Lenore Taylor, political editor
Monday 1 December 2014
The prime minister used admissions on ABC cuts and a ragged recent performance to try to reset the debate, but there was little tangible change. There may be a good reason for that
Prime minister Tony Abbott speaks to the media during a press conference at Parliament House on Monday. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
The Abbott administration has become the government that snookered itself.
The prime minister’s 45-minute media conference on Monday was a determined attempt to manoeuvre himself out of a dire political situation and reset the debate.
With even the conservative commentarial attacking his government, it was calculated to give the impression he was listening (sure, things have been a bit ragged) and making concessions (yes, ABC cuts are at odds with what I said before the election), while pointing out hand on heart that he had “guts” and “conviction” (one thing no one had ever really doubted).
But besides a minor concession on Australian Defence Force allowances and accepting the bleeding obvious about his broken promise on the ABC, there were no actual changes to give effect to the “reset”. That may be because every way the prime minister turns there’s an obstacle he put there himself.
The budget situation is deteriorating – largely because of the hit on revenue due to declining commodity prices. The government appears to have accepted advice by organisations such as the OECD not to respond with bigger spending cuts because the economy is already struggling with the end of the resources investment boom.
Except the Coalition has spent years telling us the previously forecast deficit and debt levels were a disaster and an emergency, which surely means – by its own reasoning – that bigger deficits are an even bigger disaster.
No, the prime minister says, because the budget emergency started to abate the instant a government came in and showed that it was determined to address it. “If you have a fire, the moment the fire brigade turns up, the situation starts to come under control.”
Most people would argue fire brigades work better if they actually use their hoses.
But there was also some indication on Monday that the size of the budget “blaze” is being scaled back in the government’s estimation. Now it’s less a disaster and more just a problem.
“We were saying uphill and down dale until we were blue in the face that there was a budget problem,” Abbott said. “We used very strong language prior to the election to describe the budget problem,” he said. Ah, yes prime minister, you did.
Then there are the budget savings measures stalled in the Senate. None of them appear likely to pass this week.
The government could ditch them, but then they would not be included in the mid-year economic statement as government policy, and the predicted deficits would grow even larger.
The government could put them to a vote, and if the Senate rejected them twice, seek to break the impasse in the accepted constitutional manner of a double dissolution election.
Except the government has comprehensively lost the public debate about the fairness of these very measures, and trails in the polls by 10 percentage points in two-party-preferred terms. And a double dissolution election, in which half the normal quota is required to elect Senate candidates, would assist the same minor parties and independents that are playing havoc with the government’s budget strategy at the moment.
And there’s the Victorian election result, where federal factors obviously played a role. Julie Bishop said, quite rightly, that the state parliament had a lot of problems of its own – such as the instability of being forced to to deal with the unpredictable independent Geoff Shaw. Therein may lie another lesson for her own government.
As the prime minister said, in the end “substance trumps atmospherics”. But his reset was all about the atmospherics, because on most of the substance, he seems to be snookered.
