A ring-a-ding-ding ding-dong between Finance Minister Nick Minchin and his opposition counterpart Lindsay Tanner on Lateline on Friday night sorta summed up the current state of play in politics at the moment.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Maxine shooshed as she ended the bout. “I can see there was a lot of testosterone in the parliament this week and it spilled over here.”

It’s going to spill into this week, too – particularly after the Western Australian Nats had their fun at their conference in the wheat belt town of Merredin.

Nick Minchin normally does a very good smiling shark, but he lost the look on Lateline: “Tell Mr Tanner, you just let him interrupt me. You can’t conduct interviews like this, Maxine.” It’s very odd for him to be flustered. There were a couple of gorgeous exchanges:

LINDSAY TANNER: Maxine, we’ve got the last of the big spenders here with us tonight. Nick Minchin is the Finance Minister who’s presided over a massive blow-out in government spending around the election, a 10 per cent real increase in Federal Government spending on its own activities except defence and interest in the 2004 year, the outrageous regional rorts program. He’s presided over all that. And he is creating a future fund that effectively involves the government borrowing millions in order to invest in the share market. So they be selling Telstra to buy BHP or Coles Myer. This bloke is essentially the Father Christmas of Finance Ministers. If you’re looking for a government grant, I’d stop him afterwards after the show to put the hard word on him. Everyone else has got one. This guy cannot be trusted.

MAXINE McKEW: Alright.

NICK MINCHIN: Is this comedy hour, is it, Maxine?

Or:

LINDSAY TANNER: Productivity high, it’s going backwards. What are you talking about? Productivity rates have gone backwards over the past year.

NICK MINCHIN: The Labor Party and the trade unions have been saying the sky would fall in for the past 10 years.

LINDSAY TANNER: Cut the propaganda out and tell the truth.

The question left hanging, however, is what exactly is the Government’s reform agenda – other than Telstra and IR? Why are they allowing themselves to bleed over an irrelevance like voluntary student unionism?

Steve Bracks laid down a real challenge on the Sunday program with the package of reforms he offered in order to add $65 billion to Australia’s annual GDP over the next ten years.

The Prime Minister’s response was limp. Business regulation cuts are not the priority – it’s IR, IR, IR all the way.

Over at Meet the Press, new Nationals leader Mark Vaile was showing exactly why Labor is targeting him as the weakest link in the government. He had to deny he was slipped down over IR. “You can always rely on the Labor Party to make these sorts of allegations when things are not going too well in their own camp,” he said.

Things not going well in their own camp? Yes, Vaile actually said that while his WA colleagues – Federal parliamentary representation zero, state representation about to be slashed thanks to the coming of something approaching one vote, one value – made extortion bids against the most successful federal government this nation has seen since Menzies’ day.

“Australia has risen from a low middle to a high middle income economy and is now just one rung away from the very top of the developed world’s ladder,” The Australian‘s George Megalogenis, one of our best reporters on politics and economics, wrote in The Australian today. “The risk for Australia is, if it doesn’t embark on another wave of reform, according to the Bracks Government, the next step on the ladder would be down, not up.”

At the beginning of the month, the Business Council of Australia released a report saying Australia will have the third-highest per capita gross domestic product in the world if further structural changes are made to the economy. Significantly, it says this improvement can be made building on existing reforms, rather than radical policy solutions.

Everybody knows that the economic reforms of the eighties have enriched us all, but the Howard Government can’t formulate their natural successors.

Instead of offering a broad program of win-win policies, it is hamstrung over a hand full. That’s a failure of leadership – and would-be leadership from the bloke in charge of economic policy.