By ABC's Jonathan Green Thursday 11 December 2014
Photo: Tony Abbott might be forgiven for looking a little fondly toward the looming calm of the Christmas break. (AAP: Daniel Munoz)
Having spent its first few months undoing the deeds of Rudd/Gillard Labor, it seems the Government has now turned with some energy to undoing itself, writes Jonathan Green.
The Government, having enjoyed the best and most productive year of conservative rule since either a: Thatcher, b: Churchill or c: the creation of coal, might still be forgiven for looking a little fondly toward the looming calm of the Christmas break.
The recent pace has been fierce, a "year of achievement" capped by several days of frantic policy inversion.
Presumably having stopped the boats and cut various taxes, the Government has made the decision that its best work lies in undoing rather than creating. Having spent its first few months undoing the deeds of Rudd/Gillard Labor, it has now turned with some energy to undoing itself.
The GP co-payment, unloved in both the court of public opinion and the Senate, has been trimmed and retooled through "an intelligent and sophisticated" process, before being handed over to unsuspecting GPs for collection.
The PM's signature policy of paid parental leave is in the process of being unwritten.
And, perhaps most tellingly, $200 million will go to the UN Green Climate Fund, which smacks of throwing good money after bad warmish bureaucracy, but may placate a Foreign Minister apparently in a state of perpetual fury over her "professional and close" working relationship with the Prime Minister's chief of staff.
Telling because issues touching on climate change go to the heart of the Government's fundamental structural weakness: that tension between pragmatist centrists and those close enough to the right's ideological fringes to doubt such foundation staples of modern discourse as scientific method.
Giving $200 million to some UN climate qango - albeit a gesture made palatable to the right by being at the expense of the third world - is a significant shift in position from a Prime Minister who just weeks ago was determined enough to brave the scorn of the G20 and hold out on funding this "Bob Brown bank on an international scale".
Could the turnaround be explained in the increasingly fraught terms of the Government's internal politics? Might it be a means to boost the stocks of the Foreign Minister as she attends a significant climate summit the Prime Minister's Office at first thought unworthy of a ministerial presence, before approving Ms Bishop's travel, but only in the close company of the climate hesitant Minister for Trade?
Perhaps. That the talk, especially among the commentators of the normally sympathetic conservative press, is now of challenged unity and precarious strength is in itself telling.
As Paul Kelly observed yesterday:
The lethal combination that can spell political death has emerged. It is entrenched poor opinion polls, tensions among senior ministers, criticism of the Prime Minister's office and a media mindset that the government's woes are the pervasive story - all of which have a self-fulfilling potential.
And in that now familiar narrative of fading political fortune and blood-crazy journalistic enthusiasm, we have passed another marker, with the first flurries of unsourced but authoritative accounts of turmoil and division.
As we saw with the decline and fall and rise and decline and fall of Kevin Rudd, internal conspirators and malcontents will always find an eager audience somewhere in the fourth estate. Through the convenient meta-logic of performance politics, the very fact of their aired grievance substantiates their claims.
It seems an unstoppable cycle once begun, though one that might one day be countered by a public that suddenly voiced a taste for determined and coherent policy in the face of almost numberless national anxieties and challenges.
As things stand we seem to have an electorate that votes more for what it doesn't want than it does for any sound prescription of serious policy and thought. It's a voter position that breeds an obsession with approval ratings as well as negativity and discontent. It's the enemy of policy ambition, the friend of ambition itself.
All of which points depressingly to a repeat of the rhythm so well-rehearsed since 2010, of an opposition that need offer nothing beyond universal scorn and a government quivering with internal anxiety.
We are watching that pattern mirrored now, though unlike the travails of Rudd/Gillard Labor, it is no longer fuelled by personality, but rather on ideology and belief: qualities seemingly abandoned by the parliamentary left but now running with destructive freedom on the right.
It's a tension in play earlier in the week as the Prime Minister made the key presentations at his own literary awards in Melbourne.
Somewhere in the depths of judging the history prize the culture warriors had a notable victory, giving recognition to the quickly disputed revisionism of Perth polymath and Quadrant luminary Hal Colebatch.
If the PM felt any discomfort as the winner made his rambling and conspiracy thick acceptance he didn't show it.
But then came the lingering surprise of the night, when, apparently thanks to Prime Ministerial fiat, writer Richard Flanagan was awarded a share of the prize for fiction.
Flanagan of course, is a political foe of the Government and man who famously aired his shame at being linked to team Australia.
The PM showed the courage, insight and generosity to embrace his critic.
It was a reminder that Tony Abbott is a man chronically underestimated, but a politician who has an instinct for political survival and compromise, and the capacity for unexpected reversal: in book awards as in GP co-payments and conciliatory gestures to his party deputy.
All of which might even be enough to save him from the counter pressure of the ideological warriors, a force in his party that once elevated him, but might yet, if he stays too close to the hard-line, provide the division that drags him down.
Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.
As the year unwinds the Government unravels - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
