Have you noticed, amid the "can't look away" horror of America's presidential race, how little actual policy gets aired?
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Instead, debilitating culture wars rage - the electorate descending into an aggressive macrosocial identity politics in which there are few shared truths and agreement across the middle appears unattainable.
Can American democracy survive this debasement? Historical lessons are not encouraging.
Australia is on a similar timetable in deciding who will govern from 2025 onwards, but our internals are more sound. While we are not immune from deceitful opportunism and hyperpolarisation, twelve months out from our election there is still form and substance to our sober tradition of mainstream representation.
One indicator of this is that meaty, even imaginative policy is still eventuating, and still framing our choices.
Consider examples from the last couple of days. First, the government's freshly unveiled superannuation payments for parents on paid parental leave. Second, the government's proposed fuel usage standards for new cars. A third big idea is the Coalition's foreshadowed nuclear power stations policy. And a fourth is the Greens' new/old idea of direct government-built housing.
In their own way, these ideas are all substantial and nationally transformative.
Replenishing the retirement accounts for women during career interruptions for child-rearing is a vital plank of economic and social levelling-up.
It should have been done two decades ago when then-treasurer Peter Costello justified his baby bonus with the words "have one for mum, one for dad and one for the country".
Making it about "country" elevated childbirth to the status of nation-building, up there with investing in R&D, and creating jobs. Pity then that women would silently carry the financial penalty of lower retirement savings all the way to their more impoverished twilight years.
The Coalition has reluctantly come on board now - presumably after concluding its legendary problems with women were in danger of compounding faster than a parliamentary superannuation account.
No such agreement seems likely in the case of "Labor's ute tax" as the Coalition dubs Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen's yet-to-be-settled "New Vehicles Efficiency Standard". This is another long-overdue piece of policy given global standards and given that gas-guzzling American-style utes have become the scourge of Australian roads. Labor wants its new standard to apply from January 1, 2025 - i.e. before the election.
Whether that is brave, or crazy-brave, depends on how soft or hard it ends up going with the maximum grams of carbon dioxide allowable per kilometre. As usual, the vested interests who delimit our democracy have issued wild claims about cars jumping in price by as much as $25,000. Cue irrational fear.
It has never made sense that as we grew aware of the global ecological damage of burning fossil fuels willy-nilly, our cars grew, too. Our roads groan with these lane-filling leviathans which clog our car parks, obscure the forward view of other road-users, and endanger cyclists and pedestrians.
The battle over this pseudo-Australian birthright will no doubt tempt the Coalition to rerun its risible "end of the weekend" scare against electric vehicles from 2019.
Labor would be well advised to remember that although the theatre of Canberra politics is of little interest to most voters, they can get very attentive when their own assets are said to be imperilled.
Dishonest as it is, branding a fleet-wide CO2 emissions cap a "ute tax" is at the lower end of the things you do when you've spent the last 15 years denying science and scuppering prudent policy. At the higher end is proposing a radical, super expensive and hitherto deeply unpopular nuclear option. Peter Dutton's mooted but yet-to-be released policy of building large-scale nuclear power stations on the sites of old coal-fired generators is the solution you come up with when you were dead wrong in defending coal and denying climate damage, but still will not admit it.
There is literally no public clamour for nuclear energy outside the Nationals party room - the same fringe crowd which dictated the opposition's acrimonious stance on the Voice. Tail wags dog. Again.
The danger for the Coalition is that voters will read this heroic policy lurch as a desperate clutch for anything but renewables. There's much irony that the free-enterprise party that killed a market mechanism for pricing carbon emissions into scarcity is now prepared to go full nuclear to avoid accountability. Having cost Australia more than a decade in denial, it now wants to surrender another decade, or perhaps two, as the global temperature rises.
The Greens' $12.5 billion plan to build 360,000 "affordable homes" over five years for purchase or rent has been criticised as unworkable and expensive in the usual quarters, but it has already achieved something the other parties have failed at - open representation of renters and the homeless who usually remain forgotten.
As its spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather notes, we spend as much or more subsidising the second and subsequent homes of those who already have them.
Labor has allocated billions into low-cost social housing and while it will not admit it, these investments have been significantly higher as a direct result of the effective political representation of younger voters interests by the minor party.
Our politics can be willing and cheap, but at least policy still informs much of it.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.
