Tony Wright National affairs editor of The Age
March 31, 2013
The opposition's election manifesto seems to promise something for everyone, but there's less to it than meets the eye.
Illustration: Joe Benke.
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott carries a shield with him as he darts from greengrocer to drycleaner to manufacturer warning of the evils of the carbon tax and how Julia Gillard's government is destroying the economy and driving consumer prices to the stratosphere.
His shield is a 50-page booklet bearing a photograph of his leadership team looking suitably optimistic, Malcolm Turnbull slightly out of focus at the far end.
As Gillard's government attempts to recover from its recent calamities and many commentators declare that September 14 will deliver an Abbott government, the booklet Mr Abbott holds before his heart at every photographic opportunity might be considered required reading.
''Our Plan'', declares the headline on a suitably Liberal blue background. ''Real Solutions for all Australians''.
In rather smaller typeface it promises ''the direction, values and policy priorities for the next Coalition government''.
These are carefully chosen words. If they baldly stated that the document contained the Coalition's detailed, costed and properly audited policies, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission might be required to investigate.
But ''Our Plan'' risks no such thing, even if it is the putative Abbott government manifesto.
''Here, in these pages, is the stronger Australia - a truly 21st century Australia - that the next Coalition government will build,'' Mr Abbott promises in a signed statement on the very first page.
What follows is a repetitive list of aspirations. By page 9, you will have read the phrase ''strong, prosperous economy'' no fewer than 10 times, and have been assaulted with various permutations of the same words many more times.
It is almost as numbing as Julia Gillard's use of the term ''moving forward'' 24 times in five minutes when announcing the 2010 election date.
The reader seeking assurance that all the Coalition's promises to build a strong, prosperous community are affordable has to reach page 50 before finding the following: ''All Coalition policies are fully costed and fully funded. The Coalition has a long track record of managing budgets responsibly.'' And that is the single guarantee that everything will be in order on the balance sheet.
It is, of course, hardly surprising that an opposition is promising a golden future without explaining in serious detail how it might be achieved.
Kevin Rudd's glossy promise in 2010 was encapsulated in two words: ''New Leadership'', and like other opposition leaders and prime ministers of recent times, his more serious policy promises were handed out, one by one, only when the election campaign was under way.
We can expect the same strategy during the several weeks of formal campaigning leading up to the September 14 election this year. Day by day, Julia Gillard and her ministers and Tony Abbott and his team will dole out their printed promises to journalists about two minutes before holding short news conferences to ''explain'' the detail.
It is infuriating to the media and that section of the public that wishes to be engaged in the process. During the last election, many voters expressed anger at the media for not spending more time and effort analysing the last-minute avalanche of policy announcements.
The political terror of premature detail can be traced back to John Hewson in the early 1990s when he produced his Fightback!, the most compendious and honestly explained plan of any opposition in Australian history. It was so detailed and tortuous that even he couldn't explain how his promised GST would apply to the mere parts of a birthday cake. Voters recoiled and gave Paul Keating an unexpected extra term in government.
John Howard in opposition dealt with this lesson in realpolitik by offering in the lead-up to his 1996 campaign little but a series of headland speeches laying out almost nothing specific enough to be attacked.
His first headland conveyed not a single new promise beyond a vaccination program for children. He became prime minister and stayed there for almost 11 years.
Indeed, Howard got around the inconvenience of the economy having been doing relatively well under Keating by trumpeting that it was nothing but ''five minutes of economic sunshine''.
Abbott's ''Our Plan'' doesn't even bother with such a device. There is not a single word in its 50 pages conceding that Australia under the unmentionable Rudd and Gillard escaped the ravages of the global economic crisis and emerged in better shape than virtually every other developed nation.
Instead, it focuses on the government's net debt of about $150 billion, complete with confronting graphics. It looks and sounds frightening - but it very carefully doesn't mention that as a percentage of gross domestic product, government debt is vastly less than that of virtually every other developed nation. Only Denmark and Estonia are in better debt shape, and only then by a slim margin. But that's all detail. The Coalition, bashfully conceding the hazy nature of ''Our Plan'', has separately produced a thick sheaf of what is described as 50 of Mr Abbott's real policy announcements over the past two years.
Boiled down, they are a mishmash of pledges, plans, ideological stances, ideas not yet developed, discussion papers and speeches, plus a few widely welcomed firm commitments such as $35 million for diabetes research when the government offered nothing.
At the top of the sheaf of 50 announcements is a declaration of the Coalition's support for constitutional recognition of indigenous people. This happens to have the support of virtually the entire Parliament, and thus is hardly more than an identical promise to that of Labor.
The last of the 50 promises is to restore ''proper'' funding of the Australian War Memorial - an extra $5 million. The promise is dated February 2011. The Labor government four months later allocated an extra $10 million for the War Memorial in its budget.
Many of the ''promises'', however, come with no price tag. ''A Coalition government will protect funding of Australia's medical research,'' begins one statement. A page later, the reader is no wiser about how this will be achieved beyond the commitment that the Coalition's ponderings will be guided by the ''imminent release of the McKeon review''. The Strategic Review of Health and Medical Research in Australia, headed by the 2011 Australian of the Year, Simon McKeon, was established by the Gillard government.
The Coalition's humanitarian program has a figure, however: it turns out to be a promise to save $1.3 billion by not proceeding with Labor's plan to increase the nation's humanitarian intake from 13,700 people a year to 20,000, and evolves into a commitment to ''stop the [asylum seeker] boats''. Within a week of gaining government, Mr Abbott promises in one of the speeches inserted into his sheaf of commitments ''the navy would have new orders to turn around illegal boats''.
There is an ''aim'' to double the annual growth rate of small business by scrapping the carbon tax, cutting red tape, re-establishing the building and construction commission, building better roads and transport systems to ease gridlock, reviewing competition laws, extending unfair contract protections and the like.
A promise to strengthen Australia's productivity rehashes the above almost word for word.
The Coalition's plan for safer streets offers $50 million for things like better lighting and CCTV cameras.
There are commitments to create a new anti-dumping regime, to review marine parks, to force asylum seekers on bridging visas to work for their welfare (currently less than the dole), to reform military superannuation and ensure certainty in broader superannuation regulations, a plan to reduce drownings and to establish a new Colombo Plan, offering scholarships to bring Asia's ''best and brightest'' to study in Australia and to send Australia's brightest to study across the region.
The glossy ''Our Plan'' shield is an attempt to present most of the above into at least the appearance of a cohesive whole within 12 ''top policy priorities''.
The 12 priorities begin, almost inevitably, with ''we will build a stronger, more productive and diverse economy with lower taxes, more efficient government and more productive businesses that will deliver more jobs, higher real incomes and better services for you and your family''.
The Coalition will also ''get the budget back under control, cut waste and start reducing debt''.
The number three promise is to ''help families get ahead by freeing them from the burdens of the carbon tax''. The removal of the carbon tax is trumpeted almost endlessly across the ''policy'' documents as a cure for numerous economic ills.
Small business will get tax cuts, plus $1 billion a year through reductions in red tape and ''green tape''.
Jobs, the plan declares, will grow by half a million in five years and a million in 10 years through a ''world-class five-pillar economy''.
These five pillars, central to everything, are to be constructed to ''build on our strengths in manufacturing innovation, advanced services, agriculture exports, world-class education and research and boosting mining exports''.
Modern infrastructure will ''reduce the bottlenecks on our gridlocked roads and highways''. There is no mention that modern motorways cost upwards of $40 million a kilometre, though a separate Coalition promise to complete the Pacific Highway in NSW for a cool $5.6 billion gives some context to the magnitude of getting rid of roadblocks.
Abbott is offering $1.5 billion for the East-West Link in Melbourne. As The Age's economics editor, Tim Colebatch, pointed out during the week, this is apparently regardless of whether the project has the approval of Infrastructure Australia and passes cost-benefit analysis, and is about one-tenth of the likely cost of the link, the building of which remains something of a pipedream.
Health and education services will improve, Mr Abbott promises, by putting local communities in charge of hospitals and schools. Instead of a carbon tax, there will be a 15,000-strong green army to clean up the environment and reduce carbon emissions ''in Australia, not overseas''.
Asylum seeker boats will be ''stopped''. By promise number 12, the cupboard of new ideas appears to have dried up and the Coalition resorts again to committing to deliver ''strong and stable government that restores accountability''.
The following pages attempt to explain how this will all be done. You need to wade through 18 pages before discovering that the mining tax will be axed so, the plan promises, the mining industry can grow.
With less than five months until the federal election campaign officially begins, a shield of this quality may wear thin, but Tony Abbott and his colleagues clearly believe it is stout enough to protect the Coalition from a government that to date has turned its weapons largely on itself.
