That cacophony of fire and brimstone politics and smoke and mirrors policy that is the Clive Palmer sideshow rolled into town this week, the bizarre icing on the squalid cake that is our federal political scene.
The choice between a basket case party in Government and a preening, petty Opposition has helped give rise to the Palmer United Party, and certainly sustained it through various assaults on voters’ credulity. Palmer’s marquee candidate, who stood behind his shoulder throughout proceedings, is former Footscray legend Dougie Hawkins. Nothing, of course, wrong with retired AFL footballers venturing into politics; many of them, after all, are passionate, articulate advocates. But Dougie doesn’t fall into this category. “I’ve kicked a lot of goals in my time,” he drawled to the sparse but approving Adelaide audience. “But now I just wanna kick goals for the people I love in federal parliament.”
It’s a personal bugbear, but why do so many sportsmen-cum-politicians insist on talking in sporting clichés? Okay, we know that’s what you used to do, move on! Whatever you think of Peter Garrett’s ministerial performance, at least he doesn’t constantly hark back to his former life as a muso, punctuating parliamentary debates on Gonski funding with knowing pop-cultural bon mots such as: “The time has come to say fair’s fair, to pay the rent, now, to pay our share!”
Certainly, I’ve still not come to terms with the fact that every time Midnight Oil comes on the radio and I’m starting to succumb to nostalgic whim, I quickly remember that the once-eccentric, flailing-limbed frontman is now our rather beige Education Minister. The cult of personality in politics certainly has a lot to answer for, but the cult surrounding Clive Palmer is something we’ve not seen in Australia, probably since the Joh-for-Canberra push in 1987, of which Palmer himself was such an instrumental part.
He certainly announced himself as having inherited Bjelke-Petersen’s infamous disdain for the fourth estate, barring a reporter from The Australian newspaper – with which he is having a legal spat – from entering the Adelaide campaign launch and press conference. It’s hardly the ideal advertisement for an aspiring Prime Minister that he wants to pick and choose who asks him questions.
Especially when such glaring questions need answering. The Palmer United Party’s real credibility gap comes in its policy prescriptions; it’s promising an $80 billion health services spend, with no detail whatsoever about where that money will come from.
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Perhaps Palmer is simply used to throwing around numbers with lots of zeroes at the end.
Whatever, it is the lot of fringe parties to make outlandish claims; the sound, fury and financial heft behind Palmer’s push may mark him out for extra publicity, but his campaign is no different to any other that plays on people’s despair and captures the votes of the disaffected in times when the mainstream politics of both left and right have so failed in their pursuits that the disaffected are there to be captured.
What’s scary, really, isn’t that Palmer can get away with it, but that the mainstream parties can too.
"The SA Liberal Party’s dogged adherence to a small target strategy will leave a “policy-lite” stigma inextricably attached to its brand, as it should."
Steven Marshall’s budget reply speech on Tuesday was, as expected, another list of grievances without an accompanying list of solutions.
He publicly acknowledged this week, finally, that he would not be seriously entering the policy fray until after the federal election, when he has clear air.
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Fair enough, if that is what he believes. But an Abbott Government may not give him much clear air either. The federal Opposition’s plans to cut auto industry assistance will leave the state Liberals between a rock and a hard place, as will any inclination towards streamlining the public service.
Furthermore, perception in politics is omnipotent. And once a perception is formed, it is hard to shift. The SA Liberal Party’s dogged adherence to a small target strategy will leave a “policy-lite” stigma inextricably attached to its brand, as it should.
After all, even its core constituency wants to hear what this supposed government-in-waiting is all about. Business SA chief Nigel McBride this week pointed out that while the Libs lamented Labor’s failed promises, the Government had at least started with a promise. The Opposition starts with a lament.
Steven Marshall continues to complain about the budget deficit, about failures to meet savings targets, about businesses in decline, about Holden’s ongoing uncertainty, about excessive taxes, about faltering services.
The implicit promise in these complaints is that the Liberals can manage all these issues better than Labor. They just refuse to say how.
In reality, they probably don’t even know how.
And while that may be fine for the ilk of the Palmer United Party, it is not good enough for a party genuinely aspiring to Government.
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