Lenore Taylor, Guardian Australia political editor
theguardian.com, Sunday 7 September 2014
By sticking to the line that his election promises are being kept, the PM seems to think voters will eventually believe him
Tony Abbott has stared down questions from within the government about how he will deal with perceived broken election promises. Photograph: Olivia Harris/Reuters
If a prime minister breaks promises made repeatedly to 15 million voters and then insists he hasn’t done it, will they eventually believe him? It’s almost the opposite of the famous philosophical musing: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Everyone in Australia must have heard Tony Abbott say he would make “no cuts to health, no cuts to education … and no changes to the pension”. They heard him say parents could “vote Labor or Liberal and get exactly the same amount of funding for your school”.
The government then cut $80bn from health and education payments to the states in the budget, shocking and angering premiers. The state leaders were clear the federal government had “cut” their funding, “flick-passing” to them the need to figure out exactly where the savings should be made.
However they do it, there will be less money for schools and hospitals.
The government also decided that aged, disability and carer pensions would from 2017 increase by the consumer price index (CPI) – in other words inflation – and not (as they have for the past 20 years) by average weekly earnings, an increase that is almost always higher.
It’s exactly because it increases at the higher rate that the aged pension is now worth $7,500 more a year than unemployment benefits. The new pension indexation rates will mean the pension is worth $4,000 a year less in real terms in 10 years’ time. And it’s because the pensions will now increase at a lower rate that the decision delivered a substantial budget saving.
However you measure it pensioners will have less money to spend in real terms.
But Tony Abbott still insists no election pledges have been broken. “Education spending goes up every year; hospital spending goes up every year ... Sure, some of the unsustainable promises, some of the blank cheque promises that the Labor party made aren’t going to be honoured by this government but again, we were very up-front about that before the election,” he said on Sunday.
And he is just as adamant in private. During a full ministry meeting at the end of the winter parliamentary session he rounded on a junior minister who asked how the government was intending to deal with the widespread view that it had broken election promises. There were absolutely no broken promises, the prime minister said. End of discussion.
The Liberals’ glossy one-year anniversary brochure even boasts about increases in schools and hospitals funding. “We’re investing more in schools and hospitals. Schools funding is increasing by $4.9bn (37%) and hospitals funding is increasing by $5.3bn (40%) over the next four years,” it says.
And even though Treasury data released under freedom of information confirmed economic modelling by the national centre for social and economic modelling and separate modelling by the Australian National University – and they all showed that low-income earners were hit hardest by budget measures and high-income earners would feel very little pain – Tony Abbott does not concede this point either. In fact he says “protecting the vulnerable” is something he intends to continue to do for the remainder of his term.
Whatever the merits of the policies, whatever the reasons the decisions were taken, the electorate knows Tony Abbott broke his promises, and his colleagues know it as well.
But his strategy is to concede nothing. Does he believe voters will stop caring, or that they will forget what they heard?
