An interesting pastime is pondering what politicians would ask for if they were granted one wish.
The practical ones would want to be president for life. Hopefully principled Liberals would want lower taxes, while presumably Labor MPs sticking to their principles would want the opposite. The pragmatic ones would simply wish to keep their jobs.
In the absence of a parliamentary fairy godmother, the closest any backbencher can ever get to getting their one wish granted is to have the prime minister ring you on the weekend before a Monday morning motion to spill the party's leadership and ask you for your vote. Two weeks ago that's what happened to Sean Edwards, a Liberal senator from South Australia. After the Prime Minister assured him the government-owned ship-building company ASC, based in Adelaide, could bid to build a fleet of new submarines, Edwards said he would vote to support the Prime Minister.
Of all the things the senator could have asked for, asking for ASC to bid to build some submarines was not the worst. However, ASC's chances are remote. Based on the experience of ASC building the Air Warfare Destroyer ships, if the company made the submarines they would cost at least 30 per cent more than if they were bought overseas. Given the submarines' price tag is anywhere from $20 billion to $40 billion, having them stamped "Made in Australia" is an expensive luxury. To put these amounts in context, Australia's defence budget is $25 billion a year. After the then defence minister said he wouldn't trust ASC to "build a canoe", an opinion more than a few observers would agree with, he was sacked.
A better wish for South Australia would have been for Edwards to ask Tony Abbott to put Australia's first electricity-generating nuclear reactor in Adelaide. The royal commission into uranium and nuclear energy announced by the South Australian premier is the welcome first step to Australia eventually getting nuclear power.
In the midst of the frenzy of leadership speculation it was inevitable political commentators would focus on the PM's promise to Edwards, in terms of its impact on party room votes. But the significance of what the senator asked for goes beyond just votes for the leadership, it sums up the problem confronting the Abbott government. Edwards asked for something the Prime Minister couldn't give him — the guarantee of jobs. There's nothing unusual about a politician wanting government contracts for their electorate, but in the current climate jobs and job security have a special salience. The national unemployment rate is 6.4 per cent, the highest in 12 years,and in South Australia it is 7.3 per cent.
And these official figures don't reveal the extent of underemployment. The theme of jobs featured in the Victorian and Queensland state elections. In Victoria the Coalition and Labor both campaigned heavily on their respective jobs "plans". The reason that relatively minor reductions in spending on vocational education and training by the Victorian Coalition had such prominence in the campaign was because training is so inextricably linked to employment. In Queensland public service cuts and privatisation — which is associated with job losses — cost Campbell Newman government.
The public know the Australian economy is in transition. They are told that constantly by the media and they see it in the falling value of their resource stocks in their share portfolio. The public is realising the economy is transitioning away from taxpayer-subsidised employment in car-making and submarine-building. Yet there's uncertainty about what it is transitioning to. Or to put it in the way the question is usually asked — "where will the jobs come from?"
Which leads back to what the Liberals' leadership turmoil of a few weeks ago was about. The spill motion was prompted by many factors but one of the core concerns of backbenchers was the seeming inability of the government to sell an economic message and communicate that it has a plan for jobs that involves more than just cutting the budget. And in the absence of such a plan, all that is left for a backbencher to do is trade their vote for the uncertain promise of a chance for workers in his state to build over-priced submarines.
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