It was an election campaign filled with memorable images. Tony Abbott, like some cabaret crooner with a cordless microphone, hitting the swirly carpet to schmooze the crowd at the Rooty Hill RSL. Mark Latham busting out of his enclosure to go on the rampage at the Brisbane Show. Discharged patient Kevin Rudd, his senses deadened by pethidine, poring over an electoral map of Queensland at a staged summit with the woman who pinched his job.
Given the result of the election, there’s another lesser image which might not be emblematic of the campaign, but speaks volumes about the utterly bizarre policy outcomes it has delivered.
The image was of Independent MP and gentleman farmer Tony Windsor, in moleskins and a leather-shouldered knitted jumper, riding a tractor mower which probably cost as much as a Holden Barina, tending the lawns at his country manor as he finalised his extortionate crusade to turn our national government into the vassal of the laughably persecuted rural class.
That image represents a continuation of the warning sounded in this column last week - about how the myth that rural Australia has a monopoly on hardship and deprivation is now being taken as absolute gospel, and incorporated into policy on an unsuspecting populace, out of sheer, base desperation by the major parties to stay in power.
The past two weeks have challenged perceptions about life in rural Australia. I thought people chose to live in the country because of the fresh air, the safety, the sense of community, the fact that it was full of viable industries, both on the land and in support services in the towns, and you could not only find work but drive to and from it without any traffic, tolls, parking fees, and be home at 5pm to have dinner with your family in your extremely cheap house.
It turns out that hundreds of thousands of Australians are choosing to live in the country because of the impossibility of finding work, the death of every known primary industry, the crushing levels of mental illness, the fact that there’s no good schools, no hospitals, and every time you leave the house a road train or kangaroo comes flying through your windscreen.
Because Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott were so desperate to cobble together a government from this mess, everything which Tony Windsor and his fellow rural independents have said and sought this past fortnight has been treated with a deference which is not only alarming, but almost sickening.
The mysterious hard-hitting facts which Bob Katter claimed to be carrying about in his briefcase, every one of them has been taken as fact by both sides, without any public discussion or scrutiny, as they nervously cobbled together their warring rural assistance packages in a bid to schlep their way into power. For all we know Katter could have had a house-brick smuggled inside his Samsonite and none of us would be any the wiser as there was so much forelock-tugging going on by the major parties that nobody dared question his hillbilly manifesto.
Julia won the day. And it was on the very first day and at the very first press conference where we gained our first insight into the policy perversions these new government arrangements have delivered and will continue to deliver.
The first is the enormously expensive $10 billion rescue package for the bush. You’ll remember this as one of the big ticket policy items from the five-week campaign. Well, you won’t actually, because it wasn’t discussed at all, but it’s starred item number one on the agenda now. Which is unnerving in itself, as both Labor and the Coalition, mindful of the extent of the deficit and the amount of money that had been spent wisely/blown indiscriminately on stimulus, ran parsimonious campaigns where they promised little in the way of major spending.
To placate and capture the rural independents, that former sense of fiscal rectitude has been shredded. In an attempt to maintain a veneer of economic responsibility, Julia Gillard explained that the rural assistance package would be funded through savings elsewhere.
For “elsewhere” you can read “the suburbs”.
There’s two ways you can find $10 billion for rural Australia. You can do it by cutting services in suburban Australia. Or you can do it by enlisting the taxpayers of Parramatta, Ipswich, Werribee and Elizabeth – you know, those pampered, la-di-dah suburbs on the outskirts of our major cities – to kick in so that the forgotten people of Tamworth (even those with 10k ride-on mowers) can find relief from the horrors of their pastoral existence.
The good news for Tony Windsor’s constituents is it may soon be cheaper for them to have a moan down the phone to each other about how utterly desolate life in the bush is.
The second hint of a policy shift came about by accident. Julia Gillard made an interesting policy slip at her first press conference when she was asked about the importance of broadband in rural and regional Australia, and inadvertently raised the issue of timed telephone calls.
“In this country today,” Ms Gillard said, “…if you want to ring a business in the centre of Sydney and you’re doing it from Tamworth, that is going to cost you something different than if you are doing it from another business in Sydney, and it’s that differential in costs that has borne on businesses in regional Australia and families in regional Australia ever since we had the telephone.”
As one of the journalists present pointed out, the only way you could alter that reality is through a cross-subsidy – that is, by charging city people more to use the phone than country people.
And as a side point, it’s worth noting that Ms Gillard’s new-found concern over the cost of phone calls for country businesses doesn’t factor in the massive differential between the price of rent for city and country businesses.
But in the current climate, you wouldn’t dare mention such a thing as it jars with the mood of the times.
A new Cabinet will be announced within days and there is a strong chance it will include Rob Oakeshott as Minister for Regional Assistance, or whatever they choose to name the portfolio. His first three requirements in the portfolio will be a bucket, a shovel, and a whole shedload of cash, as we tackle the imagined, cavernous gulf between rural and suburban living.
And that’s the problem with this weird election result. Living in Australia should not be a competition. These blokes are turning it into one.
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