Lenore Taylor, political editor Friday 5 September 2014
Even when he knew he would win the election, Tony Abbott refused to risk telling voters the truth. Then came the overreach, the backtracking and the deferred decisions. The question now is whether voters will accept untrustworthiness as a given
Tony Abbott may have fared better if he levelled about the policies that were coming. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
It was five days out from the election that Tony Abbott first appeared sure he would win. Addressing the National Press Club, he perceptibly shifted from the political warrior of opposition to the prime minister-almost-elect, as if he’d stood in front of the mirror that morning and finally allowed himself to say the words “Abbott government”.
There were numbers to back his conclusion – he entered the final week of the campaign with a 54%-to-46% lead in the two-party-preferred vote, a bigger lead than either John Howard or Kevin Rudd as they entered the final week before their government-changing victories. He had also finally overtaken Rudd as preferred prime minister. It had been a long, long road, but voters were starting to accept the idea of him as their leader, if not enthusiastically, then at least as better than the available alternative.
So to be fair, completely fair, let’s judge that Abbott government – one year on – not by the all the scrapping of the previous three years but by what Abbott said in that speech on 2 September 2013, when he looked at the television cameras and spoke “directly to the people of Australia”, knowing the responsibility of leading the nation was almost certainly just days away, feeling it settle on his shoulders.
Tony Abbott celebrates his election victory with his wife Margie and daughters Louise, Frances and Bridgette. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP
Even then, sure of victory, Abbott stayed a resolutely small target. He refused to put candour before caution. He refused to risk telling voters the truth, even though his own remorseless campaign against Julia Gillard’s “lie” on the carbon tax proved beyond doubt that honesty was essential for successful reform, and trust for successful leadership.
He insisted Labor’s claims that the Coalition would “cut to the bone” were “bare-faced lies”, unwilling to admit his promises of continued spending were incompatible with his promise to return to surplus and solve the “budget emergency” and the “debt and deficit disaster”.
“In the last week of the campaign, Labor will say anything to sway your vote including the most bare-faced lies about the Coalition … There are no cuts to health. No cuts to education. Pensions don’t change. The GST doesn’t change.”
“... My aim is to lead a no-surprises, no-excuses government that says what it means and does what it says.”
The newspapers record the day Tony Abbott took power. Photograph: Mitch Duncan/AAP
But of course the electorate was in for a lot of surprises and the government would make a mountain of excuses. Health and education payments to the states were cut by $80bn. Pensions were changed. All the reassuring words of the campaign gave way to a budget that hit the poor hardest. It included new taxes and unsettling new ideas, never mentioned pre-election, such as denying unemployment benefits to many under-30s for six months of the year.
Abbott also set out his positive pitch – that under his government Australia would be “open for business” because he would “scrap the mining tax to boost investment and jobs, cut red tape costs by $1bn a year, restore the Australian building and construction commission (ABCC) to deliver $6bn a year in productivity improvements, build the roads that Australians need in order to live and to work better, and – above all else – abolish the carbon tax”.
Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott show off early mangoes that were auctioned for $30,000 at Sydney’s Flemington Markets on 4 September, 2013. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP
Twelve months later he can tick two of those five boxes – the abolition of the carbon and mining taxes, the latter only after a “less than perfect” compromise at a huge cost to all workers’ superannuation. Abbott found himself with an incredibly difficult Senate, but his government has also been slow to get the hang of negotiation. It has not yet presented the bill to restore the ABCC to the new Senate, one of many reasons for a building frustration in its natural ideological and business constituency. The “cranes over cities” promised within 12 months due to the construction of the “roads of the 21st century have not eventuated yet either. Planning and approval processes were always going to take longer and the promised cost-benefit processes haven’t always happened either.
Looking back, there are many reasons Abbott and his government have not settled in better, or grown into the task of governing.
Smiles and back slaps for the government as the carbon tax repeal bills pass in the House of Representatives. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
The vacuum
That early “feel the serenity” strategy where ministers ventured only infrequently from their new offices and, when they did, began every utterance with a reassurance that they were being careful and methodical and purposeful about their new jobs. News vacuums always fill, sometimes with problems not of a government’s own making or choosing, and this one was quickly occupied by ongoing allegations about MPs’ dubious use of travel entitlements and then a full-scale diplomatic crisis after Guardian Australia and the ABC’s revelation that Australia, under the previous Labor government, had spied on the Indonesian president, his wife and his inner circle.
The overreach
An early headline example was Christopher Pyne’s attempt to backtrack on the Coalition’s promise that it was on a “unity ticket” on school funding by cutting funding (while claiming he wasn’t) before back-flipping again when no one bought his explanations. Another would be George Brandis sinking his own proposed and unpopular changes to the Racial Discrimination Act by declaring that everyone had a “right to be a bigot” and the debate that was allowed to run for a while about how the ABC needed to be cut down to size, not just for budgetary reasons but because it was unfairly hurting commercial competition such as News Ltd. And who could forget the prime minister’s personal indulgence in the decision to bring back knights and dames or the government’s astonishing request to the United Nations to delist 74,000 hectares of world heritage-listed Tasmanian forest, which the UN promptly rejected.
And the prime minister has resolutely held on to his “captain’s pick” policy of a generous paid parental leave scheme, despite the fact that the opposition points to it every time the government asks rhetorically where they would propose alternative budget savings.
Decisions delayed
There were the things the Coalition fudged before the election, the reasons for which quickly became plain.
The Coalition promised to cut $500m from car industry assistance, but insisted the future for carmakers was still strong. Post election its stance helped hasten the inevitable and all three carmakers have said they will be gone by the end of 2017.
It never released a higher education policy, but did promise in the “Real Action” booklet that it would “continue current funding arrangements for universities”, which meant the sweeping overhaul announced in the budget came as something of a shock. It deliberately downplayed health as a point of policy difference, which meant the co-payments and spending cuts were also a surprise.
And Abbott presented his Direct Action climate policy as a pain-free alternative to the carbon tax, but as details were fleshed out after the election its credibility is flimsier than ever, and it has not passed the Senate, meaning Australia currently has no legislated climate change policy. He and his ministers promised to retain the Renewable Energy Target (RET), and then appointed a self-professed climate sceptic to head a review which proposed two different ways to effectively close it down and decimate renewable energy investment, even though they had to concede it was not, in fact, pushing up power prices.
Climate change protesters wait for Tony Abbott at Penrice Soda Holdings in Adelaide on 3 September, 2013. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP
And there was the almost complete lack of clear explanation. The budgetary goal was to return to surplus, except many of the savings were spent on medical research and roads. The political goal was “grown-up government”, except the government sometimes appeared as chaotic as its predecessor. The administrative goal was efficiency, but there are increasing complaints about logjams in the prime minister’s office, centralisation of decision-making and the bypassing of cabinet – similar, if not quite as loud, as the complaints made against Rudd.
Judged against its own pledges, the Coalition has succeeded in stopping the boats, although concern is growing about the consequences for the asylum seekers who became the collateral damage for this policy aim.
And it has been more successful than many observers expected on the foreign policy front, signing free trade agreements with Japan and South Korea and remaining largely sure-footed on the international stage. Coalition strategists are quite clear that international issues and national security are having the welcome side-effect of a much-needed stabilisation in the government’s poll numbers and the electorate’s perceptions of the prime minister.
But still the government ends its first year well behind in polls, having burnt through political capital with astonishing speed. And this was supposed to be the gently-does-it period of getting used to government. Much of the Coalition’s most politically difficult (and keenly desired) reforms are scheduled for the second term of its two-term plan (tax reform, workplace reform, reform of the federation) after securing a new mandate in 2016. No wonder the Coalition’s support base is getting nervous.
All your problems solved
Its difficulties can be traced back to before it ever won office, when Abbott chose to maximise his victory by pretending he could solve Australia’s economic, social and environmental problems with almost no pain.
He has taken a different tack to Gillard when the broken promises have been revealed post-election. Gillard tried to come clean and move on, conceding that a three-year fixed carbon price was essentially the carbon tax she had promised not to introduce. Abbott refuses to admit anything, contriving contorted explanations about why obvious cuts to projected expenditure cannot be viewed as cuts since actual expenditure continues to rise, or why legislated changes to policies do not amount to broken promises if they don’t take effect until after the next election. But voters don’t seem to be buying his tactic any more than Gillard’s.
Julia Gillard had a different approach to political admissions. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
Commentator Paul Kelly has argued that the “Australian system” is broken and reform is now almost impossible because of the power of negative campaigning and the need for political leaders to rule things out in order to be elected.
But we don’t know that for sure because in recent times no leader has really tried. The Coalition told voters about some of the “tough” spending cuts coming their way – the schoolkids bonus, for example – but that didn’t turn out to be the half of it.
Abbott was elected not so much on a groundswell of enthusiasm for those policies and ideas he did enunciate but a in a national wave of exhaustion with political conflict and dishonesty and Labor’s internal divisions.
It seemed to intend to follow John Howard’s recipe for government longevity – gradual change, taking voters with him, keeping his promises, returning politics to “normal”.
We don’t know how Australians would have reacted had Abbott levelled about the policies that were coming, and tried to explain his reasons when he looked down the barrel of the cameras that day.
But we do have even more evidence that voters react viciously when they feel they have been deceived. The question now is whether it is possible for a leader, and a party, to recover after breaching the trust of the electorate, whether voters, faced with an underwhelming opposition, can be persuaded to take untrustworthiness as a given.
Tony Abbott one year on: how the trust was won and lost | World news | The Guardian
