theguardian.com, Sunday 8 September 2013
Tony Abbott has resolutely been in the business of under-promising and over-delivering. Low expectations could be the seeds of his success
Prime minister-elect Tony Abbott poses for a picture with the son of a supporter, the morning after his victory. Photograph: Daniel Munoz/Reuters
If there’s one lesson prime minister-elect Tony Abbott seems to have taken from his immediate predecessors, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, it’s that Australian voters don’t take kindly to having their expectations built up and then dashed.
Rudd and Gillard were both seen to have dishonoured the pacts voters believed they'd struck with the country. In Rudd’s case, he variously promised to be like John Howard but better, that he’d treat climate change as Australia’s greatest moral challenge, and that he would accept the decision of his caucus colleagues and not undermine his party’s leadership. Gillard vowed to restore a party that had lost its way, to fix the issues that Rudd did not, and not to have a carbon tax. Yet both prime ministers’ inability to deliver on these commitments proved to be their undoing.
Conversely, Abbott has resolutely been in the business of under-promising and over-delivering. Much of this tactic is based on him having learned from the mistakes Rudd and Gillard made in mismanaging voter expectations.
In fact, it could be said that Abbott has leveraged off voters’ low expectations of him right from the start. After having won the party leadership from Malcolm Turnbull by just one vote, run an unashamedly negative campaign for longer than any political observer can remember, and occasionally stumbling with words and poor media interviews, Abbott’s transformation at the beginning of this year into the cautiously-spoken statesman in sharp navy suits was received positively by a growing number of pleasantly-surprised voters.
Abbott’s approach to policy has followed a similar path: low key, limited detail, realistic goals and no nasty surprises.
What does this mean for the new Abbott government? It means Abbott and his team have made the commitments they firmly believe they can deliver and tried to leave wriggle room for those about which they are unsure. Hence the single-page policy commitments released during the election campaign with only one to five lines of costing "detail", and the gradual change or "timeshift" in language committing to when a budget surplus will be delivered.
Yet Abbott has staked his ongoing political credibility – and his government’s future – on delivering iconic policies with attendant high voter expectations: scrapping the carbon tax/price, stopping the arrival of asylum seekers by boat and establishing the Coalition’s paid parental leave scheme. Inability to deliver on any of these expectations, or mishandling any attribution of the resulting blame, could see Abbott’s credibility mortality wounded as was Rudd’s and Gillard’s when they similarly failed to deliver.
Ironically, Abbott still has a lot to gain by not living up to certain voter expectations. After witnessing the man barely miss a step in his relentless campaign to become prime minister over the past four years, is there any real evidence to suggest his campaign to be a measured and responsible prime minister who governs for all will be any less disciplined?
What if Abbott proves to be a reformed chauvinist instead of the slavering misogynist he's sometimes portrayed to be by his opponents? What if he’s a sensible spender of taxpayer funds, instead of a brutal cutter? And what if his ministry and government stay united and productive, thereby providing the years of stable government the community craves?
By living up to our high expectations of him and dispelling those that are low, Abbott could defy all preconceptions by proving to be one of Australia’s most successful prime ministers. Now that would be unexpected, wouldn’t it?
