An indispensible annual guide to Australian politics and society.

Introduction

If a day is a long time in politics, a year can seem geological. The 2007 Federal election saw the old order dragged kicking and screaming out of the Lodge, and before you could say ‘iced Vo Vo’ the new prime minister and his heroic team were dragging its monuments to the ground. The outlines of a kinder, gentler Australia began to emerge as team Rudd ratified Kyoto, said sorry to the stolen generations, dumped Workchoices, ended mandatory detention, withdrew troops from Iraq, and threw open the doors of government to Cate Blanchett. All of Andrew Weldon’s pre-election doubts that Rudd was Howard-lite or some the ‘dweeby bureaucrat’ were cast aside — we had the Gregory Peck of To Kill a Mockingbird as PM and many of us collectively choked up with an entirely unfamiliar pride in our government. 

The accusations began early on that Rudd had ‘hit the ground reviewing’; that he was addicted to process; that he was a watcher not a fixer; and that in place of hard, substantive decision-making he was capable only of the symbolic gesture. There were also dark murmurings about ‘sub-prime’ and ‘securitisation’. But back then, when Rudd’s world was still young, our biggest worry — apart from the catastrophic melting of the polar ice caps — was that the dragon of inflation (a trusty old metaphor beautifully employed by Mark Knight) was loose, fed by those madly irresponsible tax cuts. Would the economy survive the Reserve Bank’s cure? Would those banks, supposedly in competition, pass on the interest rate cuts? With the polls showing Rudd as preferred PM even among Liberal voters none of this was too worrying to the new team, and anyway most of that could still be blamed on the economic profligacy of the previous government. 

Our cartoonists might no longer have had John Howard to kick around, but the spectacle of the once mighty Liberals floundering in Opposition was irresistible. It was clear from the start to Alan Moir that Nelson was a sacrificial figure, no more than a ‘nightwatchman’ sent in to play out a few difficult overs in the fading light before stumps in front of an empty stadium; the business end of the electoral run chase would be left to an as yet undecided but more gifted other. Caught between the reactionaries and the progressives of his party critical issues such as the apology, Workchoices and climate change were poisonous for Nelson, and falling back on petrol prices and alcopops seemed his only solution.

Weldon’s brilliant series of cartoons featured Nelson as an ALP mole sent in to wreck the Opposition from within, while Bill Leak depicted him as a guileless, chipper little bloke in a bubble-topped flying saucer. The ability to inspire pity is not a useful attribute in an Opposition leader, and when ‘poor’ became the natural adjective for ‘Brendan’ his days were numbered. In John Spooner’s ‘river of politics’, St Kevin baptises his summiteers in the still clear waters, while downstream, the old and new pretender watch insouciantly as Nelson goes over the falls alone. 

The Costello story preoccupied the Liberals, and of course Peter Costello, for a good part of the year, and speculations about his intentions were endless and damaging. Was he, like Matt Golding’s Narcissus, too fascinated by his own reflection to hear the desperate pleas of his comrades? Was it schadenfreude? Or was he just trying to flog a few more books? When the much-hyped Memoirs finally appeared — coincidentally on the day that Malcolm Turnbull assumed the leadership — it was with more whimper than bang. Didn’t we already know this stuff? The Liberals and their crises were so much more fun than the hardworking and worthy Labor crew. Rest assured, their turn will come.

A key part of Rudd’s appeal at the 2007 election had been his recognition of the need to act on climate change. That human activity is a major contribution to global warming is now no longer seriously questioned, and the deniers seem to belong to a more intransigent era. But debate about the efficacy of emissions trading as opposed, say, to a tax on carbon was also over. The discussion became technocratic, limited to emissions targets and the nuts and bolts of the system. The sceptical John Spooner can be relied on to rain on all our orthodoxies and he is profoundly wary of the carbon trading sharks who will be at home in the expanding seas of the new market, however worthy the intentions of its creators (p.99). The question of whether we should be followers or leaders in setting emissions targets is a complex moral as well as economic dilemma. Spooner’s ‘Garnaut Land’ brilliantly illustrates the global nature of the problem: the emissions targets we decide upon for ourselves will be irrelevant without international agreement; a feel-good, recycling, windmill-driven Australia will drown in the same rising seas of toxic sludge as the least climatically righteous — we will just get poorer more quickly. These truly are diabolical problems. 

When Ross Garnaut’s report on the slow motion catastrophe of planetary warming finally arrived, it was overshadowed by a more immediate meltdown — that of the global financial system. Those missing weapons of mass destruction finally turned up hidden away in our super funds in the form of complex financial instruments designed to spread risk into every corner of the globe. Moir’s lame duck president, clambering out of the wreckage of his Middle East policy, waddled into action, ‘Now for the economy’. David Rowe didn’t waste the opportunity for one last crack at the soon-to-be-retired Dubya, and his Uncle Sam bailing out Bush’s skull is one of the memorable images of the year. By the end of 2008, nationalisation by other means and large doses of Keynesian pump-priming were the order of the day. If all this government intervention wasn’t exactly socialism —‘It’s not what it looks like’ cries Petty’s hammer and sickle wielding figure — it certainly signalled that the 30 year neo-liberal orthodoxy was finally under serious challenge. Geological shifts indeed.

We ended the year rather less optimistic about the future than we entered it. For the moment CO2 has temporarily taken a back seat to CDOs as the villain dujour. But, as Cathy Wilcox's final cartoon illustrates, financial storms come and go, but climate change will be with us always.
                             

— Russ Radcliffe, from the Introduction