If I were Kevin Rudd right now

I am here today to define the course of this election campaign. I said at the outset of the campaign that the Labor Party was going to bring a New Way of politics, which has been interpreted in various quarters as being in opposition to negativity or realpolitik. The New Way is not about these things. I will now define what it is, starting with a bit of history.

The Labor Party has always been a broad church, with many points of view represented within it. In the last twenty or thirty years, you can see the various leaders we have had have been different characters with different views of what government should do. My predecessor, Julia Gillard, led a government that was seated firmly in the union tradition of the party, focused on building the future of this country through education and the social safety net. Paul Keating led a government that was focused on economic results, and how we produced those results was a secondary concern, which did not always benefit our union friends. Bob Hawke started as a union man, but the influence of Mr Keating as Treasurer and the development of the Accord cast him in a transitional role. Economic transition, caused by the opening up of Australia to the world by the lowering of tariffs and liberation of markets, was all started by Gough Whitlam. Transition is what the Labor Party is in right now.

I am here to honour, not repudiate, the legacy of all of these Labor Prime Ministers. The story running through the Prime Ministerships of all of these fine leaders is preparing and educating Australia to compete on the world stage, free of Menzies era protectionism and strong with the knowledge and skill that good education provides. Four decades after Gough set the country on a new course, our economy is the envy of the world. If you are 21 years of age or younger, you have never known this country to be in recession. We are in the late stages of the transformation of Australia into the most robust economy in the world.

The work of strengthening Australia to punch above its economic weight is not done, though. There is still much to dislike about the Australian economy, and what signals government sends out through its policies. There are big changes that can still be made to improve our lot as a nation.

The New Way is this: finish the job that Labor started four decades ago by doing the hard things, the things we have been putting off as in the too hard basket. Take that too hard basket, empty it and see what needs to be done to finish the job.

The Australian people understand how important this is, because they see all around them the benefits of economic transformation to date. We are all in this together. We all benefit from the improvements to the competitiveness of the economy. We all benefit from the removal of protections, including protections of some within the tax system. Traditionally, leaders have been reluctant to talk about removing undeserved tax loopholes for fear of getting people who exploit those loopholes offside. The New Way is about rising above that weakness, and trusting in the Australian people to understand why we are acting on behalf of all of them, not just a privileged few.

The New Way is about rising above special interests. To be a special interest is to seek to undermine the free market by securing special privileges for you and yours. Unions are a special interest, as are businesses, as are retirees, as are students, as are environmentalists, as are the unemployed. The way politics has been run is to give everyone special privileges, so that the economy ends up being blanketed in a patchwork quilt of protectionism. The New Way is to abandon this irrational practice and instead strengthen the economy by removing burdens from its back.

There are smart people around the place who have already thought long and hard about the details of things in the too hard basket, of course. Saul Eslake is one of a host of commentators who have figured most of it out already. The Henry Tax review contains many excellent ideas, some of which we have already implemented. More needs to be done.

Specifically - and I know you all want to hear more about programmatic specificity! - more needs to be done about housing affordability. Sometimes governments get things wrong, and negative gearing has ended up having the reverse effect than what was intended. Instead of making housing investment more affordable, it has led to speculation that has driven up the price of houses to an extent where an entire younger generation is largely excluded from the dream of home ownership. This must end. However, I do not wish to upset the long-term retirement plans of those with existing loans reliant on negative gearing, so any changes we make to negative gearing would only be to new loans made from today onwards. This is a prudent way to end what has been a drag on the Australian economy.

Also, while much has been said about the GST in this campaign already, the New Way allows for some rational discussion of raising taxes to fund the things that taxpayers expect to pay for, like education and the social safety net. The GST is currently exempt on food, and the explanation has usually been to protect lower paid workers and the unemployed, but when you look at the way this actually works in the real world, it works out as being regressive and in favour of upper income earners, since they more for food. Extending the GST to food is a sensible response to balancing the budget.

Finally, the Howard government made many mistakes in managing the economy while it was in office, and perhaps the greatest one was creating a loophole for retirees by completely lifting income tax on superannuation withdrawals for those over 60 years of age. This is not rational. No other country does this. Restoring what was a perfectly reasonable measure is a normal response to what was an unsupportable change by the Liberals.

You might be asking already, but what about Labor's support for the car industry that I announced only days ago? It is true that the car industry is a special interest, and our assistance package is a form of protectionism. However, the automotive industry is vital to Australia's interests in the region, as we need a healthy base of skilled workers to support our armed forces in the maintenance of existing equipment and the development of new technology. We would not want our troops to lack for support in logistics in a time of war due to the tens of thousands of workers in the car industry having lost their skills. Additionally, it is wise to invest in manufacturing R&D to build the exports of the future. If we are to look beyond the mining sector for growth in the coming years, manufacturing is one area we can not afford to ignore.

The New Way will come under criticism from special interests, each of whom have their own ways of communicating to the public, some even through their own media outlets. It will come under criticism from the Liberal Party, who are still stuck in the old way of representing some special interests and knocking others. I say to the Australian people directly: we may be a country full of special interests, but we are all in this together. We are not a nation of seagulls fighting over a chip. We are all part of the best country in the world. We have solved many problems and avoided many pitfalls that have befallen others, but there is still much to be done. We are all in this together. Thank you.

Note: this post is a fixup from my response to this Larvatus Prodeo piece. And yes, this is the second in a series of "If I" pieces, for which I have created a label.

If I became leader of the Australian Greens

Thank you for attending this press conference. Lauz, Tingles, Kez, Uhlo, Bongo, Knackers, welcome all.

I realise my rise to become leader of the Greens has been sudden and precipitous. None of you predicted my rapid rise from recent membership to climbing the ranks, a parachuting mission into the Senate under what has become known as Operation Varsity II, and completing that particular analogy by invading Germany, I mean the Green caucus room. The inevitable Downfall mashup video chronicling the events surrounding my accession to the leadership over Ms Waters was rather amusing - I particularly liked the gag about how Greens really are watermelons, since we found out just how red Larissa was underneath her green exterior when she got backstabbed. Heh.

Anyway, all that is behind us now, and I would like to set out my policy vision for the Greens into the future. I would first like to pay respect to the founding father of the Greens, Bob Brown. However, what I am about to say may not jive with his recollection of what he set up the Greens to do. The Party has nonetheless moved on, and we have new challenges to face.

I see the Greens as the ultimate economic rationalists. You may protest and say that this is anathema to the history of the party, as we have traditionally opposed many aspects of globalisation and neoliberalism. While that is true, my view is that the Greens can and should be seen as superior economic managers of all parts of the economy. The crucial difference is that we, the Greens, include the environment in our economic models in a way that most economists do not. Most economic models classify natural resources, energy sources and biodiversity as assets to be mined, exploited and exhausted. In short, the environment is seen as an "externality".

This word, externality - which has become part of the language of the political class without much examination as to its meaning - means an economic effect, either bad or good, which affects an uninvolved third party. That is what the Earth is treated as in traditional economics: something external to the economy, something Other. Economics is, almost by definition, in opposition to environmentalism. It is, in the wrong hands, the science of exploiting the environment by pretending that it is a limitless resource.

The consequence of this in traditional economics is that their sums work while the environment provides, but once the resources dwindle and become more expensive to extract and exploit, markets fail and recessions happen. I am here to say: no more. The environment is not an externality. It is internal to our definition of ourselves. We are part of it, and it is a part of us.

I realise that this language sounds like that of many of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, and I acknowledge that the Greens have a debt that can never be repaid to them for teaching us how to value our land and to immerse ourselves in its many wonders with respect and appreciation. We must be careful never to get too mystical, but there is a time and place for a little bit of dreaming in what the Greens say and do.

Ah, you might say, but these are just words. How do you propose to combine economics and environmentalism if they are so opposed? The answer is that they do not have to be opposed. A synthesis is possible. In fact, I am a firm believer in the power of economics within capitalism to empower the powerless and grow a country better than any other system. Including the environment as an integral part of economic modelling does not break the models, it merely means economics removes a lie and becomes more grounded in reality.

This does not mean we leave all the coal in the valleys, all the oil under the deserts and all the trees in the forests. This means prudent planning for harvesting and renewing resources, and transitioning away from exhaustible resources and towards renewables where possible in a gradual fashion. Economics can also be seen as the management of energy, and cheap energy is a social good that the Greens should not reject, and will not under my leadership. The shale oil boom, in particular, is already starting to have positive impact on many smaller economies, which we can not forget in our zeal for ideological purity within our own country. To deny the world cheap energy would be to slow down the wholly positive process of globalisation inexorably lifting up the economies of those in developing countries. Shale oil can be extracted under the control of environmental safeguards even at levels we are comfortable with in Australia, and I will not stand in the way of another energy boom that could underpin the next decade of Australian growth.

You might be thinking that I am not saying anything new. It is true that we have already gone some way towards internalising the externalities, with the carbon price being the most prominent example. The Greens have been at the forefront of developing and implementing the carbon price in Australia and around the world, and I acknowledge the work my predecessors have done in this area. Far from repudiating this proud history of the Party, I seek to build on it to underline the economic credentials of the Greens. We are often portrayed as being at the far left end of the political spectrum, but I do not see it this way. We are a party of the centre, it is just that we define the centre as being centred and at one with the environment, with all of our economically rational policies flowing from that river source.

This is not sophistry, or wispy wishfulness. I believe that the Greens can successfully meld what is called economic rationalism with environmental concerns. How this impacts on individual policies is for a later day, but today I am here to say this: the Greens are the greatest economists the world has ever seen... we just take a longer view than most.