Lenore Taylor, political editor Friday 5 December 2014
The government’s daily briefings are useful in understanding how this year went so badly wrong so quickly
Tony Abbott has made a virtue of sticking to the plan. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
Every morning the major parties send out the “messages” of the day. These aren’t really super-secret documents since ministers and MPs dutifully recite them into any available open microphone.
But seeing the government’s messages in their original form is helpful in making sense of the end of an astonishingly bad first year, in which the government lost the confidence of the electorate with spectacular severity and speed.
The messages help because they are, quite transparently, neither coherent nor convincing, but rather the spin of a government that seems to have snookered itself.
So here are the morning messages for Friday – crafted as parliament rose for the Christmas break to help Coalition MPs go forth into the summer and convince voters the year has not been chaotic, as it may have appeared on the nightly news, but “rich in performance” and achievements from a government “delivering in spades”.
The messages can be distilled into the following points, to which I have taken the liberty of adding notes.
The Abbott government’s plan is THE ONLY PLAN to improve economic growth and repair the budget
- Except that it’s not. This is not the only possible plan. The savings in the budget are not the only possible savings the government could have made. When Tony Abbott opened this whole debate soon after the election, before the commission of audit and the budget, many other suggestions were made, and ignored. The Grattan Institute and the Australia Institute, for example, pointed out that changes to the generous treatment of superannuation could deliver big savings over time by reducing benefits flowing largely to the highest income earners. Instead the government announced it would not proceed with a policy of the previous Labor government to impose a tax of 15% on superannuation earnings of more than $100,000 a year. (The government says changing superannuation would be a broken election promise, a curious rationale given its willingness to break so many others.) Other savings were suggested by the Australian Council of Social Service, such as changes to the tax treatment of trusts and negative gearing.
- Since budget savings are needed over the medium term, Labor deserves to come under increasing pressure to indicate where different savings might be found as the parliamentary term progresses. But the fact that a first-year opposition hasn’t unveiled alternatives does not mean there are none.
The Coalition’s plan is THE ONLY PLAN to fix Labor’s debt and deficit disaster.
- If the $24bn deficit for 2014-15 forecast at election time and inherited by the incoming government was a “disaster”, then the forecast to be unveiled by Joe Hockey in the budget update next week (Deloittes predicts it will be $34.4bn) must be an even bigger disaster – even if the deterioration has been caused by things outside the government’s control, such as falling commodity prices.
- So the economic narrative “reboot” planned with the bad news from the budget update relies on voters understanding that there is a problem with the budget, but also buying the implausible idea that there is one, and only one, set of policy choices to solve it. Voters must also believe that what the Coalition once said was a disaster is in fact entirely manageable and no real problem for the economic outlook. Tricky.
The government will stick by THE ONLY PLAN, even though parts of it have been rejected by the Senate and the public, because otherwise they would look like headless chooks.
- The “headless chook” line was actually from Tony Abbott, when 3AW’s Neil Mitchell pressed him on whether the government had lost the budget debate and the voters’ trust. “What we won’t do is run around like headless chooks and change the plan which is the only plan that can fix the economy,” he said, extemporising slightly with the “chooks” bit.
- But the majority of senators are clearly saying they won’t pass things such as the GP co-payment any day, and, according to an Essential poll, the majority of voters agree the majority of senators should refuse to pass stalled budget measures. That includes 68% who think the $7 co-payment should be blocked and 65% who want the cuts to higher education funding defeated.
- Before the government said it was sticking to “the plan” the government briefed the media that it wasn’t sticking to some parts of it. For example the $7 GP co-payment, a reversal which meant they looked like headless chooks anyway.
- On some days the Coalition seem to say it will seek to in effect impose the GP co-payment via regulation (by reducing payments to doctors) while on other days it seems to say it won’t. Imposing an unpopular measure against the wishes of the Senate and the medical profession and the voters would not seem to be the best way to win back confidence and trust.
The problems facing THE ONLY PLAN are all due to Labor’s mess/wreckage/feral behaviour
- Large chunks of the morning note are devoted to Labor’s record (disastrous) and current voting behaviour (irresponsible), but as Laura Tingle argued on Friday, this frames the debate in terms of the political battle, not around what voters actually want. The voters want a coherent economic plan from the people running the country.
- As the Liberal party’s pollster, Mark Textor, told Lateline this week: “Economic anxiety is number one, two and three on the issue agenda.”
Textor said the government needed to find “really greater clarity around what is the core to the economic strategy. Is it to diversify the economy? Is it to rekindle parts of the mining and resources community? Is it to release growth through greater productivity? … As I said, those questions, from an economic perspective, still have to be answered.”
Back to the morning notes and there is still no answer.
“We’ve handed down a $50bn infrastructure package, the single largest infrastructure package in Australia’s history,” they say, except most of the package was re-announcements or money redirected from public transport projects to roads. “We’ve cut $2bn in red tape”, they say. Getting rid of truly unnecessary regulations is a good thing, but this boast isn’t exactly a barbecue stopper.
- The prime minister did his Friday doorstop at a Melbourne firm that makes dental amalgams and fillings, and might be able to export more to China because a 5% tariff is being removed under the recently signed China free trade agreement. The new FTAs do offer the possibility of expanding trade, but often in small ways that don’t look all that exciting, like the prospect of exporting extra dental amalgam. And beyond the FTAs we’re back to the carbon/mining tax repeal mantra.
Joe Hockey was praised as a ‘man of remarkable resilience’ by Tony Abbott. Photograph: Stefan Postles/Getty Images
If the problems are not Labor’s fault, they’re Joe Hockey’s fault.
- This isn’t in the morning notes, which advise that “if asked” MPs should swat away the idea that ministers are “losing faith” with Hockey by calling it “speculation upon speculation”. But with newspaper headlines such as “Joe’s on the nose”, it’s pretty obvious some in the government would like the treasurer to take the fall for the government’s difficulties. Now newspapers are commissioning polls about who voters “prefer” as treasurer, which serves only to exacerbate the instability.
- Tony defends Joe – sort of. “Joe Hockey has been criticised lately, but I tell you what ... he is someone who bounces back, and that is what he is doing now,” he says. “He is a man of remarkable resilience, focus and grit.” But he also defends his beleaguered and almost-indefensible defence minister, David Johnston. And he says he is planning a reshuffle before the next election.
- Senior sources suggest blaming Hockey is a way to deflect criticism from the performance of Abbott himself as possible alternative future contenders, such as the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, are obviously raising their public profile.
When asked whether he would ever consider standing aside Abbott says no, because “the worst thing for Australia would be to have another unstable, short-term government.”
But based on its current performance and polling, that is exactly what the Abbott government appears to be.
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