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To demon­strate that it is not affected by polit­ical wheeling-and-dealing, a hypo­thet­ical cent­ral bank may raise interest rates (sev­eral times) in an elec­tion year out of sheer bloody-mindedness to demon­strate that it is “inde­pend­ent”. Sim­il­arly, a hypo­thet­ical pub­lic broad­caster may go extra hard on the oppos­i­tion party in an attempt to demon­strate that it is not affected by endemic left-wing interests. Who knows what the extent of this is in the real world, but it would be naïve to think that it is not at least a minor con­sid­er­a­tion in the minds of the rel­ev­ant decision-makers.

On a com­pletely dif­fer­ent note, there are many reas­ons why the ALP prob­ably does not deserve to return to the treas­ury benches des­pite renewed lead­er­ship and a swathe of new policy:

• Not­with­stand­ing the Fair­fax papers’ exposé on the appalling treat­ment of some migrant work­ers, the atti­tude of many in the Labor base regard­ing migrants leaves much to be desired. Joel But­ler (quite accur­ately in my view), argues in the March 2007 issue of Quad­rant
  
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  that though the oppos­i­tion to s457 visas is pre­dic­ated on con­cern for migrants’ wel­fare, it is actu­ally an appeal to base xenophobia.

• The intric­ate two-step between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gil­lard hid a fun­da­mental prob­lem for the ALP. There is a recog­ni­tion among the party lead­er­ship that the uni­ons are effect­ively no more (to be sure, they are very use­ful advoc­ates for vic­tims in situ­ations such the James Har­die asbes­tos case), but the party rank-and-file and the uni­ons them­selves are wil­fully obli­vi­ous to this. Rudd’s job for most of the year was to pla­cate the ACCI and other industry bod­ies, to send sig­nals that there wouldn’t be sig­ni­fic­ant changes under a Labor gov­ern­ment. Whereas Julia Gillard’s role was to soothe the party’s base and rally them against the gov­ern­ment. Recon­cil­ing these dif­fer­ences will be one of Rudd/Gillard’s toughest chal­lenges in gov­ern­ment. They have come a sig­ni­fic­ant way already with their accept­ance of indi­vidual con­tracts (a softer, more cuddly AWA), and con­tinu­ing the oper­a­tion of pro­vi­sions against illegal strikes. But how much longer can Labor put the boot into uni­ons and con­tinue to take their money? Surely they recog­nise they’re being screwed? Something’s got to give.
• Wayne Swan and related oppos­i­tion spokespeople have not said any­thing about the need for whole­sale reform of the tax-welfare sys­tem. At the moment, those mov­ing from wel­fare to work face exor­bit­ant effect­ive mar­ginal rates of tax­a­tion (EMRT) in the 70 – 90% range. Clearly, this is a huge dis­in­cent­ive to move off wel­fare pay­ments. Fur­ther, they are appar­ently happy to con­tinue with the phe­nomenon of tax churn­ing, which is a huge inefficiency.
• When Max­ine McKew was on Insight
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  , she cor­rectly poin­ted out that increased infra­struc­ture spend­ing would, on bal­ance, not place upward pres­sure on interest rates. This is because it increases the nation’s cap­ital stock, and eases sup­ply and capa­city con­straints. How­ever, when pressed as to what this might actu­ally involve, she could only nom­in­ate “broad­band”. A fibre-to-the-node national broad­band net­work would be use­ful, but it is hardly exhaust­ive of term “infra­struc­ture”. What about rail, roads, ports and other trans­port infra­struc­ture? Uni­ver­sit­ies, tech­nical col­leges and apprenticeships?