So much noise for so little purpose. The house of representatives sat for four long days this week but managed to pass just two pieces of legislation. And arguably one of those was as much a stunt as a law.



On Tuesday it passed the Tax Bonus for Working Australians Repeal Bill, which makes sure no more of the 2008 global financial crisis $900 stimulus cheques are mailed out.

Of course it is ridiculous that anyone should still be getting $900 all these years later, but as it turns out hardly anyone is.

Last year some people getting amended assessments from the 2007-8 financial year still received the hand-outs, but the explanatory memorandum for the bill before parliament says the Australian Tax Office has “already ceased issuing cheques in most cases” and the new law is forecast to save just $250,000 over the next four years.

Which does raise a strong suspicion that the law was designed at least in part to give the government an opportunity to make claims about Labor’s waste and reckless financial management, as well as to save the money.

The other actual law our lawmakers passed this week was the Primary Industries (Excise) Levies Amendment (Dairy Produce) Bill 2014, which increases a levy to pay for animal health obligations of the dairy industry from 0.058 to 0.145 cents per kilogram of milk fat. Seriously. That took them days.

The rest of the time was consumed by the normal below-the-radar parliamentary business – members’ statements, tabling of reports and the like, by discussion of other things going on, job losses, on-again-off-again plans to assist Qantas, the government’s drought relief package, and by a lot of shouty meaningless debate, the central themes being: (from Labor) “You don’t have a plan for jobs”, and, (from the Coalition) “Yes we do, we want to repeal the carbon tax.”

It didn’t contain much news you could use, like a decision from the government about whether it will offer Qantas a debt guarantee, or a clear argument from Labor about why it should, or an explanation of what happened during the violence on Manus Island or exactly where and how the asylum seekers will be resettled if they are found to be genuine refugees.

This is, of course, not entirely abnormal, no matter which party is in power, but at the moment the government does seem to have a particular shortage of legislation for the house to consider, leaving even more uncluttered debating time than usual to be filled with the jobs plan versus carbon tax talking points. Again. This could be because the Coalition is saving more contentious bills until they have a better chance of passing the Senate.

But there are also repeated complaints emerging from within the government ranks about the time it takes to get the prime minister’s office to sign off even uncontroversial legislation, routine stuff such as the dairy levy increase – complaints that tie in with claims that there are several hundred pieces of ministerial correspondence also held up in the PMO, a logjam that would rival former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s office in its most dysfunctional days.

Meanwhile, people saying sensible things quietly, people who would once have been listened to, attract very little attention at all.

Even as the carbon tax was being raised by the prime minister as one answer to Qantas’s inability to compete on a level playing field (even though the repeal would remove the tax from the fuel bills of all airlines and therefore leave the airline’s competitive position unchanged and even though Qantas imposed a ticket surcharge to help meet the cost), Bernie Fraser, the former governor of the reserve bank and now chairman of the soon-to-be-abolished climate change authority was releasing a 400-page report on the other side of the building.

The key finding of the independent, expert authority was that the Abbott government must treble Australia’s minimum 2020 target for greenhouse gas emissions from 5% below 2000 levels to 15% to have a “credible” role in international efforts to slow global warming.

The environment minister, Greg Hunt, saw its key message as the “ineffectiveness of Labor’s carbon tax”.

Actually, the report says it is very difficult to calculate the impact of a policy that has been in place for only a year and for most of that time with the expectation that it would be repealed.

Fraser studiously avoided any assessment of the Coalition’s alternative Direct Action policy. But he did bemoan the deterioration in the standard and civility of political debate.

He said divisive political behaviour had become “so prevalent” and the basis for decision making so debased it was “no wonder the public is confused about what is going on”.

And he was particularly scathing of “wild assertions blaming every lost job on the carbon tax” without “any objective consideration of the evidence”.

Crazy ideas like that just don’t cut it these days. And anyway, the softly spoken Fraser didn’t say it nearly loudly enough.