And so the parliamentary year comes to an end.
Despite the hollow threats of Tony Abbott that parliament would sit an extra week to allow the Senate to vote on the carbon price and mining tax legislation, the political carnival for 2013 is over.
The first three days of this week saw the understudies take to the big chairs as both Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten were at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service.
Sometimes when leaders are absent parliament can be a quieter affair. But this week’s story of Holden leaving was too big for either side to tread water while waiting for the leaders to get back to show everyone whether or not they got a selfie with Barack Obama.
Monday saw the extraordinary position of the government doing all it could to let GMH know that the Liberal Party no longer saw them as part of the cool group.
Treasurer Joe Hockey, no doubt wanting to prove to everyone after his being rolled over the Graincorp takeover decision that he really was an economic “reformer”, told parliament that the future of the car industry was in the hands of the car industry. It was a pretty unsubtle way of telling them to bugger off if they wanted more assistance.
The issue had come about because “senior ministers” last week had leaked to journalists that Holden was going to leave; confusingly however, the Minister for Industry, Ian Macfarlane said the reports were untrue. On Tuesday Warren Truss, acting as PM, took the unusual step of calling on Holden to clear up the confusion which had been created by members of the government.
Joe Hockey upped the ante shouting that Holden needed “to come clean with its intentions”, to “be fair dinkum” because “either you are here or you are not.”
And on Wednesday Holden told it workers that it was not.
Now perhaps Holden was going to leave, but perhaps it was also going to wait to see what came out of the report by the productivity commission on the automotive industry given the review had actually been commissioned by the government to provide “certainty” for the industry.
By Tuesday it was clear that whatever the PC found, the government wanted to show everyone just how fiscally hairy-chested it was.
And thus Holden will be no more from 2017. How Joe Hockey responds may very well be the making of him, but for now it appears more that it was about his showing everyone that he won’t get pushed around by old-style lobbying.
Unless it is by the National Party.
The ALP, was much more comfortable on this issue. Bill Shorten in yesterday’s censure motion on the PM for the first time sounded convincing, perhaps because as a former union leader the fight was on his home ground.
But far from covering itself in glory the ALP this week also decided to support government moves to repeal pokies reforms brought in by the Gillard government. These reforms, weak as they are, remain opposed by the clubs industry.
For those hoping that the ALP would have found some mettle and realised after the past 6 years that when you get pushed around by interest groups eventually you get pushed over, this decision served as a reminder that the ALP remains vulnerable to outside pressures.
And so that is it till 11 February next year. Plenty of time for the Liberal Party to decide if its economic policy is all huff one week and no puff the next, or part of a cogent strategy, and for the ALP to decide if it has a spine.
Greg Jericho is an economics and politics blogger and writes for The Guardian and The Drum.
