Phil Coorey had an interesting piece on the weekend about Do-nothing Malcolm’s attempts to be popular:
…on Monday, AGL boss Andy Vesey found himself being chased by the media though Canberra airport and into Parliament House like a common criminal, to be subjected to a public show trial by the Prime Minister and Energy Minister over why Liddell should stay open for another five years.
Welcome to the club. Bankers, gas bosses and Vesey’s fellow electricity executives already know the feeling.
And if any are still unsure about what is going on, then read the speech entitled “on their side”‘ that Scott Morrison gave to the Liberal Party federal council on June 24. It was delivered on a Saturday, the quietest news day the week, so didn’t receive the attention it perhaps should have.
Morrison’s message was that politics had changed since the global financial crisis and, if you wanted to be re-elected, you had to stick it to the man.
“It is no longer about convincing Australians to be on our side, but to convince Australians that we are on theirs,” the Treasurer said.
“To crack through this thick ice, we must communicate candidly and with authenticity. And we must answer with our actions the questions that Australians are asking: ‘Do you get it?’, ‘Are you on my side?’.”
He pointed to the federal budget delivered the previous month as evidence the Coalition was hip to the beat. It reversed, albeit slowly, cuts to Medicare and belted the banks with a $6.2 billion tax rather than cut welfare, using the unpopularity of the banks as justification.
“We showed no fear of vested interests that sometimes assume falsely and without basis that they are untouchables. The large banks and multinationals are not a Coalition-protected species,” Morrison said.
“As Liberals, no one group, no blind ideological allegiance, can be put above our duty to do the right thing for all Australians.”
If that means embracing socialism, intervention, imposing taxes, or eschewing the odd free-market principle, then so be it.
What a spectacularly moronic characterisation of events. People against markets and vice versa. There is nothing more hollow than a hollow man talking about his new found authenticity. If you’re going to be authentic as a Liberal party then you’re going to need to be liberal.
What Morrison and the government are missing is that there is no need to junk “market principle”. Within a liberal capitalist system, there is a perfectly reasonable argument to intervene in “failed markets” when they let down the public good. You need to make the case of that failure then act decisively. Australians will be perfectly comfortable with that.
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Not everything the government has done since its sea change has been bad. The bank tax was a great idea, if poorly executed. Gas reservation was a great idea, very poorly executed. The AGL bashing is a bad idea also very poorly executed.
In the case of banking it was not done well, though it was at least explained reasonably afterwards as a payment for the guarantees provided to the banks.
In the case of gas it was done haphazardly and far too late, then the mechanism chosen was far too weak to make enough difference to gas and therefore electricity prices. That failure has left the government with no energy policy and in desperation it’s now intervening in markets where there is no apparent failure, such as power generators.
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These are not interventions that are thought-through responses to failed markets, they are mercurial land-grabs by a sinking PM with attention deficit disorder.
Markets are still the most utilitarian of human governance systems. But you do need someone in charge who has a clue about how to run them.
