Bringing Back Contention To Sleepy Ruddsville

IT has to be said that Brendan Nelson is one of the most confident and natural public speakers presently in the Federal Parliament. In March he delivered to the National Press Club what has become a rarity in the Western world - an off the cuff speech - and he hardly ever spoke with the aid of notes as a Minister on John Howard's frontbench. Dr Nelson's well-known liking for what some regard as self-indulgent and mawkish anecdotes was discussed and - with qualifications - defended here earlier this year. This oratorical talent - and his prodigious recall of minutiae and data - are strengths that, all other things being equal, should serve him well in the House, on the hustings and in one-to-one debates with a Prime Minister notoriously skittish about appearances sans clipboard. It was with customary steadiness and self-possession, then, that the Leader of the Opposition zeroed in on fuel prices, health insurance, 'alcopops' and the overarching hypocrisy of Wayne Swan's first Budget in the traditional Right of Reply address last night. The RBA Governor advised economists last night the Budget doesn't really matter vis-a-vis interest rates. Politically, it remains a big deal.

The proposed five cent per litre reduction in the fuel excise will become the headline abridgement of the Coalition attitude to the heretofore phony war on inflation. It will be criticised as fiscally incendiary and be transmogrified by the government into Drunken Sailor class by noon. The best line of the speech, though, may resonate: "Watching petrol prices does not bring them down." The idea may be populist but it also exposed and cut through the Prime Minister's cant about the price of petrol and groceries. If a country can spend $2.3 billion in the midst of an alleged national emergency on "climate change", a $1.8 billion tax cut doesn't seem unreasonable.

Labor having yet again mismanaged a crucial health policy initiative with almost Lathamite incompetence, the Opposition Leader was on less contentious ground when he undertook last night to employ the Coalition's perduring Senate clout to block plans to raise the income threshold for the Medicare surcharge levy. Accusations of reckless obstructionism are likely to have only limited political effectiveness in light of Treasury's advice that up to half a million people may drop out of private insurance altogether. If accurate, that spells potential disaster for a State Labor-run hospital system from which stories of mutilation and pregnant women kept in storerooms were in the news yesterday. Dr Nelson also hit the alcopop tax grab head-on by vowing to block the $3 billion plan and convene a forum on teenage drinking. Again, with the government's own advice showing the price hike won't actually affect the so-called binge drinking "epidemic," Dr Nelson is in a good position to make a case. "The nervous man that is Treasurer," as he called Mr Swan, pointedly - muscling up for Malcolm Turnbull's edification as well - now has some case-making of his own to do.