Most urgent is attempting to win Indonesia’s acceptance of the border control policy. The noises out of Jakarta continue to be negative, and they cannot be fobbed off any longer. The Coalition now has to deal with Indonesia and Abbott will visit there at the end of the month. It will be his first overseas trip as PM, and he can’t afford to slip up.
Then there is the matter of the bid by the American giant Archer Daniels Midland to take over Australia’s largest listed agribusiness GrainCorp.
This decision lies with Treasurer Joe Hockey: it has big implications for both the signals from the new government on foreign investment and relations within the Coalition. The Nationals, including leader Warren Truss, have condemned the prospect of a takeover.
On a third, totally different but socially sensitive front, Abbott will be faced with whether to try to strike down the ACT’s legislation, to be passed next month, to permit gay marriage. His conservative base will want him to act; that would defy the opinion of a majority of Australians.
Apart from these thorns, there’s the budget to prepare and the beginning of the Everest climb to repeal the carbon tax.
And as if all this isn’t enough, last night on the ABC’s Lateline, Western Australian premier Colin Barnett declared Abbott needed to repudiate his roll gold promise not to tamper with the rate or scope of the GST. Abbott says he wants co-operative relations in the federation: on his second day in office he faced one challenge from a state and another from a territory.
If the problems are piling up for the new government, in the Labor ranks there has been an odd cushioning of the pain of reality.
Normally after a defeat of this magnitude, Labor would be riven by post mortems. Instead the party has become absorbed with its new project – a ballot for the leader in which the rank and file has half the vote.
Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese are travelling the country garnering support. The process is capturing the membership’s imagination.
If seeing these two on a new election quest has a touch of the surreal about it, so does the participation of ex-ministers (Greg Combet for Albanese, Nicola Roxon for Shorten) who are now out of parliament. It’s as though they can’t tear themselves away.
So far the contenders’ campaigning has been civilised. But in the background lurk the factions. The left fears the right is both locking in its caucus votes (of which it has a majority) and, via the unions, trying to heavy the ordinary party members.
The right, desperate to get the leadership for Shorten, is not well set up for such a contest. The party’s grass roots are left leaning. The left regularly wins the ballots for national president. This is not like a preselection ballot where the candidates are often little known to those who are voting. These contenders are high profile players about whom ALP members will have their own opinions.
At least in the rank and file half of the ballot the chances for the right to get any sort of fix in are limited. Members can be pressured and the unions can speak. But the ballot papers are sent to people’s homes, completed in private at the kitchen table, and submerged with up to 40,000 others. Democracy may have a fighting chance against the factions.
Michelle Grattan is a Professorial Fellow at University of Canberra .
This piece was first published on The Conversation.
Michelle currently holds an academic position at the University of Canberra and is associate editor (politics) and chief political correspondent at The Conversation. She was the former editor of The Canberra Times, was political editor of The Age and has been with the Australian Financial Review and The Sydney Morning Herald.
