Labor wins the debate, Abbott eyes the prize
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It started with pious calls for ''consensus politics''. Remember them? How Bob Katter enthused about a ''new paradigm''? Julia Gillard called for a ''new politics'', which I can only assume was roughly equivalent to Tony Abbott's ''kinder, gentler polity''.
Then followed the most bitter, cantankerous Parliament in generations, in which every mere breath would be contested.
Now, after all that exhausting, dispiriting muck, the end result has been a quite astonishing consensus. At the eleventh hour, and almost without anyone noticing, the biggest disagreements of the past three years (the carbon tax aside) have been dissolved. Perhaps most astonishingly, several of them have been resolved in favour of the Labor government we now look set to eject.
On Saturday the country will elect a party with an expensive national broadband network policy. It will vote for a party that will significantly increase education funding, at least for four years. And it will elect a party that has resolved that the best way to handle asylum seekers arriving by boat is just to kick them out so some other country has to deal with them. Sure, differences remain between the parties on these issues. Some of these differences even matter: there are still fights to be had. But they are now over matters of detail rather than essence.
You know something is happening when Abbott is explicitly spruiking a ''unity ticket'' with Kevin Rudd on education funding (even though he fails to match Labor for the most expensive years of the Gonski plan).
All this is a long way from the days when the NBN was a ''white elephant'' - a ''colossal waste of taxpayers' money'' that the Coalition had solemnly pledged to ''dismantle''. Now, as Alan Kohler observed when the Coalition finally proposed an alternative NBN of its own, ''Malcolm Turnbull's great achievement over the past 2½ years has been to save the national broadband network''. It's a long way, too, from Christopher Pyne's dismissal of Gonski as ''a conski''; from his insistence that ''the status quo is a better model'' of education funding, before unabashedly declaring ''Labor should have been doing this last year'' and deciding to ''adopt exactly the same funding envelope as Labor''.
But the grandest, most Damascene conversion has come on fiscal policy. For years the Coalition has held Labor at gunpoint, demanding a return to surplus as some kind of litmus test for good government. For years, and for reasons unfathomable, Labor has played along. Having taken the perfectly defensible Keynesian path of running a deficit to stimulate the economy during a global recession, it became so obsessed with proving its deficit was temporary that it simply forgot to argue its case.
The entire economic conversation revolved around a promised return to surplus by 2012-13. Nothing could divert Labor from this course. Not even a gigantic natural disaster such as the Queensland floods in 2011. If ever there was a reason - or even an excuse - to shelve the surplus and build the nation, this was it. Instead, Labor introduced a levy, pledged to cut spending and held fast to a promise no economist seemed to think was a good idea, and which it could never keep. The scene was bizarre. In its zealous search for a surplus, Labor kept trying to find cuts to government spending. This, of course, deflates the economy. So the Reserve Bank was frantically cutting interest rates in an attempt to stimulate. Here we had two institutions beavering away at cancelling each other out.
Even when it became clear last year that both company profits and wages were falling - effectively destroying the government's tax revenue - Labor still insisted it could cut its way to surplus. By Christmas it had to concede. The surplus, once a holy grail and unexplained economic necessity, became an irresponsible goal that would compromise ''jobs and growth''. And thus ended one of Labor's most foolhardy, damaging attempts to appease the Coalition.
Only now, the Coalition has converted, too. The most underrated phrase of this entire campaign was Joe Hockey's plan for ''appropriate stimulus'', even if that meant we'd have to forget about the surplus for a while. This is the same Coalition that seemed so resolutely not to believe in stimulus that it argued against it even during the financial crisis. Well, forget that. We're all Keynesians now.
Rudd can argue all he likes that Abbott will cut the economy to shreds and plunge it into recession but he has two problems. First, this contradicts everything Labor was telling us when it insisted it would find whatever cuts were necessary to deliver that surplus. Second, Abbott has freed himself from the shackles of finding a surplus, thus allowing him to shelve spending cuts until there's no danger of a recession. He has manoeuvred this beautifully, as Labor should have done from the start.
All this is a testament to the brutal efficiency of Abbott's opposition.
He's quite prepared to bludgeon the government with an argument he later rejects. It's shameless but it works because he does it with confidence and a straight face. Contrast Labor, which has spent far too much time answering the Coalition's charges rather than telling its own story, in its own political terms. If it falls, it will certainly leave a legacy: disability insurance, broadband, Gonski. But we won't really know what that legacy means because it has never really told us. Besides, these are Coalition policies now, too. In so many ways, Labor has won the arguments it refused to have, and for which it will receive no reward.
