Nicholas Stuart | Albanese govt doesn't need referendum to start changing lives

From the moment Anthony Albanese wakes up in the morning the media offers him a huge microphone to use as he chooses. He used it a couple of weeks ago, when Treasurer Jim Chalmers went ever so slightly off-script on breakfast TV.

The PM simply picked up the phone, called the ABC, and swiftly closed down any speculation genuinely radical reform of tax system was in the mix. It's that simple.

He can't do that all the time, but this proximity and access to media offers any prime minister a remarkable super-power. They have the ability to dictate the national conversation: what it's about and, critically, how it's framed.

It's the sort of power opposition leaders just dream of.

But just because the PM has the ability to focus the spotlight doesn't mean they'll choose the right place to shine it.

Simply possessing a media strategy does not create change. Every PM since Kevin Rudd has shone a light on their answer to our submarine problem: Japanese (Tony Abbott), French (Malcolm Turnbull) and AUKUS (Scott Morrison and now Albanese), but the boats themselves are decades away from trundling down the slipway, if they make it there at all.

That's why it's important not to confuse the ability to focus the spotlight with accomplishment. It's the difference between performance art and policy. That's the problem with the huge microphone.

It can so easily appear to the person speaking to it as if things are happening. Actually they're just marking time.

This is Labor's danger now the wording has been fixed for the referendum question. That's been a great accomplishment for a change that will be hugely, if primarily symbolically, important.

But that's all it is. A question the nation will, at some time in the future, vote on about getting Parliament to listen to a Voice that probably won't even be enshrined into legislation until next parliamentary term and, even then, will just begin talking.

It's a good model, a great start, but never forget. It's only words: not action.

If the government was serious it could plough ahead and begin constructing a prototype body to begin offering this sort of advice. We don't require a referendum to start that process today.

Or alternately - here's a thought - perhaps something could be done to actually change the lives of First Nations' people on the ground.

Perhaps, just instead of creating something to do for all the lawyers and journalists who will talk about this referendum interminably for ages, change could be driven on the ground.

The government isn't achieving anything simply by filling the public agenda with words. When you're preoccupied with talking, nothing is happening.

So while announcements like the AUKUS submarines (which won't even be laid-down for another two decades) and having an agreed referendum question (which, if it passes, will simply create a body to speak to Parliament) are great, they don't actually do anything.

In the meantime, while the politicians are prattling on, real issues are changing the world.

The government needs to start getting some real runs on the board. This is the one big advantage autocrats have over democratic politicians.

So while China's Xi Jinping might have enormous difficulty bringing regional governments into line with the central diktats of Beijing and preventing minor disturbances from bubbling into serious protest, he can make things happen.

If he orders change it happens. So when Xi indicates, for example, that he's going to radically and rapidly transform China into a zero-net emissions economy, the only question is, "does he mean it?"

Because if he does, change will happen while we're still digging coal out of the ground and carrying on with our verbal sparring.

The ANU's Dr Jorrit Gosens has investigated China's ambitions and provided the first minutely detailed working model of China's energy sector.

He's examined generation capacity and linking this to where it will be used. It's this detail that provides insight. Last year, for example, more than 26 per cent of cars sold in China were electric.

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Australia putters along behind with just 3.8 per cent of vehicle sales being EVs. And what will power China's cars? A huge grid connecting massive solar and wind-driven power plants. A

new north-south rail link is also being built across the mountainous centre that will deliver high-grade Mongolian coking coal to power industry. This will completely change the economic equation for Australian coal exports.

Any new mines rapidly becoming stranded assets and yet government is talking about them as if they will create a future export industry.

This is all quite apart from the climate change that you can see happening all around you. If Energy Minister Chris Bowen had spent last week reading the newly released IPCC climate report, rather than getting bogged down in a futile fight with the Greens, he might realise just how imminent catastrophic environmental disasters are.

The only possible reading of his pointless battle is that the entire government is determined to demonstrate to voters it can be just as right-wing as Peter Dutton's opposition. Or that it is willing away climate change.

At some point in every government's term, they loose the ability to control the microphone. That's when the real world takes over and pleonasm is seen for the distraction it is.

It happened to Scott Morrison. He generated media sound bites like a smoothly-oiled machine. Never much thought or follow-through, but that never mattered because by the time you'd worked out his words were empty he'd already moved on. It was a scheme that worked right up until it didn't.

Propping yourself up in front of a lectern and a couple of flags outside The Lodge doesn't confer the ability to change reality.

Housing is becoming unaffordable for essential workers because of ballooning rents and soaring prices. Poverty is spreading and people can't afford food to put on the tables of homes they can't afford. The climate is changing around us.

People might start to wonder what the government is actually doing.