The government’s not in control and voters are not listening

As often as not, it is the capacity to have broader, casual conversations – rather than necessarily just ones about whatever is on a formal meeting agenda – that is important.

The significance of the government’s proposals hasn’t really been understood outside the energy and climate change nerd belt.

It feels very olden days to remember the days when quite a few ministers actually spent a lot of time working, or even living, in Canberra.

The change has knock-on effects, too. Ministerial staff and offices were once firmly based in Canberra. Apart from anything else, that increased the likelihood of senior staff – and their policy experience – being seconded from the Canberra-based public service.

Teamwork in Canberra

Posting the photo seemed to suggest the PM’s social media team knew they needed to get it out there that the government “team” was hard at work.

This week marked 18 months since the last election – technically the halfway point for the parliamentary term, even if the next election date is never set in concrete.

Things have not been very pretty for the government post-referendum.

Most recently has been the apparently chaotic response to the High Court’s decision on indefinite detention. After the repeated rollovers to the Coalition on a legislative response to the decision last week, the government was confronted with an immediate High Court challenge to the legislation, even before the court has published its reasons for the original decision.

The government might hope that both sides of politics are seen as the authors of a legislative response which was under challenge so quickly, but things rarely pan out that way: governments always get blamed.

But the government is dealing with an economic situation it doesn’t really control: the main day-to-day to narrative about how government policy in the broad is affecting individual voters is being driven by Reserve Bank decisions.

The highly fraught situation in the Middle East has also been weaponised in domestic politics, and has required political leaders to tread a delicate path through the sensitivities of various communities in Australia.

One way or another, the result has been a growing sense that the government is not in control of events.

There have been big stories undermining confidence in all sorts of institutions that are not of the government’s making, but which it nonetheless has had to respond to – like the Optus outage.

A barrage of announcements

When you are halfway through your first term, there tends to be a build-up of reforms, reports and reviews that you commissioned early on in government coming home to roost. By then, people have moved on a bit and can’t remember what the issue was about in the first place.

The results of these reviews are being launched into a political landscape cluttered with current crises.

A series of announcements have been made recently, either to remind voters about what the government is doing about the cost of living, or just because the end of the year is approaching and things need to be released.

The impression left, though, is of a government throwing out lots of chaff, as they say in the military – that is, small clouds of metal countermeasures designed to confuse incoming guided missiles.

It’s unfortunate, because some of these reports are important and worthwhile subjects for serious discussion.

In this week alone we’ve seen reports on overhauling secrecy laws and on cybersecurity. There have been new plans for e-safety, the odd breakthrough on the government’s omnibus industrial relations legislation, and a Productivity Commission blueprint for reforming the childcare and early education sectors.

Exhaustion with energy politics

Possibly most significant has been the release of the government’s plans to massively expand its underwriting of green generation and storage: plans that require the states – which were in discussions in Perth on Friday with Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen  – to sign off.

The exhaustion with energy and climate change politics, no matter how vital they might be to the electorate, seems to have meant the significance of the government’s proposals, and the shift they represent, hasn’t really been understood outside the energy and climate change nerd belt.

The important thing to know is that the proposed underwriting tender for new energy does offer the prospect of overcoming a market failure – for want of a better term – where potential investors in new generating capacity hesitate until they are confident other forms of investment (like coal and gas) are coming to the end of their life.

The underwriting gives investors the confidence to know they will be covered if prices crash because of extra supply coming on line. The design of the scheme also gets around an intractable problem of different states having conflicting views on the role of coal and gas in the energy transition.

Plenty of problems remain, of course, in the design of our energy market. But the proposal seems to be the most significant breakthrough – at least in expediting clean energy capacity – that we have seen for some time, and at a time when the energy transition has been floundering.

Next week will be the year’s last full sitting week for the House of Representatives. Even more reports will be added to the pile as parliamentary committees hand in their work: everything from electoral reform and transparency to the delivery of job services.

Whether any of them will get much oxygen amid the turmoil of a political landscape that seems to be dominated by populism, let alone an electorate that doesn’t seem to be listening, is anyone’s guess.