Lenore Taylor Political editor Friday 14 August 2015
As the divisions deepen and the polls get worse, the government is again descending into a self-defeating cycle of instability and suspicion
Tony Abbott at question time on Thursday. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
Behind the Abbott government’s very bad week – a careening series of disasters that looked like the political version of an AAMI ad – is a common thread that could wreck it permanently. Tricky politics has driven Tony Abbott into yet another crisis.
So many of the prime minister’s problems begin in the strange netherworld of decision making, where policy is crafted to fit a slogan rather than the other way around, based on the insulting assumption that voters are too dumb to notice.
All politicians, from all sides, weigh policy ideas against how they might play in the electorate but this government is coming up with the slogan and calculating the political “play” before it even has a policy. It’s a reckless way to run the country. Now the trickiness is sometimes aimed at internal opponents as well as Labor.
Same-sex marriage, for example, was going to be a difficult issue for any Coalition leader. In the end the party backed Abbott’s view that it should continue to oppose any change to the definition of marriage during this parliament but that this position wouldn’t be tenable any longer and that maybe there should be a popular vote on the issue.
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But now supporters of same-sex marriage see Abbott and other opponents of the idea taking the confused party-room non-decision about what should happen after the next election and crab walking it towards a process that will ensure nothing ever happens.
Abbott has the slogan all ready – he’s for a “people’s vote” and the Labor party is for a “politicians’ vote”. He just didn’t have a policy.
Malcolm Turnbull and others say the party room did not in fact make a definite decision in favour of a “people’s vote” at all and there is obviously no decision on what kind of people’s vote. Some are opposed to a change, like Scott Morrison (who is apparently positioning as the conservative’s preferred alternative leadership candidate), are talking up the idea of a constitutional referendum which would ensure change never happened, and isn’t even necessary because we already know the federal government has the power to make laws about marriage, as the attorney general very pointedly pointed out to his cabinet colleague on national television.
The ministerial slugfest via TV grabs continued through Friday in a kind of real-time display of government divisions. Perhaps if the cabinet had been consulted before the surprise party-room meeting and had come up with a strategy things would have turned out differently. But there are a lot of same-sex marriage supporters in cabinet, so that might have got in the way of the tricky.
The “people’s vote versus politician’s vote” slogan strategy was designed to “neutralise” the issue, but in fact has ensured it will continue to be an issue right through the next poll. Tricky has quickly turned into a political car crash.
The Coalition’s new climate change targets may yet turn into another example. They aren’t enough to meet Australia’s share of limiting global warming to 2C and they are behind many developed nations but they aren’t as low as some of the government’s previous decisions on climate policy might have led us to anticipate.
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This, we are informed by numerous commentators, is so the government can run the slogan that it will protect the environment without wrecking the economy (like Labor will). But there is, as yet, almost no detail about how the government intends to meet the target and therefore no way to measure the economic cost of either plan. The government got around this by the Daily Telegraph suddenly unearthing three-year old modelling of targets it asserted were Labor’s. When there are actual costing of alternative policies the cost may not be all that different. And, in any event, polls show voters are willing to wear some cost increases, and don’t trust the Coalition’s bona fides.
More tricky-gone-wrong came with the revelations about the royal commission into trade union corruption.
It was designed with two main objectives in mind – to examine deeply concerning allegations concerning some trade unions and to mortally wound the one-time union leader Bill Shorten. The former could have been achieved with the judicial inquiry the Coalition promised during the election campaign, or by using existing processes, such as the courts. But the latter was obviously much better served by the gravitas of a royal commission. It was reported at the time that the Coalition was so enthusiastic in pursuing its political goals that the terms of reference had to be corrected in cabinet because as originally drafted they would have actually set up a royal commission into the Labor party rather than the labour movement.
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It was this real suspicion of political motivation that lent lethal credibility to the revelation that the royal commissioner Dyson Heydon had agreed to speak at a Liberal party fundraiser – a fact that will be used to try to shut down the hearings, sully the commission’s findings and certainly blunt its usefulness as a tricky political manoeuvre.
And this week came after many other examples of backfiring trickery – like the attempt to head off cabinet discontent over unconstitutional and unworkable citizenship laws (that had been flagged for a year in the media but never presented in detail to the cabinet) by getting backbenchers to write a letter asking that they go further. Almost every constitutional lawyer in the country has now lined up to say the bill is, indeed, likely to be unconstitutional and may even lead to the stripping of the citizenship of scores of folk convicted in the past of damaging commonwealth property. It is unclear how the government intends to handle this.
At the same time the government’s policy agenda is thin and confused, its days filled with ad hoc announcements, and protestations about jobs and growth and ill-defined stories about intentions to get even tougher on national security than its already extremely tough stance.
Voters had already lost trust in the prime minister, dating back to his first ill-considered budget. His colleagues’ faith got pretty shaky earlier this year as well. They are now once again expressing despair. As the divisions deepen and the polls get worse, the Coalition is again descending into a self-defeating cycle of instability, suspicions and second guessing of the leadership intentions of Turnbull or Morrison or Julie Bishop.
Some argue the government just needs a clear narrative to sell its policies. But that would require the trickiness to be set aside long enough to figure out what they are.
