Malcolm Turnbull is a lot more interesting than Kevin Rudd. Which explains the Canberra press gallery's obsession with Turnbull and his future. What's more, the thing that's put Turnbull's leadership under strain -- climate change -- is an issue many journalists have invested great emotional energy into. Almost without exception, members of the Canberra gallery follow the line of Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama, in arguing climate change is not a question of politics or economics -- it is a question of morality. Climate change policy has led to the sort of barracking from the media not seen since the 1999 republic referendum.
What's been forgotten in all of this is that the Liberals can't by themselves block the government's legislation. Kevin Rudd doesn't need the Liberals to agree with him to get his emissions trading scheme through the parliament. If Labor had tried to get the support of the Greens and the independents, the Prime Minister could have got his wish and Australia would already have an ETS in operation.
The oft-repeated claim made by Labor that the Liberals are somehow blocking an ETS is a furphy. Labor's tactic of placing the blame for a delay in the ETS on the Liberals has succeeded. Liberal members of parliament can, with some justification, ask themselves how they've allowed themselves to be put into this position. During the best years of Howard the Liberals possessed a mastery of strategy that Labor was never able to match. Now it seems that the Liberals have been turned into a rabble of political neophytes.
The immediate problem for the Liberals is not only that Turnbull is interesting. Backbench rebellions are pretty interesting too. And they're easy to report on. There's no shortage of members of parliament willing to provide anonymous quotes. For journalists, that's a lot more straightforward than attempting to decipher the utterances of the Reserve Bank of Australia governor.
The time journalists are devoting to Turnbull is time not spent scrutinising the government. And the Prime Minister likes to keep it that way. He's had to deny claims he's been lying low while the Liberals are engulfed in turmoil. Maybe it's just a coincidence that Rudd has been barely sighted in the past few weeks. In the first fortnight of September, Rudd made 23 recorded public appearances. In August he made 24 appearances, and in July 18. Until a few days ago, the Prime Minister had appeared just once this month. Maybe it's a coincidence that Rudd has been particularly deskbound at the same time as the Liberals have been busy impaling themselves.
There's no sign that media attention to the minutiae of Liberal Party climate change policy will change in the near future. For many in the media the chance to preach to the Liberals is just too good to pass up. It's been amusing to witness those commentators who spent years campaigning against the Howard government now offering advice to the Liberals on how they can reach a deal with the Labor Party on the ETS. The Liberals' attitude to the ETS coming on top of their refusal to endorse the seemingly popular stimulus package is taken by those commentators as proof the Liberals are unfit to govern. It's as though public popularity is now the test of good policy.
Politically, this is probably as good as it is going to get for the Rudd government Labor leads the polls by 58 per cent against the coalition's 42 per cent. If an election replicated this, Labor could count on at least three terms in office.
At the same time as Labor is consolidating its political power, it's strengthening its administrative authority, especially over the public service. The idea that the public service is in any way independent is well and truly dead. The biggest public supporter of the government is Treasury secretary Ken Henry. At the Senate inquiry into the stimulus package, Henry didn't bother producing any independent analysis that Treasury had undertaken of the efficacy of the government's stimulus spending. He simply asserted his opinion that the government was above reproach, and that if by any chance it adopted the opposition policy of withdrawing the stimulus package, disaster would ensue.
As interesting as Turnbull is, he's not the prime minister. And the Liberals are not the government. And that's why we should avert the gaze from the opposition for at least a little while, and focus instead on the actual government, not the alternative one.
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