Peter Hartcher Sydney Morning Herald political and international editor
June 6, 2013 - 12:45PM
As much as our leaders would like the next 100 days to be about their policies, it will be about them - and their lack of political leadership, writes political editor Peter Hartcher.
Australians didn’t like the choice they were offered at the last election and they don’t like it any better this time around. In fact, they like it even less.
Taken together, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott are the most unpopular leadership offering that Australia has had in nearly 20 years.
Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard. Photo: Andrew Meares
''They are the least popular pair since Paul Keating was prime minister and Alexander Downer was opposition leader,'' says Fairfax pollster Nielsen’s John Stirton.
Gillard and Abbott were both unpopular leaders at the 2010 election. The choice was so dispiriting that Australians couldn't decide and returned the first hung Federal Parliament since the 1940s.
Believe it or not, they have become even less liked in the three years since.
''Their combined approval rating was about 100 – or about 50 points each out of a possible 100 each – at the last election, and now they are averaging a combined 80,'' Stirton says.
In two separate incidents in recent weeks, schoolchildren felt entitled to throw sandwiches at their Prime Minister; the Opposition Leader inspired a book on the prevalence of misogyny in Australia.
And if anyone had the idea that the political debate didn't matter for the day-to-day state of the country, these three years have proved them wrong.
The political debate has been so dismal it has cast a pall over national confidence.
Bizarrely, consumer confidence in Australia was cheerier during the global financial crisis than during the Gillard-Abbott era.
The gloom has been so marked that even Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens has felt obliged to note that the ''bitter political debate'' is hurting consumer confidence.
The disconnect between Australia's objective economic situation and the way we feel about ourselves is striking.
Australia, uniquely among the developed countries of the world and uniquely in its own history, is now in its 22nd year of continuous economic growth.
''Australia is a country that's doing very, very well,'' Bill Gates pointed out last week.
''Australia has the lowest debt, or close to the lowest, of any rich country, and the lowest deficit of any country I can think of.''
In the same week, Australia's living standards were judged to be the best of any rich country for the third year in a row, according to the OECD's Better Life index encompassing 15 measures of wellbeing.
Yet we are gloomy about what we're building for our children. A poll last month by the Washington-based Pew group finds that 53 per cent of Australians believe today’s children will be worse off than their parents. And the lack of confidence in the national leadership seems to be a central reason.
It's not really a surprise, however, because Gillard and Abbott were specifically chosen by their parties not so much to lead as to retreat.
Abbott was made the head of his party by a single vote on the ticket of retreating from its commitment to an emissions trading system.
Gillard was installed as head of her party promising to follow Abbott and abandon Labor's commitment to the same scheme.
In other words, they were not chosen for their ability to manage a difficult reform but for their ability to run away from it.
Their qualifications to lead, in other words, were based on their promises to run in the face of difficulty. Is this the definition of leadership?
The defining difference between the two parties in the past three years was that Labor under Gillard was obliged, with utmost reluctance, to return to the task of putting a price on carbon as a condition of winning the support to form a minority government.
Abbott has pledged to make the election a ''referendum'' on Labor's carbon tax.
If that's all it’s about, it wouldn't be much of a plan. The tax itself has turned out to be not the ''wrecking ball'' that Abbott had prophesied but an event that most people have not even noticed.
Abbott promised ''it is going to hurt from day one and as time goes by it's just going to get worse and worse and worse and the only way to fix it is to change the government''.
But the storm turned into a mild breeze. In polls after the tax took effect on July 1, most people said it had made no difference to them. In the latest poll, 57 per cent said so, while 37 per cent said they were worse off.
But, for Abbott, the carbon tax is not so much an event in itself as a symbol. Its real potency is as a totem of Gillard's untrustworthiness.
And even as the public fear of the carbon tax has faded, the Gillard government has delivered new totems of untrustworthiness, refresher courses in broken promises.
The ''guaranteed'' budget surplus was a major one. It's been followed up with the dumping of promised tax cuts and school kids' bonuses.
The arrival of asylum seekers in ever-growing numbers has been a running sore.
From the moment she tore down her leader Kevin Rudd after vowing not to, trust has been Gillard’s greatest vulnerability.
Gillard and Abbott have tried to move towards a more positive set of election offerings for 2013.
Gillard has been campaigning on three major positives: a national disability insurance scheme, reforms to schools funding and a national broadband network.None is going according to plan. Abbott has signed up to the disability plan, taking away Labor’s partisan advantage.
Some of the major states are vociferously opposed to the schools plan.
And the national broadband network, years behind schedule, is turning, day-by-day, into a problem of asbestos management.
And her every promise is overshadowed by the essential problem that the electorate does not trust the person making it.
Abbott is trying to move from, as he put it, ''not Dr No but Dr Yes, no less''. But he did his Dr No impression so well, for so long that he has yet to inspire the electorate.
The key difference is that the voters are more disillusioned with Gillard's government than they are with Abbott's opposition.
Both leaders' approval ratings have gone backwards over three years, but Gillard's has gone back further.
And Labor has been in a losing position for all 29 of the 29 Nielsen polls in the life of this Parliament.
''That has never happened before'' in the 40-year history of the series, Stirton says.
Labor's remaining hopes, which are vanishingly small, rest almost entirely on a plan for a final, frenzied assault on Abbott as sinister, unhinged and unreliable.
Meanwhile, the Liberals will remind us, at every opportunity, of the depths of Gillard's deceit.
It will be a long 100 days ahead.
