Lenore Taylor, political editor Friday 13 March 2015
The prime minister can no longer skirt around the things that matter: hospitals, education, welfare, climate change and the rest
Here, there and everywhere: Tony Abbott in Blackburn, Melbourne, on Thursday. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP
Tony Abbott, drained of authority but determined to hold his job, is racing around the country saying things he thinks will please his backbench and his party’s base and perhaps elicit a bounce in the opinion polls, although, as we have seen, that doesn’t always follow.
It’s quite a spectacle for politics watchers. But the more important spectacle is a government, in whatever-it-takes-to-survive mode, increasingly unable to explain how it will take care of the things Australians elected them to do – such as our healthcare, our kids’ education, the elderly, the unemployed, our contribution to slowing climate change, our attitudes towards Indigenous Australians, our unity of purpose as a nation.
Here are 10 of those questions for the prime minister.
Who is going to pay for our hospitals?
Your last budget announced that, from 2017, the federal government’s share of hospital spending will grow each year in line with inflation and not by the previously promised 6% or more (which was calculated to help meet the actual cost of running hospitals). The budget claimed this would “save” $50bn over the next 10 years, but of course it didn’t “save” anything. It just hand-balled the cost on to the states.
At the time it was assumed this was a tricky negotiating ploy to force the states to the negotiating table when the government starts negotiations about tax and federalism. But then the intergenerational report assumed this vastly reduced future commonwealth funding would continue indefinitely, which helped you make a political point about the long-term forecasts for your “existing policy”, but didn’t actually answer the real question about who would pay for the hospitals. The states are deeply worried.
As the NSW premier, Mike Baird, said in a recent interview with Michelle Grattan, “What happened last federal budget is not sustainable. That was, the commonwealth and the federal government said, ‘We are going to allocate a large part of the future growth in health costs from ourselves to the state governments.’
“Now I said at the time, and I say it again ... both publicly and privately to the prime minister, that is not sustainable. The states do not have the capacity to meet those health costs on their own. The commonwealth has a critical role to play.”
Voters might well be worried, too, with the future of a functioning hospital system apparently now reliant on your government finding the authority to reach an agreement with the states, half of them now Labor, on tax reform and a shake-up of the federation, and to somehow find the political courage to take radical changes to the next election.
Who’s going to pay for our schools?
The last budget also announced that $30bn would be sliced from projected spending on schools. This may have come as a surprise to voters who had heard you insist during the election campaign that parents could “vote Labor or Liberal and get exactly the same amount of funding for your school”. But if they had read the fine print, they would have seen your pledge to match the funding promised after the Gonski review applied only “over the forward estimates”, which meant for four years. The budget does that, and then reverts to increases in line with inflation, and, once again, the intergenerational report assumes inflation-linked increases will continue indefinitely.
The Gonski report said additional money was necessary to stop poorer schools and disadvantaged students from falling further behind. But your government rejected a Senate report calling for Gonski to be implemented, arguing that the report had “created fissures rather than consent and agreement” and insisting “teacher quality” and “school autonomy” were much more important than money (as if these were either/or propositions).
Once again, the states (who have to run the schools, but need your money to do it) are deeply alarmed. The NSW education minister, Adrian Piccoli, has said, “The commonwealth government’s budget decision is more than a breach of a commitment with the NSW government, it is a breach of faith with all school students in the state.”
Are you going to cut the real value of the pension or not?
The budget suggested the annual increase to the pension would be linked to inflation rather than average wages, which one economist has calculated would mean its value would drop from 28% of average weekly earnings today to just under 16% by 2055. The new social services minister, Scott Morrison, has said that is not a “viable outcome” but your government still wanted to find savings. The intergenerational report suggested you might revert to the higher annual increases in 15 years (like it would be up to you by then anyway). So what is your policy, and why are you looking for savings by reducing the real value of all pensions, rather than restricting eligibility for part pensions or concessions?
What is your policy on Medicare?
After four unsuccessful stabs at it, you say a Medicare co-payment is now “dead, buried and cremated” but your health minister, Sussan Ley, says she still wants a “values signal” for visits to the doctor for people who can afford it (which would be a co-payment, right?) and you’ve frozen the Medicare rebate which means doctors are going to have to charge a co-payment over time or go out of business. So is the co-payment dead, or is it just resting until the political fuss dies down?
What is your policy on industry ‘welfare’?
This seemed clear for your first year in office. You were the guys who were “ending the age of entitlement”. You were so determined you didn’t even flinch when the car industry announced it was going in 2017. But then this week you returned “entitlements” to the car industry worth $100m, $500m or $900m, depending on who one talked to – but seem to be closer to $100m, apparently to make sure the car industry didn’t close down one year earlier, i.e. in an election year.
What is your policy on welfare?
Morrison says he’s open to alternative savings to the plan for under 30-year-olds to get the dole for only six months of the year (which the Sunday Telegraph informed us was imposed by your office over the protestations of the relevant ministers). But what are they?
How are you actually going to do something about climate change?
Even your own ministers know the $2.5bn “direct action” plan cannot possibly meet the deeper emissions reductions you will have to agree to in Paris in December. They point to the detail in your policy that would allow you to set tough “baselines” for industries, allowing them to buy and sell emissions permits from each other. Will you agree to that kind of emissions trading scheme? Can you, after what you said about the last one? If not, what is Australia’s climate policy?
How do you plan to be the prime minister for Indigenous Australians when you keep saying things that offend Indigenous Australians?
That “lifestyle choices” comment was obviously the final straw, even for Indigenous leaders who have been supportive of your agenda. They reacted with distress and incredulity. If you genuinely want to make a positive and practical difference to Indigenous affairs during your time as prime minister, how do you rebuild those bridges?
What are you doing with this budget?
Do you still think we are dealing with a debt and deficit disaster that requires big spending cuts? Or do we just need to restrain spending for the time being? Do you abandon last year’s stalled budget policies before you unveil this year’s offering? How does all of that relate to the treasurer’s message that “doing nothing is not an option?” And the big question: will you restore spending for hospitals and schools if you fail to do a tax deal that allows the states to find different ways to pay for them?
It was frustrating enough when you didn’t reveal many policies in opposition, but leaving so many major policy areas so unclear after 18 months in government seems very neglectful. With so much depending on a tax and federation deal with the states which may or may not occur, with so many of your achievements running to stuff you’ve undone or abolished (the carbon tax, the mining tax) and so much confusion about your intentions on so many big issues, how do you claim to be a fully functioning government?
