Last Monday there he was with Boohoo Hockey squealing that Labor’s targets on clean energy would “push up the cost of electricity” and suggesting horrendous figures plucked from devious imaginations; this from double-dealers campaigning to push up the cost of everything through the GST.

What a nasty game federal politics has become.

The bully, having swiped much of the states education and health money then appeals for a more efficient Federation that seems to mean that the Feds will be responsible for virtually nothing except foreign policy, border protection and collecting money from taxpayers.

So Feds control the dough, take no responsibility for services; states do what they can and cop the blame when things go wrong. Maybe this will lead to smaller Federal Government? – I don’t think so.

In April I suggested that we have probably the most expensive democracy of all the developed countries and the most overpaid politicians with our Dear Leader paid more than Barak Obama and twice as much as David Cameron. It’s unsustainable!

We have seven full Parliaments with all the costs and pensions they bring and two Territory Chambers already expensive enough and with the Northern Territory campaigning for full statehood. It’s unsustainable!

Maybe more efficient federation should include consideration for pruning the cost of it but that’s unlikely for two main reasons: most immediately too many snouts are having too good a time in the trough and constitutionally Federation was agreed to by a priori states that would have to commit hari kari for really monumental change to occur.

Perhaps we need to elect a benevolent fixed term dictator or triumvirate to re-organise our expensive shambles of government so that we can start again. In the meantime current politicians should take a pay and expenses cut and freeze as acts of goodwill and fairness in the light of current austerity demands.

Over the last weekend I caught some of the Labor Party’s Federal Conference at which thorny issues were publicly talked out in reasonably civilized, fairly rational and relatively transparent ways. If only the Coalition would do that, though transparent Coalition seems an oxymoron.

Subsequently I happened to read some accounts of the Conference in The Daily Telegraph and was stunned into wondering what meeting the writers attended; it certainly wasn’t the one I saw transmitted.

What chance is there for rational national debate when one of the dominant national presses and the shock jocks use news opportunities for diatribes of lurid misrepresentation? We are fortunate, indeed, to have an ABC that transmits such meetings live and without interpretation.