By Shaun Carney
AMERICAN singer and composer Randy Newman - one of the greatest songwriters of the past 50 years and an artist who observes few lyrical boundaries - performed with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at the Arts Centre last night. Not only does Newman write about the conventional song subjects such as lost love, he's also an astute social observer, ridiculing prejudice in his long-ago hit Short People, and a sharp political satirist. His body of work proves yet again that on the big questions, all too often the artists can illuminate the truth better than the essayists, the journalists and, perhaps less surprisingly, the politicians.
In the song A Few Words in Defense of Our Country, released in 2008 at the fag end of the Bush-Cheney years, Newman muses on America's imperial decline. Setting out to speak up in defence of the US, he gets into difficulties by making historical comparisons. Referring to ''the Caesars'', he splutters with increasing desperation, ''And one of 'em, one of 'em, appointed his own horse to be Counsel of the Empire / That's like vice-president or somethin' ''. After a confused pause, Newman says, disappointed: ''Oh, wait a minute, that's not a very good example.''
Randy Newman is a sharp political satirist.Credit: Reuters
Apart from the verbal spearing of Dick Cheney, the song has extra bite because 40 years ago Newman penned Political Science, in which he satirised America's global power by suggesting that the rest of the world, except Australia with its good surf and cute kangaroos, be bombed into submission because other countries and continents were so annoying - too hot (Africa) or too cold (Canada) or just plain ungrateful. Having captured America's Vietnam-era swagger early in his career, all these years later he's now charting the ''messy at best'' end of America's empire and seeing his countrymen ''adrift in the land of the brave and the home of the free''.
For all of the acid in his political songs, one unmistakeable aspect of Newman's art is his deep love of America and American life; it's in the rhythms and the cadences, and the passionate intelligence, in all his work. Australia could do with its own Randy Newman right now - someone who, coming from his own peculiar angle, could celebrate the country while acknowledging its complexities and, yes, its faults.
Just once, it would be good to get to the end of a week and feel that the political debate wasn't getting more debased.
This week, the June quarter inflation figure was released, showing that the increase in the cost of living, at 3.6 per cent, was well outside the Reserve Bank's target range of 2 to 3 per cent. However, the underlying rate of inflation is still within the acceptable band.
The result increases the prospect of a rise in the cash rate later this year but does not make it a certainty. Treasurer Wayne Swan tried to make the best of a potentially bad number and pointed out the effect of cyclone Yasi on the nation's banana crop and its subsequent impact on prices. Swan's argument was that once the big seasonal distortion was set aside, the overall inflation picture was OK.
This was rejected out of hand by shadow treasurer Joe Hockey. It was not bananas, he said. Hockey's press conference on Wednesday was typical of today's politics. It always has been, and always will be, a necessary part of the political system that oppositions will frame every event as an indictment of governments.
But what happens now is that anything goes. Hockey told reporters: ''Well, next quarter I fully expect Wayne Swan to claim that the dog ate his homework. He's going to come up with every excuse every quarter. The bottom line is they've done nothing to lift productivity in Australia. Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd declared war on inflation three years ago and have not lifted a finger to do anything about it.
''In fact they've made it worse by imposing taxes on alcohol, by imposing more taxes on cigarettes, by imposing higher costs associated with private health insurance. These are the things that feed directly through to the inflation data, and then they put their hands in the air and blame natural disasters for the significant increase in inflation when it's their own actions through electricity prices, through water prices, through not doing anything about housing affordability. All these things feed through to a higher cost of living for everyday Australians, and the government now is directly to blame.''
It was fair enough for Hockey to recall Swan and Rudd's war on inflation. But was his criticism in keeping with the opposition's position back then? In 2008, the Coalition said Labor's war on inflation was based on a fiction, a political ploy by Swan and Rudd to misrepresent the economic performance of the recently departed Howard government. And couldn't you consider three years of good inflation numbers as a reasonable result in that ''war'' anyway?
As for alcohol and cigarettes, is Hockey promising to make them cheaper? On electricity prices, he began his press conference by warning of even higher inflation because this week's figure did not include ''the massive increases in electricity that state governments have passed on on the 1st of July this year''.
By the end of his press conference, Hockey was declaring that electricity prices were the direct responsibility of the Gillard government - which they are not. But, hey, who cares? The ''dog ate the homework'' grab and another dismissing the price of bananas as being important were the grabs that made the TV news.
This is not an attempt to demonise Hockey. What he did was in keeping with the way politics in 2011 is conducted in Australia, where the credo seems to be ''say as much or as little as you think you can get away with''.
If the ''high banana prices cause jump in inflation'' trope seems familiar, it should. In July 2006, Peter Costello provided a similar explanation for a CPI leap, to a five-year high of 4 per cent, a few months after cyclone Larry hit northern Queensland. Back then, Hockey was human services minister. He didn't dismiss Costello's analysis, but Swan, then shadow treasurer, did.
On Thursday, Swan released a discussion paper for October's planned tax summit, or in the government's parlance, tax forum. The government is convening the summit as a result of its power-sharing arrangement with two independents, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott. The paper canvasses a wide range of taxation measures for discussion, from state taxes, to the welfare system, to incentives enabling greater mobility for skilled workers.
Ahead of that, Swan has raised the prospect of assistance for businesses hurt by the high Australian dollar, such as tourism and manufacturing. Can he deliver on all of this? The tax forum/summit will run for only two days and cannot possibly get through the issues that have been mooted, at least not in a meaningful way.
Experience suggests that the meeting will pass without anything concrete being established, matters will be referred to working groups, and the opposition - Hockey and Tony Abbott will probably have to arm-wrestle for the privilege - will come out and pooh-pooh the whole thing as a lot of hot air.
While the current generation of Australian leaders play at their craft, India and China are transforming their economies and their societies, and getting smarter at it.
It would be a good subject for a Randy Newman song.
Shaun Carney is an Age associate editor.
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