Paul Kelly, Father Christmas, cracks in the pavement and exhaustion induced by punditry and politicians

(Above: Father Christmas pointing the way ahead towards endless punditry, political weariness and never ending structural reform).

The daily business of life can become wearing, and nothing is more wearing than the business of punditry.

When the headlines are wearing, you have to match the pace. So today Belinda Neal breaks her silence to effectively say nothing in a dignified way (Why Della is a top bloke: Neal breaks her silence) Which surely deserves a dignified silence in response, since politics as soap sage is best left to daytime television.

Elsewhere in the same rag Nathan Rees vows he won't be worn down, boosted by the mortal wound to his rival John Della Bosca (A year on, Rees vows he won't be worn down). So I've vowed I won't be worn down by Nathan Rees, state labor and its endless capacity to induce a sense of crisis by not doing anything useful.

And what's any of this got to do with the good governing of NSW? Nothing much, except to reinforce the view of politics as gladiatorial entertainment, with a brave woman on one stand and Nathan Rees doing a Rusty Crowe on the other.

What we need is a high priest in the corner squawking of doom and gloom, and warning that any good news is just a prelude to bad, nay disastrous news. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it, so cue Paul Kelly in The Australian, under the header Swan, Tanner set rules for the next poll.

Professional, eternal, exhausting anxiety requires long term vulnerabilities and endless reform. Such that you might get reform exhaustion along with pundit exhaustion:

This highlights two truths about the impact of the global financial crisis: that Australia has resisted the downturn more successfully than any other rich nation, but this event has exposed our vulnerabilities and demands a vigorous long-run reform agenda.

Which reminds me of my favorite line in for narrators in uplifting government documentaries. Much has been done, but much remains to be done. To which of course you can add, let's roll up our shirtsleeves (remembering women didn't count) and work together for a brighter future.

Yet it wasn't so long ago that the same pundits were in the business of predicting the GFC would see the end of the world as we know it. Now that we're struggling along, with at least three of the four cylinders firing, what's left except to blather on about the exposed vulnerabilities and the need for a vigorous long-run reform agenda, whatever the hell that might mean. Except it sounds serious, even solemn, like castor oil, maybe not nice tasting but for our health.

Kelly spends his time recounting the different visions of Australia going forward, but his very efforts produce the kind of eye glazing his warnings are supposed to prevent. Because it's all based on the mantra that doom might very well be just around the corner, waiting for us and we don't know or care about it:

Labor's problem is local complacency. The Australian public has not the slightest comprehension about the tribulations affecting the rest of the developed world, which Australia has avoided.

Which of course is an heroic assumption, based on the notion that Australians at large have no interest in or understanding of the rest of the world, or no notion that the United States for example is still struggling and in social and economic turmoil at the moment.

Really it's an assumption designed to reinforce - by way of contrast - how wise and successful our leadership has been in not sharing this kind of simple-minded ignorance:

And Labor strategists fear such complacency will deny them political capital from this economic achievement. Meanwhile Tanner reminded this column: "The government's stimulus strategy is directed at short-term economic activity but also at long-range productivity improvement." This opens the door to another narrative. Because he is responsible for spending restraint and deregulatory reform, Tanner puts his stress on long-run structural changes.

In his speeches and blogs on the crisis Tanner argues that Australia's Father Christmas era of excess cash and big surpluses is finished.

Sob. They're killing Father Christmas. And as we all know there's no Mother Christmas. But we have to go on changing and reforming in an endless cycle of adaptation and adjustment and change and ... help, who can guide us through this relentless never ending trauma of punditry, politics and potential disaster? Can I even take a walk in the street, in the expectation that the tar will hold me up?

His theme: don't get complacent, don't be fooled by Australia's reprieve, beware the cracks beneath the surface.

No Santa Claus, and not even the tar can be trusted. The bloody council. I warned them about the tar they were using.

And stretching endlessly towards the horizon and a setting sun, I can see vulnerabilities of a particularly dangerous and entrenched kind:

For Tanner, the resources boom has concealed Australia's vulnerabilities: "a deteriorating productivity performance, an entrenched, very large current account deficit, a pretty ordinary household savings rate and a very mediocre export performance".

This is a serious list of defects with overtones that have plagued Australia during its economic history.

The question for Australia is whether the legacy of the global crisis will be a delayed shock that exposes such structural flaws.

Deteriorating vulnerabilities, entrenched cracks beneath the surface of the tar, people refusing to put their savings into superannuation to watch it being stripped away, a mediocre export performance as the world loses interest in kangaroo meat, such a serious lift of defects plaguing us that the legacy of shock will surely lead to entrenched structural delays of comprehensive incoherent inertia.

Well we'll ignore all that at our very peril, which might be so perilous that it might well be life threatening unless we propose a central question, which might be called the central cliche, which begs consideration of central issues, which might well be mixed, but perhaps by hand rather than in a mix master:

Tanner argued: "There is a mixture of issues which we ignore at our peril and always our economic policy needs to be informed by the central question: What will we be selling to the rest of the world in 10 or 15 years?"

You mean kangaroo meat isn't going to cut it?

Well like as not I'll be dead in fifteen years, so go talk to the hand. And if we can't dig up coal and iron ore, I suggest a new line of business - exporting politicians and pundits and blather to the world. Sure there'd be fierce competition from the Irish, but their economy is down the tube, and they couldn't handle the heat generated by our finest minds.

But wait, there's even more problems looming up ahead, so that we have to have central themes in answer to the central questions, which require a strengthening in case of a weakness because of the hidden cracks in the tar, which if you step on them will result in a bear springing out and eating you:

Yet, as Rudd and Swan know, the challenge for Australia is to save more, improve productivity and strengthen its export performance. The debate about structural reform cannot be submerged and must became a central theme in Labor's election next year.

Structural reform. Always with the reform, and the strengthening and the saving and the improving and the submerging, or we're all doomed by our exposed vulnerabilities. Fear is the answer, fear is our strength. And if you go down in a submarine, submerge so to speak, beware the machine that goes ping.

So naturally it wouldn't do for Kelly to finish up without consulting the gloomy delphic oracles on the other side, and of course they're laden with warnings and bad news, which might not be bad news provided they get into government instead of the other mob:

At the same time Hockey warns that Labor's fiscal repair job can rely on only three mechanisms: spending cuts, asset sales and higher taxes. Unsurprisingly, he is predicting higher taxes. "We believe that higher taxation is not inevitable," Hockey says. It is, he predicts "the recourse of lazy Labor governments". If Labor hikes selective taxes for health reasons the opposition will relate this back to the imperative of budget repair. The final step in the opposition's argument is that higher productivity is the key to better performance. So it finishes on the same platform as the Rudd government. It would be heartening to think this presages a 2010 campaign about economic reform. This should be the logic flowing from the global crisis, but that would be a heroic assumption.

Well you know - and this is an heroic assumption - it would be heartening to think that the political debate wouldn't be shaped by such a lazy recourse to labored musings on threats, warnings, prophecies and a public which continues to fail its political class by being ignorant and refusing to do the things expected of them, like save like sheep so they can be regularly shorn.

Because if the mantra of higher productivity, for example, is such an important aspect of life, the first thing we should do is abolish the likes of Kelly - perhaps all newspapers - so we can get down to the daily grind without fear mongering or worrying whether the world will continue to be going around in fifteen years.

Because for all its high flown talk of structural reform and vulnerabilities, the real message in Kelly's column is a simple one: you're all doomed if you don't vote for this mob, who know what's going down, as opposed to the other mob, who don't have a clue.

These days anxiety attacks attempted by attendant lords clucking over chicken entrails and warning of doom and gloom in the future wash off the back, and a new rule should be instituted.

If you have no real insights to offer, no genuine sense of where the world is heading, then instead of sending words spinning around lazily in the washing machine hoping they'll end up clean and sparkling, don't bother to write the column.

Because not once does Kelly ever explain the economic reform or the structural vulnerabilities requred outside of the blather of pieties that have been doing the rounds for the last twenty years: save more, improve productivity and strengthen exports.

Well I've decided I'm going to rely on Father Christmas. Yes, there is a Father Christmas, Virginia, I know there is ... and as a back up, you won't ever catch me stepping on a crack in the tar or cement ...

I expect these two structural reforms, designed to guard against long term vulnerabilities, to be implemented immediately. Make it so Spock, and beam me up Scotty.

(Below: after reading Paul Kelly, Father Christmas showing us where we're headed. Dammit, et tu Santa Claus. Time for a war on Christmas).