Lenore Taylor, political editor Friday 23 January 2015

Governments must be open-minded and listening to win public support for reform, but the Abbott government has been neither

Abbott has squandered the most important commodity necessary to achieve change. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

Are we really back there again? Ministers putting on their best serious face and declaring their leader is not electoral poison. Colleagues “backgrounding” the obvious fact that he is. A government paralysed by policies it cannot legislate and a backlog of big ideas but no political capital to push them through.

Yep, we are back there. But let’s forget this horribly familiar scenario for a second and imagine that a new prime minister dropped in from outer space and delivered the agenda-setting press club speech Tony Abbott has scheduled for 2 February.

In my view, he or she would probably raise at least some of the same things Abbott intends to. Australia does need to reduce spending over time. We do need to overhaul the tax system, since much of our budget dilemma is due to declining revenue. Our population is ageing and that fact does raise big policy questions. Our federal system is dysfunctional.

But Abbott has a major disadvantage compared with the imaginary alien leader. He has already squandered the most important commodity to achieve any change at all – trust. Voters have to believe a government is open-minded and listening before a major policy can be debated. The government has to actually BE open-minded and listening to win public support for reform. The Abbott government has been neither.

The consequences are clear in the response to the Productivity Commission review into workplace relations. The employment minister, Eric Abetz, is now reassuring everyone it will be fair and factual and listen to the views of “all parties”. But his government responded to allegations of corruption in some unions not by referring them to the police, but by launching a sweeping royal commission into all unions. It has happily ignored recommendations it doesn’t like from other evidence-based Productivity Commission inquiries (like the need to conduct proper cost benefit analyses before promising huge amounts of money to infrastructure projects). It has made its views on industrial laws abundantly clear. Of course the unions don’t trust the process. And it’s not clear the government will have the authority to convince the public to trust it either.

Abbott will use his speech to lay out his plan for the year. He’ll talk about the “families package” in the budget, taking money from his paid parental leave scheme and using it to pay for more flexible childcare subsidies. He’ll talk about the soon-to-be-released tax paper, which will open every can of worms – superannuation tax breaks, broadening or raising the GST and the prospect of personal income tax cuts. He’ll probably talk about the intergenerational report, also out soon, and all the challenges as the population ages.

But his government already ambushed Australian voters with previously-unmentioned health, education and welfare changes in last year’s budget which were decisively judged to be unfair.

And he and his ministers have spent the past year ignoring, defunding and sidelining groups that advocate for the poor, the sick, the disabled and disadvantaged.

The Australian Council of Social Service wrote to Abbott early last year proposing that he set up a welfare advisory body, similar to the business advisory group headed by Maurice Newman that was up and running within three months of the election. It still hasn’t received a response.

The government abolished the Social Inclusion Board, the National Housing Supply Council, the Prime Minister’s Council on Homelessness, the National Policy Commission on Indigenous Housing, the National Children and Family Roundtable, the Advisory Panel on Positive Ageing and the Immigration Health Advisory Group, citing “red tape”. It has cut $270m in funding to other community organisations over four years, including from groups that advocate for the homeless, refugees, youth and the disabled.

It has abolished the Climate Commission and rewritten funding agreements with community legal services to prevent them from advocating for changes to laws that affect their clients.

To political warriors, refusing to hear or offer assistance to those who might challenge your ideas and arguments probably seems an obvious course. But for a leader who really wants to have a debate, rather than just impose an outcome, it’s dumb. It leads to bad policies and an erosion of the confidence and trust that are necessary for lasting political success.

It also lets political opponents off the hook. Just as Abbott used former prime minister Julia Gillard’s carbon tax “lie” to delegitimise all she undertook and stood for, Bill Shorten is using the electorate’s disillusionment and suspicion of Tony Abbott and this government’s broken promises to undermine the prime minister’s standing on whatever new subject he touches.

Debating big, necessary questions – like tax, or workplace laws or federalism – and taking the result to the next election is the right thing for a government to do, if it is willing to listen to all sides of the argument.

But Coalition MPs are worried that their government will be fighting rather than debating, and on too many fronts, and in front of an electorate that has already stopped listening.

They can see that last year’s “reboot” was just spin. The prime minister has made it clear he thinks the problem is not the policy but the sales job – he just needs to “skite” more.

Some are despairing, and are increasingly willing to say so to any journalist who calls (anonymously of course). But they don’t know what comes next. If pressed they mutter something about how things have to get better soon, or after the budget, or by later this year.

This is not dissent fuelled by rival leadership contenders, and the two most likely alternatives – Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull – are politically close. There is no plotting, although there are “what if it came to that?” conversations, and some careful bridge-building between former factional rivals in case the time does come.

Overwhelmingly, Liberal MPs are trying to send the prime minister a message because they are still willing him to restore the government’s fortunes, and his own.

They want him to know they are dismayed by the policy flip-flops, for example over the Medicare co-payment. They remain resentful of the influence and control exercised by Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, and the narrow sources of advice reaching the prime minister’s ears directly. They want him to outline a 2015 agenda he can actually deliver.

But to achieve any of it, he can’t “crash through”, he has to rebuild trust. And that requires an approach this government may really find alien.

Tony Abbott's trust deficit disaster is paralysing his government | Australia news | The Guardian