The long-term chink in Rudd’s armour: Gottliebsen

Given that the next election looks certain to be won by Labor it is not surprising that there is no enthusiasm to challenge Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership. But in his address last night, Turnbull made an important point – political fortunes can change dramatically and quickly.

It’s very hard to see them changing before the next election, but now is a good time to look at where the Government is vulnerable in the longer term. You can obviously point to specific danger situations like industrial relations and the economy. While there is always potential for issues in these areas to blow up in the Government’s face, Canberra has a clear skills base to handle them.

I think the far greater danger is the fact that the Government is moving into areas that are way outside the Canberra skills base.

In a minor way we saw what can happen when the Government made mistakes as it tried to hasten the building of schools. Those mistakes could be justified by the speed at which the process was undertaken and they were certainly not fatal, but they were a warning sign of what can happen when you extend the boundaries of your skills base. We saw similar difficulties in indigenous housing and the Murray River policy, again reflecting the lack of implementation skills.

The Federal Government now wants to get deeper into health, roads and other infrastructure including a national telecommunications network. In addition, the new carbon rules will take the Government into power stations and many other new areas.

Given the gaps in the Government’s skills base these will be much higher risk adventures than is currently understood by most (but not all) Government ministers.

The national broadband network is an example of the looming dangers. The Government rates the network’s importance on a similar scale to electricity and rail.

The first mistake was made by Telstra, which had the opportunity to drive the whole movement to the advantage of shareholders and the community. When Telstra failed to take that opportunity, the Government took the running with its fibre to the home proposal. Under strong pressure from David Murray at the Future Fund, Telstra changed its chairman, CEO and some board members and declared that it wanted to talk.

Now there is real danger that the Government will overplay its hand. NBN chief Mike Quigley is building an empire which will very quickly develop a life of its own and Telstra shareholders are stirring. It will be an unnecessary national disaster if Australia ends up with two uneconomic competing broadband networks. The Government is in uncharted territory which is forcing it to extend its skills base. Similar challenges may arise in other areas.

But can the Government extend that skills base quickly enough to cope with these massive challenges? And should it be doing so when the skills already exist in the private sector? These questions offer the best opportunity for the leader of the opposition to regain momentum after the next election.

This article first appeared on Business Spectator.