At Fairfax, Ross Gittins is on leave and Peter Martin brings a fabulously fresh perspective in his place:
Gillard’s narrative was dishonest, incapable of coping with changing developments and denied Labor its best selling point.
Unveiled in the keynote address to the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia just days before the spill, it said the economy was “growing, stable and strong”.
“Growing” is the only one of those three words that is demonstrably true. “Stable” is rubbish. Gillard herself acknowledged in the speech there were “some complex transitions under way”. And the economy isn’t “strong”. If it was, demand wouldn’t be shrinking in four of Australia’s six states and the Reserve Bank wouldn’t have cut interest rates seven times in 18 months and be weighing up the need to cut further.
Gillard’s narrative went beyond the merely rosy. In last Monday’s speech she came close to branding as a traitor anyone who thought differently.Amid jokes about reporting journalists to the Australian Communications and Media Authority and attempts to belittle the growing number of forecasters who have pointed to the risk of a recession, she said low expectations could “themselves become an economic problem”.
“The biggest mistake we could make would be to talk ourselves into unnecessary economic weakness,” she said.
A much bigger mistake would be to shut down such talk. Smothering discussion builds distrust, in this case a feeling that the government doesn’t know and doesn’t care what’s happening on the ground. It’s the opposite of the exemplary approach Labor took during the financial crisis when it shared what it knew. And smothering discussion, insisting things are “growing, stable and strong”, leaves Labor with no easy way out when the daily drip feed of economic news turns bad.
It could try to ignore the bad bits of news and ridiculously hype the good, as Gillard did in March when she latched on to a one-off blip in the employment numbers to boast to Parliament: “We have seen an increase in the number of jobs of 71,500 in the last month. For the information of the House this is the largest monthly increase in jobs since July 2000, the best monthly job creation result in 13 years.”
The blip has since been revised away, as blips often are. Employment grew by a less remarkable 29,300 that month. It’s now growing at just a third of that rate and trending down.
Good on you, Peter Martin. This is direct attack not only on the former PM but Martin’s “shut down the debate” stablemates, Michael Pascoe and Ross Gittins. I hope they listen. They’re doing the nation a disservice.
