Talk about the kiss of death. No sooner do I overcome my years-long aversion to Nicola Roxon and give her a nod of acknowledgement than she goes out and muffs her talking points on tax and health.  Just goes to show you should not for a moment stop being nasty and cynical in this job.

The Opposition seized on her comments — and after all, that is what Oppositions are paid to do — but the media did as well because it is much more comfortable talking about tax and scare campaigns than about the reform of health policy, which is slightly more complex than whether things will go up or down.  Behold yet another case of how the public interest is dudded by poor quality media coverage.

And if, instead of talking about some of the problems Rudd’s health reform plan throws up (for example, Gavin Mooney has raised a number of serious issues at our health blog about the role proposed by the Government for clinicians in Local Hospital Networks), we want to discuss how effective a Coalition tax scare campaign will be, try this.  What’s the next installment of tax reform from the Rudd Government?  The Henry Review?  Nope.  It’s the income tax cut on July 1, that the Government put in place two years ago.  That’s the only evidence most voters will see or hear about on taxation between now and the election.

And any discussion of taxation has to be asterisked with the note that Barnaby Joyce is the shadow Finance Minister.  This morning he told ABC NewsRadio that the only reason health spending would ever rise in the future was because of Labor profligacy.  It’s good to know the fundamental budgetary problem of an ageing population has been solved by the senator from Queensland.

The other problem for the Government is that the media is still evidently in payback mode.  Putting aside The Australian, whose political coverage now more closely than ever resembles the outpourings of the mad old woman on the bus, many in the media still appear determined to belt the Government, even if it means giving a voice to the state Labor governments, so long mocked as incompetent and incapable of managing health. Although, and I know I keep saying this, Laura Tingle’s Canberra Observed column today provided the best analysis of the politics of the reform plan in the mainstream media, and John Hewson’s piece next door was a close second.  Hewson’s Fin pieces are rather uneven, but sometimes the residual bitterness gives way to post-partisan sagacity and his point that we’ve entirely buggered up our federal structure in terms of allocating responsibility for policy, funding and service delivery is one that will, as he notes, remain entirely unaddressed by the current generation of politicians.

The Government, and Rudd in particular, needs to concentrate less on the immediate news cycle and more on prosecuting the case for health reform directly to voters.  Rudd also needs to spend more than five minutes on the issue.  One of the most valid criticisms of this Government is its tendency to go for an announcement a day rather than spending time actually selling its key policies.  You’d never know from the amount of selling time the Government devotes to policies what’s important and what isn’t.  This week began, if you remember back that far, with a major announcement about a national curriculum.  That in itself is a significant, if not exactly huge, micro-economic reform, and yet it was overtaken within 48 hours by health reform, as if the Government was keen to distract attention from it.  The Government looks like it has the attention span of a five-year-old.

At least Rudd is following up his initial media blitz of Wednesday night and yesterday morning with a radio interview this morning and a trip to St Vincent’s in Sydney as well as his usual side-splitting slot on Sunrise. Politicians might complain that the media cycle moves faster than ever, but that doesn’t mean they need to encourage it.  If this is the most important health reform in three decades, let’s see more than three days spent explaining it.