Lenore Taylor, political editor Friday 19 December 2014
This year Tony Abbott was punished for his reliance on mantras and oversimplifications instead of real policy solutions. The question for Australia in 2015 is who will grasp the nettle of a detailed debate
Tony Abbott has presided over a government that has lost the faith of the electorate. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
Fifteen months after his supremely confident election night pledge to give Australia a competent and trustworthy government, Tony Abbott did a long and purging media conference to try to “reboot” his relationship with an electorate that doesn’t think his administration is either of those things.
Backed by a merrily twinkling Christmas tree, a sombre prime minister insisted he was listening and conceded things had been a bit “ragged” of late. But he also said he was sticking to his existing policies, with a few minor tweaks. The tone was conciliatory and just a little bit humble, but the substance was, in essence, the same old slogans.
Yet 2014 has been, above all else, the year the slogans stopped working. It was the year when it became painfully clear actual solutions were much more complicated than election jingles and pamphlets promising a “plan for real action” but containing no such plan.
It was the year when the Coalition’s broken promises – after all those attacks on Julia Gillard’s “lies” – meant the breach of trust between government and the governed became bipartisan. It was the year when the budget not only broke promises, but also introduced new “reforms” never mentioned before the election: big changes to everyday-life policies on health, education and welfare. It took the electorate’s breath away, and then its faith in the government.
It was the year when Gough Whitlam’s death juxtaposed his enduring reforms against the current myopic agenda and unleashed a deep yearning for brave politicians who fight and win a public battle of ideas to enact changes that transform.
Gough Whitlam and Tony Abbott presided over very different political battlegrounds. Photograph: Corbis/AFP
It was always clear that Abbott’s small-target campaign from opposition was strong on rhetoric and light on detail, and that important policy questions were being fudged. But, with Labor having rendered itself unelectable, a strong majority of voters chose to hope for something better.
By year’s end an equally strong majority appeared resolute in their rejection of the Abbott government, consistently telling pollsters they were inclined to boot out the Coalition.
The prime minister seemed stunned by this rapid reversal of fortune – the endlessly repeated sound bites had served him so well for so long. But concessions aren’t really part of his crash-through style.
A few weeks later he gave another soul-searching interview about why things had gone so wrong, this time to 2GB’s Ray Hadley as a conduit to all the Coalition’s frustrated “fans in the stands”.
Again he insisted the problem was one of communication, not substance.
“Maybe our communications could have been more effective; maybe at times when we were preparing the budget we should have been also communicating the strategy as well,” he said.
“I guess my appeal to people is try to ignore the critical chatter and look as objectively as you can at what this government is trying to do and ask yourself what is the alternative, because believe me, Ray, I am absolutely convinced in my deepest heart this is the right path forward for Australia.”
And again he insisted that, despite everything, it had been a “year rich in achievement”. He nominated the election slogans he could mark with a tick. But the electorate appears to have moved on from the mind-numbing, oversimplified world where asserting you have made good on a mantra is the same as proving you have done something that makes sense. They can see this isn’t always true, as is clear from examining Abbott’s nominated “successes” without the spin.
Treasurer Joe Hockey and finance minister Mathias Corrman prepare to deliver the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
‘The budget is coming into better shape’
Except it’s not. Deficits – which were synonymous with “disasters” in the Coalition’s hyperbolic pre-election lexicon – will over the next two years total almost $72bn, compared with the $28.7bn calculated by the Treasury and finance during last year’s election campaign. A forecast surplus is now six, rather than two, years away. And that’s when the government is still counting billions in savings that are stalled in the Senate. Given this deterioration has been caused primarily by declining revenues, and the economy remained weak, Joe Hockey wisely decided not to slash spending.
But he still insisted his May budget was the only possible way to make long-term budget improvements. This was despite its education, health and welfare measures being resoundingly and unequivocally rejected as unfair by the voters and the Senate, and despite there being other policy alternatives to achieve long-term budget repair. His plan to boost growth was also underwhelming: its centrepiece was spending money on roads.
Infrastructure spending is far from consistent in coming years, despite the Coalition’s messages. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP
‘The roads are building’
This weirdly passive claim referred to the $50bn infrastructure spend which was a “key component” of the government’s “economic action strategy”, and also the basis of Abbott’s aspiration to be known as the “infrastructure prime minister” who will preside over “cranes across our cities”.
A vision of how the East West Link might look one day. Photograph: vic.gov.au
Except total transport investment is falling, then rising, and then falling again. According to an analysis by the Grattan Institute, commonwealth transport investment totals $7.5bn in 2014, $6.3bn in 2015, $8.8bn in 2016, $10bn in 2017 and then $6.6bn in 2018, unless new spending promises are made in the meantime. Mostly the government is switching all commonwealth funding from public transport to help finance new roads.
And despite promising that all infrastructure projects would be subject to rigorous cost-benefit analyses before federal money was promised, they weren’t, and if they were, the results didn’t seem to matter. The commonwealth still wants to give $3bn to Melbourne’s East West Link road despite the fact the new state government doesn’t want to build it, and that it turns out to give a return of only 45 cents for every dollar spent.
‘The carbon tax is gone’
More than any other promise, this slogan was central to the Coalition’s success, and the government did indeed deliver on the slogan (with the votes of the Palmer United party, owned by a would-be coalminer who claimed to be motivated by saving the environment – go figure). The rationale for the repeal was to remove an “almost unimaginable” impost from our cost of living, while the alternative Direct Action plan could achieve the same environmental outcomes without the pain.
Abbott said the opening of the $4.2bn Caval Ridge coalmine in Queensland was ‘a great day for the world’. Photograph: AAP Image
So here is the impact of the carbon tax repeal on household power prices. Prices fall with the abolition of the tax, then gradually inch up again. In New South Wales and Western Australia they will be higher in two years’ time than they were at the time of the carbon tax abolition. In other states they remain only slightly lower.
Power prices by state
And here is the impact of the abolition of the tax on emissions when it comes to electricity production – which represents about a third of Australia’s greenhouse emissions. Emissions are tracking steadily upwards because power from brown coal has become much cheaper relative to other sources, and is making up more of the electricity market.
National electricity market – annualised carbon emissions. The red line marks when the carbon tax was repealed. Photograph: Australian Energy Market Operator
Turns out to be very easy to imagine the power price reductions (minor and temporary) and very difficult to imagine what we will do now about our actual greenhouse emissions problem.
Guardian Australia revealed in March that Bill Shorten intended to go to the next election with a carbon price at the heart of his climate policy, a position the government considers to be close to suicidal. But by year’s end 57% of voters told a Fairfax Ipsos poll they believed the government was not doing enough on climate, the prime minister had been embarrassed by being so obviously out of step with world opinion at the G20 meeting and the government had been forced by public opinion, the Senate and its own backbench to tone down attempts to dismantle the renewable energy target.
And while Australia might just reach its 2020 target to reduce emissions by 5% compared with 2000 levels – largely because it clinched special deals in previous climate agreements – it is now being forced to consider what it will pledge to do after 2020. That promise will necessarily involve cuts to industrial and electricity emissions that we have never made before, and which Direct Action in its current form is entirely ill-equipped to deliver.
Unsinkable orange lifeboats were bought by the Australian government as part of Operation Sovereign Borders. Photograph: HKV / Barcroft Media
‘The boats have stopped’
And they have. But stopping the boats was a slogan, not a policy. The objective was pretty much achieved when the former government – at its death knell – decided that every asylum seeker arriving by boat would be sent offshore for processing and none would be resettled in Australia. It was clinched when the new government started sending those asylum seekers still making the journey back to Indonesia on bright orange life boats.
Asylum seekers in front of their housing units on Manus Island. Photograph: Panos Pictures/Vlad Sokhin
The collateral damage is human – more than 2,000 people still in offshore detention with no idea what will become of their lives, and more than 30,000 in Australia now facing the lifelong uncertainty of a temporary protection visa. The horrible consequences of that scenario eventually persuaded the Howard government to allow temporary protection visa holders to remain in Australia. A repeat of that long, sad process appears to be before us.
And now the policy has been extended to include things the Howard government never considered: removing legal rights of repeal and all references to international refugee law, and opening the possibility that refugees could be returned to persecution. None of this was needed to stop the boats, it was effectively an ideological victory lap by Scott Morrison after he stared down a Senate that could not bear the prospect of children spending another Christmas in detention.
‘The government removed 57,000 pages of regulation and legislation and cut $2bn of red tape’
Seriously, this routine spring-cleaning of archaic rules and outdated regulations is regularly trotted out as some kind of significant “productivity” measure, with quite extraordinary savings claims attached. One example given by Labor during the debate on “red tape repeal” day was the claim that repealing an obsolete law called the Poultry Industry Assistance Amendment Act 1979 – clearly obsolete, since the law it amended had been repealed decades ago – was calculated to generate $100,000 in deregulatory savings. Another “red tape repeal” bill was mostly about punctuation. But it did have a lot of pages.
Red tape repeal days have always been an opportunity for grand claims by both major parties. Photograph: LUKAS COCH/AAPIMAGE
So when we scratch the slogans – even the ones over which the government is crowing “mission accomplished” – there aren’t always long-term answers. And when voters looked for some reassurance or some kind of plan for creating new jobs to replace those being lost in mining or manufacturing, the responses seemed flimsy.
So cocky was the government when it came to power that its strategy would last two parliamentary terms, with reforms to taxation, federation and industrial relations debated during this term and then taken to the next election.
But electoral contests over the past year have made the task progressively harder. The West Australian Senate rerun entrenched the extremely difficult situation in the upper house, and Labor victories in South Australia and Victoria squashed the dream of coast-to-coast Liberal governments that might have eased the path of big reforms requiring agreement from the states.
The government was more sure-footed on the international stage, particularly in its response to the aviation disasters of Malaysia Airlines flights MH17 and MH370. It also clinched three free trade agreements. The prime minister was calm and measured in his reactions to the Lindt cafe siege in Sydney.
But at the end of the first year, the voters’ verdict remains brutal and apparently entrenched.
Poll of polls showing voting intention. Photograph: supplied
It all left Labor wearing a permanent expression of disbelief, not dissimilar to the way the Coalition used to look when Labor’s internal “game of thrones” was propelling the Coalition back to office without having to do very much. After making such a comprehensive mess of its six years in government, Labor could not believe its luck. Still, Shorten didn’t risk anything in 2014 by venturing forth with many actual policy alternatives, instead sticking to the safe early-term opposition script of maximum attack.
Some commentators blamed the void in the political debate on “the system”, declaring it “broken”. Some pointed to the relentless nature of the 24-hour news cycle and the splintering of information sources, which certainly does make it harder to sell a complicated or nuanced message.
But surely it is too early to concede defeat, when the electorate can barely remember a political leader who tried to level with them, to conduct a bigger public conversation, an actual discussion of detailed policies and their consequences. The question for 2015 is, will either of the present major party leaders dare to try?
Tony Abbott has often relied on slogans to transmit his message. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
