David Marr Tuesday 10 February 2015
Instead of frank admissions and a fresh vision with equity at its heart, the prime minister gave us mechanical policy tweaks indicating little shift in course
Tony Abbott has promised to ‘socialise’ decisions before they become final. Photograph: Stefan Postles/Getty Images
They don’t add up to much. Tony Abbott is promising new tactics but not a change of heart. Missing from the list of pledges made in Canberra on Monday was the big promise that might save his government: to be fair.
The issue of equity is deep, obvious and unacknowledged by Abbott in the multiple mea culpas he delivered.
The polls haven’t turned against the prime minister because Peta Credlin needs her wings clipped. His captain’s picks aren’t really the problem. He’s not on the nose because his backbench is restive. The Senate has been embarrassing but hardly the cause of the dramatic collapse in his standing over the past year.
That collapse began with a budget that was seen as manifestly unfair. “It was bold and ambitious,” he told the media on Monday. “We did, with the wisdom of hindsight, bite off more than we could chew.”
But Abbott is still fighting for that budget. He’s tweaking what can be tweaked and has ditched measures he knows have no hope in the Senate. But hindsight hasn’t persuaded him to abandon the underlying strategy of making students, pensioners, the sick and the unemployed pay a high price to rescue the nation from its fiscal difficulties.
“We will socialise decisions before we finalise them,” is Abbott’s new mantra. It’s startling to hear him use the “s” word as a compliment. But listen closely and it’s clear he’s not talking about sharing anything with the electorate. He’s not talking equity.
All he’s promising from this time forward is consultation: every month he will hold a full cabinet meeting and at least every two months he will talk to the chairs of his backbench committees. “I want to harness,” Abbott said, “... all the creativity and insights that this party room has to offer.”
Mechanical proposals emerged one after the other as the media circled the wounded prime minister. He will stop awarding knighthoods in the order of Abbott. Ministers can now pick their own junior staff. A family package will soon be unwrapped. Small business can once again – despite the wretched state of the revenue – look forward to tax cuts.
“All of us have had to have a good, long, hard look at ourselves over the last few weeks,” said Abbott. But if they identified anything fundamentally wrong with his government, he was not going to say. For a man who still faces political annihilation, he has very few big-picture insights to offer.
What about the fundamental values of the Coalition? How can the government restore its fortunes until the question of fairness is addressed? Until then, how can voters know what Abbott means when he declares his government is “back at work for the people of Australia”?
Abbott comes from a political tradition where fairness mattered. The old Democratic Labor party was in many ways narrow-minded and vengeful, but it sought fair outcomes for working Australians. Those values could guide Abbott still.
It’s no mystery to the pollsters who advise his government that equity is a fundamental issue with the electorate. Whether Abbott sees this is not so clear. He says he has peered over the precipice, but has he looked behind him to see what’s pressing his government to the edge?
On Monday he might have delivered a mea culpa that would have won him all the time he needed to recover. It could have been his Churchill moment, the point at which he squared with the people and began to earn their trust.
He could have talked as he did about the big tasks ahead, about leading a government that wouldn’t shirk the challenges Australia faces. But he might have added a promise: that when he asks the Australian people to make sacrifices for the good of the nation we will all share the pain.
