• I spoke too soon yesterday in lamenting Labor’s high-speed rail commitment. By lunchtime it was raining dud rail policies. First Anthony Albanese proclaimed Labor would start building another boondoggle, the Melbourne-Darwin inland rail route, which on the government’s own data won’t even be viable until the 2030s. That will cost $4-5b, but fortunately no money will be wasted until 2014-15, so there’s plenty of time for wiser heads to prevail.
  • Then several minutes later Warren Truss jumped on the high speed rail… um, bandwagon, announcing that the Coalition, as well as Labor and the Greens, wants to conduct a feasibility study into it. Later yesterday afternoon, Albanese hit out at the Greens for saying Labor had come late to the high speed rail idea, accusing them of “jumping on board the high speed train after it left the station”. Apart from rather ungallantly suggesting that the Greens hadn’t been the first to raise the idea in the election, it raised a more serious issue – it can’t be a particularly high speed train if you can still catch it after it leaves the station.
  • It might have been fortunate that Kevin Rudd overshadowed Tony Abbott’s health policy, which has been savaged by virtually all health groups except, of course, the reflexive Liberal supporters at the Australian Medical Association. The most confusing element — and there are plenty of them — is the Coalition’s vague commitment to move to 100% hospital funding over time in exchange for GST revenue — while Abbott was emphatic that he wasn’t making a “tax grab” or a “GST clawback”. I read the policy proposal and listened to Abbott’s press conference and read the transcript and I’m still confused about what the Liberals actually propose to do. Like Labor, the Liberals also make a virtue of how they’re cutting the numbers of those evil monsters, the Bureaucrats. And yet under the Liberal plan tiny bureaucracies – which cost far more per head than big bureaucracies – will spring up for every single hospital in the country to support each hospital board. Where will all these board bureaucrats come from? From … the health bureaucracy, presumably.
  • The return of Kevin Rudd confirms this is a true election for political tragics. Its twists and turns must be a constant delight to those fascinated by the ephemera of politics, especially in the Press Gallery. For those interested in policy substance, however, it’s the equivalent of slowly gouging one’s own eyes out. But if you want to know whether Rudd’s return is good or not for Labor, check out The Australian, which editorialised against it this morning. That’s a reliable indicator that it is.
  • It’s only a few short weeks since Kevin Rudd was a badly-damaged Prime Minister, judged so politically-toxic he had to be removed by Labor. But as Malcolm Turnbull showed, being knifed by your own party can do wonders for your reputation. Rudd seems to have gone from damaged goods to distinguished former leader in a matter of moments. It used to take years. Another consequence of an ever-accelerating media cycle and the Perpetual Present of political coverage.