Paul Sheehan January 28, 2015
Prime Minister Tony Abbott says he will learn from the uproar that bestowing an Australia Day honour on Prince Phillip caused.
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"I'm determined to learn from all of this," the Prime Minister said of his self-immolating lapse in anointing the Duke of Edinburgh with an Australian knighthood, which compounded the adverse impact of the anachronistic, self-indulgent, zero-upside honours system he introduced in his first year.
Abbott is unlikely to learn from this, other than to become even more cautious and robotic. You cannot learn what you refuse to know. He is a bulldog who will not let go of a course of action which, without an end to his bunker insularity, and a change in his relationship with the electorate, will see him removed either before the next election or at the next election.
His party is already moving. The phones are running hot. They will not turn to the deputy leader, Julie Bishop. It will be Malcolm Turnbull.
The seeds of this unnecessary damage were sown a long time ago. Why did Senator Nick Minchin, the senate opposition leader who engineered Abbott's elevation to the party leadership, step down as senate leader within months of Abbott becoming leader? Minchin would leave politics altogether a year later, for a variety of reasons.
Without Minchin, Abbott would never have been leader. Without Minchin, or the gravitas of a Minchin equivalent, Abbott is not going to survive his present course.
Why has the likeable, knockabout Abbott turned into Gillard II? The public never bought Julia Gillard's robotic prime ministerial persona, or the manner by which she took power, which guaranteed her demise long before it happened.
We all thought the toxic leadership turmoil of Labor's six years in office protected Abbott from an early political death. It still does, but less so now. Australian politics has become conditioned to flux. And electoral survival trumps everything else.
The irony is that, in policy terms, Abbott has been a better leader than the man who Australians want to replace him with: Bill Shorten. The Prime Minister has achieved much despite the scorched-earth majority in the Senate, while Shorten has been rewarded for his empty opportunism. And for being Not Tony.
Abbott can beat Shorten, just as he beat Turnbull, Hockey, Rudd, Gillard, Rudd again, and the global warming lobby, all while being caricatured and underestimated.
But he cannot beat the combination of Robotic Tony and Bill Short-term.
A Coalition government with a clear, cut-through, waffle-free narrative can carry the day at the 2016 election, even if it cannot carry a blocking Senate where power is controlled by one-termers who fluked their way into Parliament on preferences despite tiny primary votes.
Which leads me to Australia Day, when a woman delivered the sort of speech that has been missing from Australia's political leaders: "The global economy is still sluggish, there is still enormous global economic volatility, and our geopolitical environment is very fragile on so many fronts. If all this doesn't constitute a burning platform, I'm not sure what does …
"The policy ambition we've become accustomed to won't be sufficient … We will need a decade of unprecedented policy action by government, and leadership and risk-taking by business … Our politicians across all parties have to prepare the community for the enormous, social and economic change that must take place in our society."
The speech was given by Jennifer Westacott, chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, who understands that Australia's commodity boom was one-in-a-century opportunity which is going to be replaced with either higher productivity or lower living standards. It's one or the other.
It looks like lower living standards. Even when the commodities cycle turns, and prices move upwards, producers won't be flocking to Australia to build multibillion-dollar projects. Australia will not see another mining boom, or any other boom, under current laws and practices.
Instead of galvanising to meet this challenge Australians have shown an opposite intent. They want Labor back in power in Canberra, with more government spending, given that Labor has taken a comfortable and consistent lead in the polls by opposing every attempt to cut spending. It even opposes cuts it proposed when in office.
In Victoria, voters have put Labor back into office despite the certainty that it meant a return to power of the corruption-riddled Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union. One of the first moves new Premier Daniel Andrews made was to dismantle the construction code set up to combat rampant intimidation in the building industry.
In Queensland, Labor has promised to repeal the anti-bikie laws, because the CFMEU, as in Victoria, hates laws that impinge on its ability to deploy bikies as enforcers on building sites.
In this broad context of national denial, Abbott's honours mistake is a mosquito bite. He has a problem but the fixation on his foibles is another sign that Australians prefer avoiding the real drama the country is facing. That narrative has yet to be properly framed by our politicians. It is too dangerous.
