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Richardson: Marshall sidelined by federal fight

Aug 29, 2014
Jay Weatherill campaigning against the budget in Canberra yesterday alongside Clive Palmer.

Jay Weatherill campaigning against the budget in Canberra yesterday alongside Clive Palmer.

There’s frequently lip service paid in politics to the notion that state parties in Opposition benefit hugely from having a federal partner of the same stripe in power.

For starters, this means the Commonwealth co-conspirators can do their bit to withhold funding agreements, hurl grenades and just generally endeavour to make their state political opponents look bad.

We’re also told of the inevitably more collaborative state/federal working arrangement in the event of the lower-rung candidate seizing power, as though such happenstance would usher in a nirvana of federal-state legislative co-operation.

But like many things in politics, the reality can be somewhat different. Just ask the state Liberals.

In 2006, for instance, then-Opposition Leader Rob Kerin pulled what he thought was a masterstroke by inviting reigning PM John Howard to kickstart his stuttering campaign. With Rann all but unassailable, the state Libs had adopted a last-ditch pitch, playing on what they considered Media Mike’s Achilles heel. They implored voters to look “beyond the spin”, arguing that while the Premier preached his economic panacea, his prescription was a fiscal placebo: the fundamentals of the state’s finances were shaky.

Howard, bless him, jetted in from the Canberra bubble having apparently not read the script. He bullishly declared the SA economy “in good shape”, before not-so-sheepishly taking the credit for delivering “low inflation, low interest rates, low unemployment and low debt”. Having effectively scuppered the Libs’ last hope of landing a campaign blow, Howard then blamed the eventual Rannslide on weak local electioneering. What a guy!

More recently, Tony Abbott’s churlish appearance in the final week of this year’s election campaign — inviting his fellow Liberal Steven Marshall to a defence launch that protocol would dictate should have included the Premier – helped swing momentum back the way of the long-since-written-off Labor Government.

More pertinently, successive SA Liberal Oppositions have struggled to walk the fine line between criticising Labor mismanagement and endorsing contentious Coalition remedies. On Holden, for instance, the Opposition did its best to remain invisible, unwilling to endorse either a taxpayer bailout or a laissez-faire end to handouts. It’s solution, effectively, was “Let’s just have a good think about this and please don’t ask us any more questions, thanks very much!”

Similarly, on defence, the Marshall camp is stuck between a proverbial rock and a hard place, politically unable to join the critical chorus demanding the Abbott administration commits to building the next generation of submarines in Adelaide, thereby blunting any bid to blame Labor for its mismanagement of existing contracts.

Balancing politics and government in federal-state relations is always a fraught exercise, highlighted by the Premier’s slightly strange mission to Canberra yesterday to lobby crossbenchers to join his crusade against federal budget cuts to health and education.

The venture culminated in one of the strangest political partnerships since Al Gore teamed up with Clive Palmer: this time round, though, it was Jay Weatherill teaming up with Clive (I suspect any political partnership involving Clive Palmer is just intrinsically strange).

Whether the only Labor Premier in the country jumping into ideological bed with an eccentric mining magnate-cum-powerbroker is a sight that will fill his supporters with enthusiasm remains to be seen. It’s certainly an odd gambit, given Weatherill’s vigour for forging trade ties with China, and only days since Palmer’s weird rant against Chinese “mongrels” (for which he subsequently, belatedly, apologised).

For his part, Weatherill says he’s prepared to stand with “any Australian that’s prepared to raise their voice against these cruel cuts”. He wasn’t, however, prepared to waste his time on arch-conservative South Australian Senator Bob Day, whom he told a senate inquiry was a “lost cause” and an “enemy of South Australia”.

… the federal Coalition is dutifully giving Weatherill renewed vigour in a fourth term in which Labor appears to be scratching around for a purpose in power.

Them’s fighting words, and unnecessarily so, particularly given his Labor Government is largely beholden to Day’s colleagues, Dennis Hood and Rob Brokenshire, to pass legislation through the state Upper House. Getting Family First offside for the sake of a gratuitous whack to a fledgling Senator is just dumb politics.

Weatherill’s disdain for Day suggests again a deep intolerance for those whose ideology does not conform to his own. But while derisively dismissing Day, he’ll not only humour but practically champion the volatile Palmer, a gambit that could come back to haunt him.

Not that Weatherill will care much. The entire exercise is a minor cog in a PR machine that is costing the state $1 million a year, for which Labor will do its best to (as the Premier says) pile pressure on the Commonwealth over the cuts. Whether they’re eventually reversed is not really the point (they won’t be, although he presumably expects some degree of compromise, for which he will then claim a major victory); in the interim, just perpetuating the notion that the state’s precarious budget position is entirely the fault of an overzealous federal razor gang suits Weatherill’s narrative brilliantly.

And, yet again, it marginalizes the state Liberal Opposition.

Weatherill and Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis are of the view that the entire federal budget exercise is a standover tactic to force the states into conceding to a broadening of the GST base, which begs the question why they’re so averse to the idea. After all, GST revenues have funded the lion’s share of Labor’s successes through a decade of Government; having vehemently opposed its introduction, the good ship ALP has blissfully cruised down the so-called rivers of gold.

Now though, they’re again violently against extending a consumption tax, so much so that they’d prefer to more than double the amount many local businesses and homeowners pay for the emergency services levy, even though the increase will effectively be siphoned into general revenue, and even though it’s a far less efficient tax.

Koutsantonis says scrapping the ESL rebate was his only option to impose a “progressive” tax, as it’s calculated on property value. But businesses, including schools, are already paying through the nose for the increase, and those costs will sooner or later flow on through the community. It’s been 14 years since the Democrats compromised the GST; they’re no longer in any parliament in Australia and yet the SA Treasurer (a bone-dry right-faction warrior, no less) is still talking about the “unfairness” of extending the consumption tax to food. Ain’t progress a wonderful thing?

Despite being the major beneficiary of a broader GST base, the states, and certainly the last Labor state, will oppose it, because that is what states do. Narrow parochial self-interest is all very well, but it is rarely conducive to competent national Government. Not that it will ever change, of course, but we are over-governed in Australia; we have three tiers where two will do.

Second tier governments and upper houses are designed in part as a safeguard against overzealous ideology, but they have become integral parts of a convoluted system of political stalemate; policy in modern politics is like a pinball being buffeted between tiers and branches of government, but never actually arriving anywhere. The net result is ongoing uncertainty, plummeting business confidence and legislative timidity. The best foil for overzealous ideology is the threat of being ousted at the next election; over-government is merely a recipe for poor administration in the interim.

At any rate, the federal Coalition is dutifully giving Weatherill renewed vigour in a fourth term in which Labor appears to be scratching around for a purpose in power. The Premier knows he probably wouldn’t have been re-elected had Abbott not won the federal poll and, while he’ll be campaigning earnestly for the Coalition’s removal, he probably knows such an outcome won’t help his chances in 2018.

There are two other occasional exceptions to the notion that a friendly federal administration is of great benefit to the cause: when all the other state bases are loaded with Governments of the same political hue, and when the Commonwealth Government is divisive, unpopular or simply egregious. Marshall seems to have copped a little of both, albeit a few more state Liberal Governments are likely to fall between now and the next election.

Nonetheless, while the narrative of SA’s economic decline continues to play out so prominently – with its competing protagonists the paternalistic interventionist state Government and the harsh-medicine-toting free-marketeering federal Coalition – the state Liberals will continue to struggle to find a voice in the script.

As it now stands, Tony Abbott could be Steven Marshall’s biggest impediment to ever becoming Premier.

Tom Richardson is InDaily’s political commentator and Channel Nine’s state political reporter.

 

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