IT is almost impossible to achieve significant reform in any area of public policy without significant bi-partisan support.
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With politics having become little better than a "game", played out to win the daily media, very short-term, opportunistic, negative, and sometimes very personal, the hope of significant bi-partisan agreement on key issues has virtually evaporated.
This has been compounded by the fragmentation of the senate, with the greater significance of minor parties and individuals, in some cases elected with just a handful of votes.
Both major parties have also mostly adopted a "small-target" strategy, not being prepared to take clear, detailed positions on the big policy issues and challenges.
As a result, the whole process of government is drifting, issues are being "spun" rather than addressed, many problems and challenges are being left unresolved, probably destined to end up as a "crisis".
The recent budget was obviously more popular than the last, and seems to have had a positive effect on consumer confidence, but it simply kicked many significant structural, policy challenges "down the road".
For example, the task of "budget repair", and issues such as tax, industrial relations, education, training and health reform, along with the challenge of climate change, have all been pushed off the near-term agenda.
Moreover, in the public/political discourse around the budget many doors have been closed on genuine reform.
Tax is a conspicuous example. One of the government's declared objectives of tax reform is "simplicity", yet the first significant tax initiative introduces a "two-tier" company tax, with a concessional rate for "small business".
Similarly, the big areas of tax concessions are housing (zero capital gains tax on the family home and negative gearing), superannuation (with benefits heavily skewed in favour of the wealthy), and the GST (now only charged on about 50 per cent of spending, with the spending that it is not charged on growing faster than that on which it is charged).
In all cases, the government has ruled out any near-term changes, even where, say with superannuation, there was some chance of bi-partisan support, with the opposition willing to make some change.
Climate change is another example. Here it is most difficult to understand how the government can be calling for an improvement in productivity, workforce participation, jobs, investment and growth in the budget, while at the same time effectively destroying a "new industry" in renewables, by sustaining the uncertainty about its commitment to the renewable energy target, such that investment in that industry has collapsed by some 90 per cent in recent times, and some 15,000 workers have been laid off.
Moreover, it is hard to understand how the government can be prepared to pay the big polluters to reduce their emissions, when there is some urgency in the budget repair task.
However, there may be some hope here, as global circumstances, specifically the global push towards an emissions reduction agreement as the outcome of this year's Paris process, may see the government being dragged to some sensible future targets.
These are important areas of longer-term, national significance, which should be above petty short-term politics.
We can only hope that, at some point, we will see that national leadership that sets out to build the political and public constituency, the essential bi-partisanship, for the essential policy changes.