After he'd previously declared climate change 'the greatest moral challenge of our time', former prime minister Kevin Rudd was rightly punished for his decision to put it second to political expedience. He was left with no moral authority, and little support from electors, who demonstrated in the opinion polls that they value moral leadership.
Julia Gillard learned a great deal from her predecessor's mistakes, and it's hard to imagine she would ever describe a particular policy vision as 'moral'. Of course it's up to her to choose which adjectives to use in enunciating her government's policies. But there will remain an expectation that she exercise moral authority, because she was chosen by her party to work for the common good of the nation. By definition, 'good' is a moral value, and consequently her leadership comes with moral obligations.
Friday morning's news that she had reached an agreement with the three miners BHP, Rio and Xstrata to take the sting out of the mining tax suggests she's made a poor start. She sold out the common good of the nation to the sectional interests of the three miners. It does not bode well for the treatment of asylum seekers and other policy sticking points that she plans to resolve before the coming election.
With the miners, the Government was comprehensively outgunned by their advertising blitz. The change of plans for the tax represented a truce, which was designed to keep the damaging ads out of sight in the lead up to the election. It does not have much to do with the common good, unlike the perfectly sound moral reasoning we were hearing until less than two weeks ago. That included the argument that the people of Australia own what's in the ground, and therefore have a right to fair compensation from those who dig it up for their own profit. It's unlikely we will hear that one again.
Also in the news on Friday was the revelation that Australia's World Cup bid team has used the nation's foreign aid budget to win support for its campaign. Fairfax reported that the federal aid agency AusAID agreed to help Football Federation Australia's bid to host the World Cup and has accordingly increased funding for particular aid programs in Asia and Oceania, where the Football Federation of Australia is trying to win support from FIFA representatives.
Australian aid is supposed to go where it can be