RATTLING THE SOCIAL POLICY TIN

Has the Federal social conscience been tweaked by the premiers, asks
Mike Secombe.

IT'S the economy, stupid! That is the single issue which most concerns
most of the voters, most of the time. And it is the reason most
Coalition voters are Coalition voters. Or so goes the accepted wisdom.

Whenever pollsters survey these things, they reinforce that wisdom.
Asked to compare the Coalition and Labor on economic and social
issues, electors consistently prefer the conservative parties'
handling of interest rates, inflation and business. They prefer Labor
on social areas such as health, the environment, women's issues,
Aborigines, education and welfare.

The puzzle is that throughout the life of the Howard Government, and
with increasing frequency lately, social policy issues have been
prominent, even dominant at times. Last week's premiers conference,
for example, devoted more energy to drugs, depression and early
childhood policy than to the GST.

Look at the record, starting with gun control (way back in the early
days), Aborigines, immigration, welfare (work-for-the-dole), aged
care, education (literacy and numeracy), constitutional issues,
euthanasia, drugs, censorship. The list goes on and on.

These are as one senior Liberal noted, "very strange battlefields to
choose". Particularly when the economy is, by most measures, humming
along, it seems strange that the Government would jam its own message
of good economic news with a series of controversial
distractions.

Are they doing it by accident or design?

Well, experts differ. Pollster Rod Cameron, of ANOP, thinks it's
happening largely by design. In fact, he contends that the economy is
no longer THE big issue.

"Whatever else Paul Keating was, he was a remarkable economic
educator." he says. "The community is not as concerned any more about
the big economic picture. The community now's more concerned about
personal circumstances."

And on issues such as work-for-the-dole, drugs or literacy. Cameron
believes the Howard Government really is close to mainstream
Australian views. He has no doubt the Coalition's private polling
reinforces this, but he does not think that supports the elite view
that Howard is a poll-driven Prime Minister; rather Howard genuinely
reflects popular - or perhaps populist - opinion.

"This is largely a deliberate attempt to broaden the political agenda.
Perhaps Howard is a bit rankled, too, by the critics who accuse him of
having a lack of vision," Cameron says.

A conflicting, and more orthodox, view comes from another reputable
pollster, Newspoll's Sol Lebovic. He sees a series of accidents. He
thinks the Howard Government is notable for having failed to clearly
set its social agenda, and has in great measure been reactive.

An early example was gun control; there was no policy intent until the
Port Arthur massacre. A more recent example was the botched response
last week to the Kosovo refugee crisis, where the Government produced
one kneejerk reaction, then another one, in response so public
opinion, and still got it wrong.

As for moral issues, moves to ban Lolita, Internet pornography and the
like, were in part a reflection of the moral conservatism of some in
the Government, and in larger part due to the need to trade with Brian
Harradine in the Senate.

"Their big initiative is the GST, which is an economic issue, but
they've had to trade on social issues to hope to get it through,"
Lebovic says.

A harsher assessment conies from Labor's Carmen Lawrence, who notes
that in many of the areas into which Howard in particular has
trampled, sober policy assessment has been the victim.

As a former premier, she saw how Australian governments collectively
dealt with difficult issues like drugs before.

"The COAG [Council of Australian Governments] process used to try to
get uniformity where it was justified to have uniformity (mostly in
economic areas), but when it came to social policy, we had the view,
as a group of premiers and the government of the time, that there was
a great deal of room for expermentation and regional innovation.
Indeed it was probably desirable."

But Howard, in playing populist politics and promoting simple
solutions on subjects like drugs or education, was motivated more by
being seen to do something than by a search for real answers.

And Lawrence thinks there are longer-term risks to such policy
dilettantism. "When those debates next come up... and kids are still
dying at the rate they have been. [Howard] is identifiable with the
policy and his credibility will be on the line."

Surprisingly, the harshest assessments of all of the Government's
social policy dabblings come from within. Several members of the
Liberal Left shared the view that the previous Labor governments
managed to quietly accommodate a broad range of social issues, through
consultation and evolutionary change.

Because this Government does not put the effort into process, issues
periodically explode onto the national agenda. However you choose to
explain the phenomenon, though, there is no end to it in sight. That
is, of course, until the economy goes bad.