Correspondent's Notebook

Looking to the future on Australia Day

29 January 2010

Canberra correspondent Linda Mottram looks at this week’s celebration of Australia Day, with hundreds of citizenship ceremonies conducted around the country and some renewed debate about the Australian flag and a republic.

It was also marked by mass absenteeism from work on the Monday before the Australia Day holiday, as Australians stretched the long summer slumber to include just one last long weekend. The contrast could not have been sharper with the subject matter of the first major Prime Ministerial message of the year, that Australia was going to have boost productivity if it was to have a viable economic future.

Kevin Rudd had spruiked his message in every Australian capital city during the week before Australia Day in a swoop of the nation that raised some still beach sand-encrusted holiday eyebrows.

Mr Rudd cited soon to be released data that includes a population forecast for Australia of 36 million by the year 2050. It’s currently 22 million. The rub though is that the population is aging. Australians, he said, would have to increase productivity to cover the costs. Perhaps as a lure to those workers looking at a delayed retirement or longer hours, Mr Rudd said a two per cent increase in productivity would deliver $AU16,000 extra into the average pay packet. A lot of Australians still opted for the extra long Australia Day weekend though – no additional productivity there.

The issue does pose a very real set of policy dilemmas. But by hitting the speakers’ trail so quickly, Mr Rudd also reminded us its an election year and was attempting to set the agenda.

Kevin Rudd will also be judged though on the promises he made at the last election just over two years ago. He has fulfilled a pledge to bury the previous government’s widely despised workplace laws. On the wider issue of the economy, the Rudd government will continue taking the credit for Australia’s emergence relatively unscathed from the global financial crisis, while the opposition will portray a big spending government that can’t be trusted with taxpayers’ money. Undelivered though is the promise to sort out Australia’s ailing health system with a federal takeover from the states if necessary.

Then there’s the bigger picture. Before being elected, Kevin Rudd referred to climate change as, quote, the great moral challenge of our generation, unquote. But Copenhagen was at best a disappointment, and Australia had styled itself there as a leader; Canberra will now pledge only a five per cent cut to its national emissions without some major deal internationally; and and the legislative future of its planned carbon pollution reduction scheme remains uncertain. It is perhaps little wonder that Mr Rudd’s pre-Australia Day swing around the states made no mention of that great moral challenge. But then, the polls do show Australians are less concerned about climate change than at the last election.

Climate change though will feature in what’s already emerging as a contentious debate about the size of Australia’s future population. Both the Prime Minister and the opposition leader want a big Australia, to boost the population to shore up economic growth and expand the tax base to help pay for the aging national profile .. with health costs forecast to be among the biggest burdens. But very quickly in this dry continent, where climate change effects are predicted to be severe, critics have questioned where the water will come from for all these new people and how already choked cities like Sydney will cope with more people. It may not swing the coming election, but it is part of the debate Mr Rudd has invited. And there’s the immigration component of the discussion.

The election, due by year’s end, will be the ultimate test too for the opposition’s still relatively new leader Tony Abbott, a former Catholic seminarian with a sporting bent, who’s deeply socially conservative and politically divisive. The Opposition has worked through a series of leaders and expects a lot of Mr Abbott. It is hard to measure though how some of his commentary will play, like his remarks to a women’s magazine this week that women shouldn’t give away their virginity lightly. Such comments are incendiary, and especially sensitive in the race for the ultimate Australian political prize.