Malcolm Turnbull hits reboot after political operating system starts crashing

 Malcolm Turnbull insists the election will be fought on economic management but he has yet to clearly outline his strategy let alone make the case for it. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

His popularity sliding, his colleagues sniping and his tax plans in confusion, the prime minister has effectively pressed control-alt-delete. On the entire parliament.

The reboot is intended to make him look decisive and put the policy debate back under some semblance of government control.

It’s pure Francis Underwood. “If you don’t like how the table is set, turn over the table.” In fact the House of Cards Twitter account approved of the strategy soon after it was announced on Monday.

The tactic answers the endless procedural questions about how Turnbull could go to a double dissolution – armed with the new Senate voting laws – a constitutional reboot button that had been sitting there all the while, unnoted because it hasn’t been used for so long.

It forces attention onto how the crossbench responds to the threat, rather than the Coalition’s policy plans still in formulation, filling the time between now and the 3 May budget with a high-stakes Senate standoff and a discussion on the Coalition’s preferred turf and about things Labor would prefer not to talk about. We will be again debating union corruption and the Heydon royal commission rather than the current stream-of-consciousness discussion about the government’s frequently changing taxation plans.

And when we emerge from all of that the government will either have won the day and got its laws through (less likely) or achieved the double-dissolution election that it wanted to have anyway to clear out the Senate, setting up a clearer run at a second term in government if it prevails.

But that, of course, is all tactics. And elections also hinge on policy substance, which remains much more uncertain.

By the Council of Australian Governments meeting at the end of next week we will know how much interim funding Turnbull is prepared to offer the states for schools and public hospitals, while he negotiates longer-term changes to the system. By the budget we will know its tax plans, now apparently hinging around a company tax cut, as well as the possibility of government bonds to pay for economic infrastructure spending.

Turnbull insists the election will be fought on economic management but he has yet to clearly outline his strategy let alone make the case for it. Labor has had the jump on him, laying the foundations for a plan based on raising money from crackdowns on tax concessions to pay for schools and hospitals and higher education. It has begun to make the case that spending on essential services, on reducing inequality, is in and of itself an economic benefit – challenging the old economic consensus.

Turnbull, having taken the prime ministership so late in the term, having sacrificed some of his own popularity as he appeases his internal rightwing critics, having vacillated on what he wanted to do on the tax front, has yet to set out a coherent case for the government’s re-election.

But he has just upturned the table and rebooted the discussion, in a way that makes it easier for him to make a case, when he has one.

Source by : http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/mar/21/malcolm-turnbull-hits-reboot-after-political-operating-system-starts-crashing

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