State of the Nation

I went along to a rather grandly titled ‘State of the Nation’ conference in Canberra last week (see related blog on Canberra and planning below). A number of Ministers attended and spoke on the Government’s agenda including the Deputy PM, Julia Gillard. The Leader of the Opposition, a certain Dr Brendan Nelson also gave an amusing but rather vacuous after dinner talk.

There were a number of interesting sessions, which I’ll try and capture in due course. But I had a number of general impressions from the event:

• First, the tone of the Labor party is identical to that of governments of progressive persuasion across the world these days. Huge emphasis on human capital, economic participation, mixing investment and reform in public services, and plenty of lip service to sustainable development at home and abroad. In that sense there’s little unique going on here, more just transplanting policies tried overseas to a different context;
  
• Second, a number of policy areas have a much greater national prominence here than in the UK. The obvious one is resources: the Chair of the Australian Electricity Board showed up at one point and was treated like a celebrity. (It felt a bit like I was in a time warp back to the 1970s.) The other one is the prominence of macroeconomics. I guess that follows from the size and scale of the export industry, and perhaps also that it’s a federal issue and the media relatively focus more on federal issues, but definitely a marked difference to the UK.
  
• Third, the Opposition Liberal party seem to be in exactly the same place as were the Tories in the late 1990s. They blame their loss of power on being on the wrong end of the electoral cycle rather than the policies themselves being outdated. So their Leader gave a talk heavy on creating a pro-business climate, yet was completely silent (and implicitly hostile in places) on the environment and social issues even though polling repeatedly shows these are respectively ranked the number one and three issues facing Australia. Like the Tories, I suspect they’ll have to learn the hard way.