Nick McKim has now pretty thoroughly demonstrated, as he continually reminds us all ad nauseum, that the Green part, or section or slice, or secret marriage (in strictest confidence), of the Tasmanian Labor-Green coalition government has done exactly what he promised it would do, “produce stable government in Tasmania”.
McKim’s notion of “stable government” was given a wide-ranging airing on ABC radio on Monday 10 October. Very free-flowing airing in fact.All sorts of air blowing in all directions at once. The main gist of it all is that the Greens have provided “stable government” by being able to influence policy direction but they have no responsibility at all for the budgetary decision-making process. According to McKim if it was a “Green budget” the funding priorities (cuts that is) would be different, and moreover a “Green budget” would have been more willing to borrow so that the damage to essential services would not have been so…ah…damaging.
So there!
And of course things have got to the stage that they’re in because of the decisions of the “Labor majority government” extending back in time to the end of the last century. McKim is especially careful to distinguish between the “Labor majority government” of the past and the current Labor-Green coalition “stable government”. In a nutshell (an airy nutshell to be sure), “no one likes to have to cut the health budget”, or as McKim reminded people, to cut the education budget, but it has to be done, although a “Green budget” would have done it differently. McKim added impressively that Michelle O’Byrne and Lara Giddings didn’t like to make cuts any more than he did.
In the McKim world that’s the nature of elective surgery in the grand scheme of things. Doing things differently was the preferred option to shutting down hospital wards and operating theatres, so he shares no responsibility for that decision while empathising with the O’Byrne-Giddings dilemma. Bring in the air conditioner. It’s getting hard to breathe.
Just a couple of other things.McKim is Correctional Services Minister In the coalition government. Asked about prisoners escaping while working in the community, “it has been the policy for a number of years now” for this to take place as part of the on-going reform of the prison system. Fair enough. But let’s be transparent here. In this instance McKim is ensuring things move in the same direction as they were already going during the era of “Labor majority government”.
Apparently in the new era of “stable government” it’s important to know how to make political mileage from some continuities on the one hand and how to disassociate from others.
Sticking with McKim’s Correctional Services portfolio, it is always mandatory that he be questioned about his position on demonstrations against the pulp mill, against the continuation of old growth logging in contravention of moratoriums, industry agreements, massive public handouts to all and sundry and so on. It was no surprise that McKim was impressively insistent about his total and complete support (oh absolutely!) for the right of people to peaceful demonstration. But as for the question of one person peacefully locking himself non-violently onto machinery at Gunns’ proposed pulp mill site and being jailed immediately for more than a month, McKim was not able to comment because he wasn’t across the details of the case. The Minister for Correctional Services is not across the details of the case? How refreshing. What a blast of fresh air.
Perhaps he’s more across the Education portfolio where cuts have to be made in line with budgetary decisions – and it’s not a Greens’ budget, don’t forget. It’s just that the Minister of Education has to work as hard as he can to implement budgetary decisions which the Greens have no responsibility for. That’s the nature of McKim’s stable of portfolios in “stable government”. Not to mention the stable of portfolios held by Cassy O’Connor, Human Services and Community Services. What’s the elective surgery there? You might need to play the pokies and lose the lot to know if you’re in the Health basket or the Human Services silo.
Speaking of the pokies, whose portfolio is that? Human Services? Surely not Racing-Sport-Infrastructure-Education-Housing-Premier? Oops… missed Treasury. Ah, Treasury.
So you see it’s all very straight forward. Just like elective surgery. If we’re going to have “stable government” as opposed to “majority government”, which created all the problems “stable government” now has to fix – although the Green part of the “stable government” would do it differently to the way the “stable government” as a whole is currently doing it – well, that’s the nature of “stable government”. That’s why “stable government” is so important.
McKim has got it all so terribly and horribly wrong. He couldn’t have got it more wrong. Time to get rid of the air bubbles. It is one thing to get caught up in the inevitable innate contradictions associated with trying to distinguish the current Giddings “stable government” from the earlier “Labor majority government”. That is ludicrous enough, albeit in a very disturbing way. It is also getting quite pathetic to hear McKim articulate areas of Greens differences with his coalition partners, while we all know that in reality those differences have been shelved in the interests of what is normally called pragmatism – or to be more honest and blunt, shelved for perceived personal and partisan political self-interest.And we all know he’s working his butt off to implement all the non-Green budgetary cuts we know he would do differently if he wasn’t working his butt off to make the ‘Labor budget” work.
How about some clear air for a change? McKim seems to think that the public will accept that the Greens can sit on all sides of the fence at once because that’s what it takes to produce “stable government”. That is unsustainable. For some people it broke down as soon as McKim agreed to form a coalition government with the party which had introduced the PMAA and been involved in a series of scandals. For others the process of disenchantment has been more gradual. But at some point it will break down more rapidly.
McKim is now hard-wired into the mantra of “stable government”, irrespective of the political program of the government he is keeping in power, seeking to distance himself from some policies and seeking to claim influence in others. “Stable government” for what? The answer is becoming more and more strident. “Stable government” to stop “Liberal majority government”. Nothing more, nothing more.
Pragmatism has its limits. Contradiction and compromise turns seamlessly into hypocrisy, abandonment of principle and betrayal of core beliefs, if they ever really existed. The McKim Greens have reached those limits. It is now more likely than not that their very insistence on “stable government” at any cost will bring in exactly what they fear most of all – a “Liberal majority government”.
That’s elective surgery. Self-inflicted.
