In a face-off between a simple argument and a complex one, the former usually wins hands down. Over the last year and a half, this is where Tony Abbott has had the edge over Julia Gillard.
True, Opposition leaders can do this more readily because their chief task is criticism.
Delivering programs is inherently more complex. For governments, the normal budget jiggery-pokery notwithstanding, the sums must add up.
Oppositions can play fast and loose because they deal in hypotheticals and face less scrutiny.
Thus, complaints of a $10.6 billion black hole in Mr Abbott’s election costings and another $5 billion forfeited in spending cuts being blocked by the Opposition in the Senate, go mostly over voters’ heads.
When Mr Abbott was asked yesterday on Radio National if he shared the Government’s 2012/13 surplus timeline, he said: “Sure, we’ve got to get the budget back into surplus. We should do it as quickly as possible, but let’s not let these guys off the hook for their massive waste and incompetence.”
Was that yes or no? Who knows?
But this is important because if he is committed to the surplus by then, he has some explaining to do - particularly after blocking savings measures the Government is relying on to get there.
Tony Abbott’s facility for gliding above the annoying detail, however, is merely one side of the Government’s problem. The other is its own tendency to manufacture confusion.
Think border protection; carbon tax; mining tax; the republic; and gay marriage, to name a few.
Precisely where does the ALP stand on these things and why?
In just over a week from now, that problem will worsen when Wayne Swan unveils his fourth Budget. All the signs point to a document which in political terms, will wind the complexity dial around to eleven.
Labor is bracing for another hit in the polls - presumably leading to a primary vote with a ``2’’ in front of it. At best Government insiders are predicting zero post-Budget bounce.
Such is Labor’s dilemma. The economy’s ebullience through the dark days of the GFC was in no small part down to the Government’s insightful approach to the crisis in late 2008.
But by election time, it got nothing for it.
Voters did not thank Labor for a storm that never hit. In Canberra, they call this the “counter-factual” problem: People won’t credit you with saving their jobs because they never went through the hardship of losing them.
And even if they bought the dire storm warnings at the start of the GFC, the cash hand-outs, free pink batts, new school buildings and generous small business tax concessions, ensured no lasting impression from a recession that never was. Besides, at that stage the Government enjoyed stratospheric support.
Scroll forward to the present day and the reverse is true. Now, voters are faced with the massive bill for those freebies and it is being called in by a deeply unpopular minority government.
Worse, it is peddling a less palatable message now that despite rising cost-of-living pressures, it’s time to cut programs and hit you with some new taxes. To paraphrase Frank Zappa, that’s about as welcome as an ice-pick in the forehead.
Selling this would be a tough ask for any government, but for one as low on authority, as bereft of goodwill, and as communicationally challenged as this one, it is close to a deal-breaker.
There are other contradictions too. To get to that 2012/13 surplus, the Commonwealth balance sheet must first go further into the red. Que? Some reports suggest a deficit as high as $50 billion - and this while spending is actually being cut.
If that’s not complex enough, the Government wants voters to understand that there is so much private capital coming down the pipeline for Resources Boom Mk II, that they should take a haircut to make room. People already battling with soaring food, petrol, and electricity prices, will be asked to make further sacrifices for a boom the Government says, won’t deliver as much revenue as the last one despite being even bigger. Batten down the hatches, the good times are coming! Little wonder voters are confused.
And then of course, there’s the new taxes. First cab off the rank is the flood levy. A narrow majority supported the 12-month tax in the lee of the summer disasters despite Opposition mouth-frothing, but it will just be another cost pressure when it finally begins on July 1, despite its mildness.
And next year, subject to the enormous hurdle of actually getting them through parliament, there will be both a new carbon tax and new minerals resources rent tax. Neither is popular. Neither has been properly explained.
The secret to Tony Abbott’s effectiveness has been his reduction of complex public policy problems to mere slogans mostly playing to prejudice, but also suggestive of his values: Stop the boats, end the waste, repay the debt.
The Government does not have the luxury of such crude simplicity or of hypothetical savings and unfunded promises. But it needs to get its story straight or it will enjoy these luxuries soon.
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