ADDRESSING the nation for the first time as Prime Minister a year ago on Saturday, Julia Gillard paid homage to former Labor prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating “as the architects of today's modern prosperity,” The Australian newspaper said in an editorial. Excerpts: The trouble for Gillard and her party is that, while they have paid lip service to the legacy of those Hawke-Keating years, they don't seem to have grasped the essence of that success. Nor have they proposed anything to emulate those achievements. With no true reform agenda to speak of, Gillard promotes two major new taxes, on mining and carbon emissions, as reform. Properly implemented, through consultation with the states and the industry, a profits-based tax on mining could help to share the benefits of the resources boom. But the issue has been poorly handled and remains unresolved. While this newspaper supports a market mechanism to reduce carbon emissions, Gillard's tax breaks a core election promise. And, crucially, the Prime Minister has failed to convince the electorate that Australia is not moving ahead of our main trading partners, in particular the US and China, thereby penalising ourselves economically for no tangible global emissions gain. The Weekend Australian worries that for inspiration the Gillard government looks more to the interventionist economies of northern Europe than the practical politics of Hawke and Keating. A year after the new prime minister said the government had lost its way, it is becoming clear that, in historical terms, the Labor movement has lost its way. What is needed is a reconnection to the aspirations of the mainstream and a productivity
