There's something about the way federal politics in Australia is both covered and practised that bugs me, and it's neatly encapsulated on the front page of today's Australian, right there in the opening par, of Jennifer Hewitt's comment/analysis piece:

THE Rudd Government will get a big political boost from its $42 billion spending package but the payoff for the country is much less certain.

So $42 billion, the largest handout in the nation's history and an act that officially obliterates the king's ranson of a budget surplus K-Rudd was gifted by the other mob, may not do squat for the economy, but it will buy him a few points in the opinion polls. How lovely.

For $42 billion, shouldn't we know for sure? And shouldn't the press gallery be screaming from the rooftops at Rudd and Swanny to justify this, particularly given the jury is still well and truly out on the effectiveness of the first stimulus package?

$950 cash handouts for all, at a total cost of $12.7 billion, sounds like an awfully indiscriminate way to spend an awfully big pile of cash. I'm not an economist or an infrastructure expert or even a university graduate, but surely there's ways to better target a sum of this magnitude if the goal is indeed to stimulate real economic activity.

In my own case the cash will be going straight back to the mortgage lender and the credit card company and according to Hewitt's piece (which to be fair actually does a good job of explaining why a latter-day Eva Peron act will do nothing to free up credit markets, nothing to encourage banks to loan to businesses which is the fundamental driver of growth) 60 per cent of the cash will be spent the same way.

Of the rest, no doubt Samsung, Sony, Tabcorp and CUB will be absolutely thrilled to bits.

For Labor's sake, they better hope their man's late-naughties impersonation of an early-70s ALP saint works out. Because at the moment his economic conservatism ($500 million winner picked here! $2 billion bailout there! $700 billion bank guarantee here! Wait, we'll start our own bank!) is looking like one colossal joke.

UPDATE 7.35pm: Good on him.

UPDATE 7.47pm: He is absolutely on the right track, but Malcolm Turnbull's performance with Kerry O'Brien on the 7.30 Report tonight is appalling. He allowed himself to be tied in knots by O'Brien, who kept harping on about Turnbull's rhetorical flourish that Rudd was personally responsible for $200 billion of debt when $115 billion of tax revenues have disappeared due to GFC. The whole thing degenerated into semantics when it should have been a straightforward message from the Leader of the Opposition: At the height of a economic crisis, Kevin Rudd is throwing around billions of dollars he doesn't have with no evidence it is doing any good.