The urgency of Abbott's federation shake-up

It is difficult to find anyone, right or left, who thinks the Abbott government has done a good job of selling its first budget.

Let's hope it has learned from the experience, as other monumental selling tasks will need to be better handled ahead of the 2016 election.

With white papers on taxation and the reform of the federation already commissioned, and with their terms of reference designed to dovetail with the controversial recommendations of the Commission of Audit, Prime Minister Abbott and his front bench will have a lot to explain to voters.

Can it be done? A rather gloomy article from The Australian's Paul Kelly yesterday suggests it cannot, largely because of the diminished power of the national media. 

Kelly wrote: "During the reform age, roughly 1983 to 2003, the media was pivotal in backing national interest policies but that age is passing. It is replaced by new media values that mirror the fashionable narcissism and find national interest debates as quaint and irrelevant."

Oh cheer up you old grump and tweet us a selfie! Lol, rofl  ;)

Actually, Kelly describes a media environment in which significant reform is more difficult, but not impossible.

The left of politics has so far shown a greater mastery of social media -- the high-water mark being the re-election of President Obama in the US -- but the right has no option but to try to emulate such success.

Changes to state-federal relations will likely be the most obviously beneficial reform for the nation, but because of the ruthlessly divisive form of opposition perfected by Abbott himself during the Rudd/Gillard years, it may also become the hardest to sell.

Better get started then -- as with the Commission of Audit, or Dick Warburton's review of the renewable energy target (due in early August), nobody really expects the various reviews and white papers to recommend anything much different from plans the Abbott team fixed on long ago.

When it comes to federal-state relations, the reversal of the century-long drift from a true federation of sovereign states towards a centralised Canberra bureaucracy has been talked about passionately in Coalition circles for decades.

The trick, as history teaches us, is to take that conversation out of elite political circles and into the broadest possible communication channels to convince the punters such radical change is needed.

As noted previously, that's what Edmund Barton, Alfred Deakin and their followers did in the late 1890s to convince the states to sign up to federation in the first place.

Barton and Deakin were operating in a changing media environment too -- though not one over-run with "fashionable narcissism", as Kelly puts it.

Instead, they were organising what media historians Graeme Osborne and Glen Lewis have called "a process that can legitimately be described as the nation's first great political communication campaign".

It was done at a time when Australian public opinion was open to centralised manipulation in a way that is infinitely more difficult today.

To illustrate the point, Osborne and Lewis note that the published proceedings of the 1890 Federation Conference in Melbourne contain a section on 'Public Opinion' which "consisted entirely of extracts from English newspapers ... No comment from an Australian paper was included".

More than 12 decades later, the Abbott team is going to have to find ways to lead the fractured 'public opinion' expressed in social media, but also fully understand how Twitter, Facebook and all those other platforms (which your dinosaur columnist doesn't use) interact with thought-leaders in the traditional media.

How else will punters realise that a broader/wider GST will not just make their groceries more expensive, but will also help to get that tax-dodging bloke in the mansion up the street to pay his fair share of tax?

Similarly, how will punters realise that ramping up state-based payroll taxes (a good alternative to a GST hike) or returning hypothecated income tax to the states will -- for the first time in decades -- make them sure of who to blame when state-run health and education services are not up to par?

The Abbott government's wish to devolve tax raising and service delivery in select policy areas is clear. The likelihood of its reviews and white papers in supporting that ambition is almost a certainty.

And so, to achieve real reform the government must get on the front foot and start using all media channels to ensure its best ideas are "pressed upon the people", as NSW politician William McMillan said of the Barton-Deakin campaign for federation that he enthusiastically joined.

In the lead-up to 2016, wouldn't it be lovely if journalists and social media thought-leaders could remain mindful that "Australia’s prosperity is living on borrowed time", as Paul Kelly puts it.

If they did, they would slam Abbott-style opposition-for-opposition's sake from Labor and the Greens, or, conversely, rip apart bad ideas that creep into the Abbott agenda.

Then again, perhaps Kelly's pessimism is justified. Perhaps that is too much to ask of a nation happy to watch its affluence evaporate while it busies itself with fashionable narcissism.