The 2020 summit kept me too busy to blog. Looking back on the weekend I have a range of impressions.

* Rudd’s opening speech was inspiring, one of the best I’ve heard from him. The same was true of the opening ceremony as a whole.

* As numerous speakers said, the sense of new possibilities and a new openness to ideas has been one of the striking outcomes of the change of government, to an extent that has certainly surprised me.

* In many areas, including the water and climate change sessions, the real message was not so much the need for new ideas (though there were some good ones) but the need to act much more urgently on what we already know

* From the government’s point of view, the Summit had a couple of effects. One was to shake up the policy agenda, giving Rudd the chance to pick up a lot of ideas that are broadly consistent with Labor’s policy platform but got crowded out of discussion in the course of me-too election campaigning. The other is to raise expectations that the government will actually achieve things in areas like climate change and indigenous policy, rather than putting a better spin on marginal changes to the policies inherited from Howard.

* It was already obvious that, with Howard gone, and Labor in office, the Republic issue would return to the agenda. It’s something we have to come to anyway, and is just awaiting the right mood of national optimism. To sustain what is bound to be a fairly lengthy debate, we need more than the natural optimism of an electoral honeymoon. For that reason, I hope, and expect, that concrete moves towards a Republic will be deferred for a while, until the government has some concrete achievements to celebrate.

I only saw this item flashing briefly across the TV screen, but it’s an issue that has been vigorously debated in the UK and over at Crooked Timber. The new Australian government, which is withdrawing combat troops (though not some troops guarding our embassy) from Iraq, has announced that Iraqis who have worked with Australian forces in Iraq will be offered resettlement in Australia. The estimated number of Iraqis to receive visas, including family members, is 600. Australia had only about 500 troops on average, so that gives an idea of the scale of commitment that might be expected from the UK and US if they met their obligations in a comparable fashion.

The decision to accept the interpreters ahead of other refugees has been criticised, but I think this is justified. The essential point should be to treat this intake as additional to, rather than part of, our general obligation to accept refugees.

On the same point, this Times story indicates that the first three workers to be accepted under the much more restrictive British program have finally arrived in the UK, and that the program has so far delivered visas to a total of 12 Iraqis and their families. The total estimated intake is 2000.

As a supporter of political competition, I don’t like the idea that the Liberals/Nationals/Libationals* will remain as irrelevant as they are now. So my Fin column a couple of weeks ago gave them some (unsolicited) advice on how to appeal to a generally social democratic electorate. Feel free to offer your own suggestions.

* This appealing name for a merged party was suggested by commenter Basilisk, who is hereby announced as the winner of the contest I proposed on this topic.
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The Liberal party finally has something to celebrate, with their most senior elected official, Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman winning re-election easily and the Liberals getting a majority on the City Council for the first time in many years. But despite this story in the Oz, the news is not all good for the Liberal brand.

* Newman’s success was largely a reflection of his personal popularity. A good point for the Libs is that this popularity is largely due to his promise to fix traffic congestion through road and tunnel projects, an issue the Liberals probably have an advantage on in general. A less good point is that it remains to be seen if the plans will work – this approach hasn’t been hugely successful elsewhere

* In Townsville, Labor copped a hiding but the conservative candidate Les Tyrell didn’t run under the Liberal label

* In the Gold Coast mayoral election, the Liberal Party spent a fortune but their candidate finished third with 26 per cent of the vote. There’s an outside chance that he could get up thanks to the vagaries of preferences but it looks pretty unlikely. Joe Hockey calls this a “great result” but if so, I’d hate to see a bad one.

All of this is relevant to the issue of whether the Liberals and Nationals should merge under a new name. I suggested the day after the election that this was inevitable, and copped some flak for it, but the idea of a merger is certainly alive now.

The remaining objection to a merger with a new name is that it would lose the value attached to the Liberal “brand”. My reading of the council election results is that this value is either zero or negative. Popular conservative candidates can win without the Liberal name. On the other hand, even in natural Liberal territory like the Gold Coast, the party label alone can barely attract a quarter of the votes even with a big advertising push.

Given general agreement that the obvious choices of NatLib and LibNat are uninspiring at best, I’ll throw it open to readers to suggest a new name for the merged party. The winning entry as judged by me will be announced in a later post.

The government has just scrapped one of the many troubled defence projects it inherited: the Sea Sprite helicopter. It may yet cancel Brendan Nelson’s Super Hornets. But with budget pressure still tight, it might be worth looking at more radical options. The obvious candidate is to abandon the long-standing tradition that our armed forces should include a surface navy.

It’s been argued ever since the development of the submarine in the late 19th century and the airplane in the early 20th (along with torpedoes and mines) that surface fleets were obsolete, being vulnerable to much cheaper attackers. This argument has been repeatedly vindicated by events, and just as repeatedly ignored by the makers of defence policy.

Update: My point is pretty much proved by this report that the Navy has dropped the ball on training and retaining submarine crews. By contrast, the general tone of many comments seems to be based on the notion “why not have it all?” with no consideration of budget constraints, let alone benefit-cost analysis.
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The NSW Liberals are the perennial B team of Australian politics. Since the emergence of the current two-party system, they (and their UAP/Nationalist) predecessors have held office only when incumbent Labor governments have either split or been so long in office that the accumulated arrogance and corruption is too much to take*. On those criteria, the performance of the Iemma government suggests that the Libs may finally be due for a turn. But there are a couple of obvious problems: the next election is not due for a couple of years, and the Liberals have never looked capable of presenting a credible alternative than they do now (to be fair, they look marginally better for the change from Debnam to O’Farrell).

So, I’d prefer it if Labor had a go at internal renewal. John Sutton’s suggestion that Iemma be replaced by his deputy, John Watkins, looks like a start. There’s also the possibility of an old-style party-Parliamentary leadership split over electricity privatisation, with threats to force the resignation of Treasurer Michael Costa. Again, the sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned.

If Iemma and Costa lose their jobs before pushing their privatisation through, it will, no doubt harm their prospects of well-paid post-political sinecures. But the financial sector looks after its own, and I’m sure something will be found for these loyal allies.

* I can’t recall ever reading much about the 1965 election which brought the startlingly corrupt Askin government to power, and introduced the one sustained period of Liberal rule with (I think) four election wins in a row. Still, Labor had been in for 24 years and the rightwing machine that has produced so many of our current hacks was already in charge, so I don’t think this can be a big exception to the rule.

Throughout the last few years of the Howard government, anyone who criticised the government, or suggested that Howard was not the best person to be Prime Minister of Australia, could be sure of being labelled a “Howard hater”. A quick Google finds this trope being used regularly by Miranda Devine, Paul Sheehan and Gerard Henderson, and being taken up by their numerous blogospheric supporters.

This was always silly. Perhaps there were people motivated to oppose the government because of a personal animus against Howard rather than his actions and policies, but if so I never met any. Of course, people who disliked Howard’s policies tended to dislike Howard, and some people who hated Howard’s policies hated Howard as a result, but using a term like “Howard hater” to explain opposition to the government is like explaining the effects of opium by reference to its dormitive qualities.

The real motive underlying the use of “Howard hater” as a term of attack was the recognition that he and his government never commanded enthusiastic support from most Australians, merely a judgement that they were better than the alternatives on offer. Once this changed with Labor’s (long overdue) choice of Kevin Rudd as leader, the government was doomed.

Tonight’s Four Corners suggests that much the same was true of Howard’s colleagues. While only Costello and a couple of his closest supporters came across as Howard haters, most of the rest showed a notable lack of enthusiasm, and willingness in retrospect, to blame Howard for the government’s defeat. Tony Abbott’s undiminished loyalty just enhanced the contrast with the rest of the crew.

In terms of policy, the most startling revelation was Joe Hockey’s claim that members of the Cabinet voted for WorkChoices, including the abolition of the “no disadvantage” test, and were then shocked (or pretended to be) that people were disadvantaged. This news ought surely to sink resistance to Labor’s reforms, and may indeed have been intended to achieve this purpose.