As scare campaigns go, the one Labor has been running in New South Wales is the full oogie boogie.
Labor and the unions have issued dark warnings about secret meetings between the NSW government and Chinese government-owned companies, who might buy NSW’s electricity poles and wires, and about whom Asio might be concerned because they might turn off the lights to Canberra because, well, it is not at all clear why they might want to do that. In fact most of this argument is not at all clear because it is mostly nonsense.
One of the meetings “emerged” because the China Daily newspaper wrote about it on 6 March, something which was referred to as a “revelation” that “prompted” the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union to unleash spooky-music, dark-lighting TV advertisements questioning the “appropriateness of a foreign power owning NSW electricity businesses”.
But Joseph Zhang, the director of the Xinhua news agency which generated that China Daily story referred to in the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote to my Guardian Australia colleague Gabrielle Chan suggesting the meeting wasn’t really a big revelation at all.
“I am surprised our article has become one of the topics in the current state election,” Zhang wrote.
“Our article ... said the NSW treasurer Andrew Constance had met the State Grid officials in China late last year about the purchase of the state’s electricity assets.
“This article was generated from our Sydney bureau, and was based on a meeting Mr Constance had with the ‘China Chamber of Commerce in Australia’ in Sydney in March, which Xinhua attended as member of the chamber. This was an open meeting, in which Mr Constance said he wanted to work closer with Chinese businesses in Sydney to promote better trade between our countries.
“We have audio of the meeting in which Mr Constance said: ‘In relation to the sale of state assets such as power companies we are open to global investors into electricity assets. We will be beneficiaries between foreign investment especially if it partners up with superannuation funds and the like. The interest from around the world is very strong but I am very grateful of the interest from China as well and it’s worth singling that out.’
“The Xinhua reporter writing this story also included information from a Daily Telegraph article from February 3 that said Mr Constance had met with State Grid officials for an ‘introductory meeting and discussion on investment in NSW’, according to recently published ministerial diary disclosures ... Xinhua did not receive any special details about Mr Constance’s November meeting with China’s State Grid Corp besides what Daily Telegraph has covered.”
And of course, if a foreign-stated owned company sought to bid for the assets, it would automatically be vetted by the Foreign Investment Review Board and passed on to the treasurer who would have to approve the transaction.
The NSW senator Sam Dastyari asked during a Senate debate this week: “Are we all so naive as to think that the Australian security agencies do not have a view on the sale of TransGrid to an international buyer? This is an electricity company supplying the whole of Canberra, including this place and including all of the buildings that our federal departments and security agencies are housed in.” The answer is obvious. Nope, we’re not so naive, we know that if any security agency had a national interest concern they could and would make it known to the FIRB.
This particular scare campaign does not seem to have had enough of an impact to change Mike Baird’s expected victory on Saturday, although it has obviously filtered through since the premier was asked about it this week by an old lady at the Royal Easter show and a bloke selling vegetables at the Flemington markets.
Baird has sort of skirted it, rather than charge at it head on, probably because he would prefer to talk about the great things the proceeds of privatisation might buy rather than the process of selling, which people don’t like so much.
But the fact that both sides of politics keep rolling this garbage out has a big impact on the political process.
The fear of any kind of scare campaign from Labor was one reason the Coalition either fudged or failed to tell us about its policy intentions before the last federal election – which in turn is at least part of the reason voters refused to accept them when they did emerge. The fear of a Coalition scare campaign is why Labor has revealed no major policies yet despite promising that this would be its “year of ideas”. The fear of a revival of the ridiculous misrepresentations in the Coalition’s carbon tax scare campaign is why Labor does not properly call out Tony Abbott’s half-baked climate policy, despite having recommitted itself to some form of carbon market.
And the sum of all these fears is the curious situation in which we find ourselves halfway through the Abbott government’s first term, where it’s not really clear what either major party stands for.
The Coalition is in the process of ditching its previous political and economic strategy. The budget emergency has been replaced by the plan to return to surplus “asap” and the promise of a “dull and boring” budget, which is apparently seen as a good thing. The replacement strategy is not immediately evident. We are about to get a taxation white paper, but we can’t be sure any politician is brave enough to make the case for change.
Labor has offered only tiny snippets of policy based on the accepted small-target strategy wisdom of recent federal polls.
If we are to draw any federal conclusions from the NSW poll then perhaps it could be that staring down a scare campaign is possible. And from there it would take just one more logical step to conclude that voters might even reward a party that had the courage to pronounce, and argue the case for, big policy ideas.
