So the Prime Minister has returned to public life after his holiday hibernation. He has come out with a series of pre-Australia Day speeches which, after the recent years of his globe-trotting internationalism, have a peculiarly domestic flavour to them, with still no commentary on what has become the great failure of “Nopenhagen”.
He has used his holiday children’s book to segue into national standards for children in care, and then gone on to talk up future development in Australia anticipating the 2050 aspiration of supporting a national population of 35 million, many of them over 65. In his speeches he has talked up the importance of developing long term infrastucture and productivity improvements and has announced financial allocations for the lower Murray river, for higher education research, for small businesses developing online presence, apprenticeship kick-start initiatives and more.
He spent some time in South Australi early in the week, no doubt hoping to address voters there given Tony Abbott’s stance on federalising the control of the Murray-Darling. This initiative would be, no doubt, very popular with South Austraian voters.
The PM’s web page is full of the transcripts of his speeches and doorstop interviews and in the last week he has started tweeting about the government’s response to the Hatian disaster, Australia day and, in the last 24 hours, has reemphasized the ageing population. See his tweet here.
Tony Abbott has been doing the radio interview rounds proffering his green credentials as he talks up the Murray-Darling problem, his green army and his ‘practical’ approach to facing the problems of climate change from a local perspective. He has promised an environmental policy, or at least “the thinking, the concepts, the ideas and some costings” for the beginning of the parliamentary year.
The opposition leader has also been talking up infrastructure importance and is taking the position of the hands-on, can-do approach as opposed to the PM’s committee idealogue approach.
His web page has been full of transcripts of his interviews and doorstops and he is certainly bringing the debate to what he considers to be the PM’s mandarinesque style of leadership, though his blog and his online tweets have been surprisingly quiet this week…perhaps as a result of so much time on the microphone
This coming week will be interesting as we watch the health debate rise up, almost phoenix-like, after Kevin Rudd stated this morning that 2010 was going to be a major year in health reform, though in 2007 he stated that 2009 was the date to watch out for. Tony Abott has countered aldready as he talks about local boards to run hospitals. The debate will be interesting…. as long as you are not sick in the meantime.
