The State of the State

Matthew Denholm: Vision takes back seat as reality kicks in

LARA Giddings doesn’t believe she has time yet to proclaim a vision for the island state. That’s not to say Tasmania’s first woman premier doesn’t have noble, overarching designs. It’s just a matter of first things first.

“In the first instance, it’s going to be getting us back on to a sound financial footing,” says the 38-year-old Labor leader when asked about her vision. “That will be my top priority.”

It’s a marked departure from her recent predecessors. The man she replaced almost two weeks ago, David Bartlett, wanted everyone to know he would make Tasmania “clever, kind and connected”. Bartlett’s immediate predecessor, Paul Lennon, just wanted to build a pulp mill, while the man who started Labor’s present reign 13 years ago, Jim Bacon, wanted to bring “Tasmania together”.

Pushed, Giddings will talk about her vision for the state based loosely on the concept of “quality and pride”: quality products and pride that a small island can punch above its weight.

However, she is keen to focus on more practical issues, with good reason: in her dual role as Premier and Treasurer, Giddings has a horror mid-year financial report to prepare, followed by what promises to be an equally difficult and dour state budget.

Revenues have collapsed in a stubbornly sustained downturn, private investment is stalled and key industries are haemorrhaging jobs. Giddings says spending will be slashed, and every other option – from sacking public servants to raising taxation – is “in the tool box”.

However, it is not just her pre-occupation with the budget that is holding her back from waxing lyrical, as Bartlett often did, about the nation-first National Broadband Network roll-out, a potential renewable energy boom and a food bowl built on new irrigation schemes.

“Of course I have a vision for Tasmania [but] I think what we have to be careful of – and maybe this is learning from David [Bartlett] in that sense – [is] making any one area of the community stand out against others,” she says. “Agriculture is vital to this state, absolutely. So is the mining industry vital to this state, so is industrial industry in other forms vital to our state, so is forestry, even in a restructured state, still vital, and tourism.”

In other words, unlike Bartlett she won’t be seen picking favourites and lavishing them with special attention.

Her transparent desire to be seen as more supportive of traditional, blue-collar industries – mining, manufacturing, forestry – is all about re-engaging with disenchanted, working-class Labor voters.

Matthew Denholm’s full comment in The Australian HERE

John Lawrence on Tasmanian Times: It’s a bit rich to hear Ms Giddings “horrified at the fiscal forecasts”. She’s been one step behind Mr Bartlett all the way as he’s manoeuvred the State towards the Precipice. Bartlett’s mess, HERE

Sue Neales: Time to end donor gravy train

…

Donations by wealthy individuals are another contentious point.

Who can forget Australian Greens leader Bob Brown, who for so long has waged a campaign against corporate political donations, publicly announcing in January that the way the Greens had won so much power and a historic first Lower House seat in Canberra last August was thanks to a record $1.6 million personal donation?

Senator Brown defended the unprecedented gift from Wotif internet travel website founder and part-time Hobart philanthropist Graeme Wood by saying it was legal under the rules.

Yet in 2009, Senator Brown was calling for a ban on the “blight” of all private donations above $1000.

“Democracy is being eroded by money. The ideal of one person, one vote, one value is eroding under the monetarist epithet that influence is there to be bought,” Senator Brown wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald in August that year.

But are individual donations any more likely to be vested-interest-free than those made by corporations?

Is the $45,000 given last year by Kathmandu founder and Tasmanian-based animal lover Jan Cameron to the state Labor Government, ostensibly “better” or less weighted with expectation than the $30,000 given by Federal Hotels to each party?

It’s impossible to generalise. But most countries that have banned corporate donations have also prohibited individual donations above a very meagre level.

And, of course, there remain clever ways for any company or individual to escape the public scrutiny that comes with political donations if they really want to.

A common method is to give less than the $11,200 threshold above which it is mandatory to disclose the details, including the donor, to the Electoral Commission.

It adds up to a situation which Australia’s democracy watchdog, the nine-year-old Democratic Audit of Australia group chaired by Swinburne University political expert Professor Brian Costar, believes is increasingly untenable.

It has ranked three aspects of political donations – their legal existence, lack of transparency and delayed disclosure – as top of the reforms needed to protect Australia’s once indisputable reputation as a leading democratic nation.

And that means Tasmania, which lags far behind all other states in addressing these eroding areas of concerns, may have to be first to get its house in order.

Full Sue Neales comment in Mercury HERE

• Is there a threat to the power-sharing deal … ? (Apparently not online … but read the scan below:)