Specious piffle from The Age

So, Ted Ballieu has one hundred days to display his mettle in government, according to The Age.

I have to say that The Age carried some good coverage over the last few weeks, compared to the increasingly hysterical primal scream we affectionately call The Australian.  There are some things I would quibble about.  They didn't really cover the policies of the Greens; most of that coverage was given over to the shafting that erstwhile party of the so-called Left graciously endured from the ALP franchises.

In spite of now having a dedicated arts page, the print edition of The Age didn't really provide much in the way of substantial discussion of arts policy.  OK, Labour kept it back until last Thursday, and the Liberals somehow didn't manage to release anything at all.  Both parties have something in their platforms which could have been rolled out.

Artists and their patrons vote as well, after all.

The commentary on economic issues was fairly uniformly excellent.  Tim Colebatch is easily one of the best economic writers around.  He connects the dismal science up with wider cultural issues in an engaging way.  But with the genuine diamonds come the fake items too; so much of the news-level coverage remains obstinately he-said-she-said.  Politics as celebrity gossip really doesn't cut it at all.  If you want a single reason for why the public appears disconnected from politics, why not start by looking at the go-betweens in the media.

One of the things which brought Kevin Rudd off the rails was his insistence on keeping every jot and tittle promised between his ascension to the ALP leadership and the washup of the night of the long knives.  His became a government obsessed with making announcements and 'winning' each day's media coverage.  It ended up putting the horse before the cart, with the predictable result of many announcements making for very little genuine progress.  Impatience bred inertia.

And commentators in the press kept setting 'tests' for him to pass.  Then they got fretful if he didn't 'pass,' or took out the sledgehammer if he somehow failed to take their advice.  Some of it was good, much of it eminently ignorable.

But Ted Ballieu has to prove himself over the next four years.  Some of his party's ideas for dealing with pressing issues are good; some things, like armed security personnel on public transport, could well be recrafted into better solutions like -- oh, I don't know, what about something a bit random and retro like staffing more train stations all day?  It's an instant winner: job creation, improvement of the customer 'experience' on public transport, and likely to improve longstanding problems with fare evasion.  The law and order auction was absurd: yet another token of how stultified public discourse has become.

The aspirations of a few crazy weeks of electoral politics must be tempered when they meet with the daily reality of having to make policy in government.  Citizens should rightly expect that it's going to take rather more than one hundred days to get the ball rolling.  No-one can ask much more than this.

In the meantime, I hadn't realized Fairfax was trying to shift a mile-high pile of fertilizer.  Perhaps they should put another of those &*#@ing wrap-around ads on The Age to irritate their readers even more.