Backbenchers writing books on policy is a perilous business.
Their opponents take their words out of context and use them as ammunition, while those in their own party look with envy at anyone who can string a sentence together. In Britain, where having an interest in policy is not a disqualification to holding public office, it is de rigueur for parliamentarians to commit their thoughts to paper.
In Australia, by contrast, it seems that MPs aspiring to be ministers adopt the approach that the less they say about policy the better. (The exception to this rule was Mark Latham -- and as it turned out he didn't prove to be much of a role model to ambitious politicians).
So the publication of a new book, Vital Signs, Vibrant Society, by federal Labor backbencher Craig Emerson should be welcomed.
The blurb on the cover tells only half the story. It proclaims that "Emerson challenges many of the current narrow ideological orthodoxies that tend to box in the debate about Australia's future". The blurb would have been more accurate if it had said Emerson challenges many of the current narrow ideological orthodoxies that make the federal ALP unelectable.
As might be expected from someone who was an economic adviser to former prime minister Bob Hawke and former finance minister Peter Walsh, Emerson gives short shrift to most of Labor's policy shibboleths. When Opposition Leader Kim Beazley launched the book a few weeks ago, he was careful to distance himself from the policies it advocated. No wonder.
Emerson dismisses as a relic of class war his party's typical attitude that all government schools are good and all non-government schools are bad. Thankfully it seems some commonsense is seeping through to the party -- it's reportedly about to dump its private school hit-list. Emerson himself proposes a market mechanism that gives wealthier private schools an incentive to enrol disadvantaged students.
Emerson also wants teachers' pay to be based according to the quality of their teaching, and teachers in hard-to-staff schools to be paid more -- an anathema to Labor's supporters in the teachers' unions because it assumes that the quality of the work of individual teachers can be measured.
On health he is equally unorthodox as he exhibits none of Labor's unremitting hostility to private insurance. He appreciates that while no one should be denied access to medical treatment, those who can afford additional treatments should be allowed to buy them. "We must not insist that where Australians want extra services they are always to be funded by taxpayers".
As Emerson identifies, Australia is now closer to being a welfare state than ever before. With unemployment at its lowest level in 30 years, one in five Australians of working age currently receive income support. At the end of the 1980s that figure was one in seven, and in 1969 it was one in 25.
Governments of all persuasions have found it easy and politically beneficial to maintain a regime of high taxes and high spending, rather than return the benefits of economic growth direct to taxpayers in the form of tax reductions.
It is inevitable that in a book covering policy on everything from aged care to water to international trade there will be areas of analysis that can be disputed. The claim that the level of the minimum wage has little or no impact on employment is arguable, as is Emerson's opinion on the value of preferential versus multilateral free-trade agreements. However, these matters don't detract from his central arguments, which are essentially correct.
Emerson is right to vigorously defend the economic reforms of former prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. But what he doesn't acknowledge is the intellectual and political support provided for Labor's policies by the coalition when it was in opposition. Any fair comparison of what the ALP did in the 1980s against what the coalition has done since 1996 must take into account that Labor has opposed practically every reform measure proposed by Prime Minister John Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello.
If Labor was serious in co-operating in pursuing the next wave of reform, it could start by doing some simple things. It could abandon its position against uranium mining, it could support the privatisation of Telstra, and it could agree to the sale of Medibank Private.
The only trouble is that to do any of these things would require Beazley to demonstrate some of the qualities of policy leadership displayed by Craig Emerson in Vital Signs, Vibrant Society.
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