As an alternative Prime Minister, former Bulletin journalist Tony Abbott makes a pretty good shock jock. For the second time running Abbott has used his formal budget reply speech not to outline an economic program for Australia but to launch a colourful and energetic but essentially empty political rant about the failures of the Government.
That’s not to suggest that the Gillard Government is light on for failures - far from it. There have been plenty and there are now more after Tuesday’s largely uninspiring Federal Budget. To a significant degree, it’s Tony Abbott’s job as Opposition Leader to chronicle those failures. It is, however, also Tony Abbott’s job to explain what he is going to do as Prime Minister.
As a former journalist, Abbott is prone to one of the most disliked features of the profession – he is much better at critiquing, attacking and denouncing than providing workable alternatives. He has made two formal budget replies as Opposition Leader and both have been criticised. They have sounded more like thundering newspaper columns or talkback radio editorials than economic speeches.
His effort on Thursday was a cut-and-paste job cobbled together from his campaign speeches of last year, wandering way off the fiscal track with his stop-the-boats mantra, to cheers from the spotty-faced Young Liberals dotted about in the public gallery.
Tony Abbott is either unaware or chooses to ignore the fact that these reply speeches are meant to examine the failings of the Government’s economic statement and then outline an alternative approach.
He was rightly marked down last year when he spent the first 20 minutes of his allotted half hour attacking the then Rudd Government, then offering a lame “watch this space” when it came to the Coalition’s budget measures, saying that shadow treasurer Joe Hockey would fill in the details at the National Press Club at a later date.
Abbott’s speech of last year had a terrific line aimed directly at Kevin Rudd, he of the greatest moral challenge of our time. Abbott said that “over-promising, under-delivering politicians are the cause of so much cynicism in public life”. He was dead right.
The trouble for Abbott is that he’s an under-promiser and an under-deliverer. He explained nothing in his speech last year, and he explained nothing in his speech last week, save for one new measure to cut government red tape for small business.
It wasn’t a budget speech, it was a campaign speech. It was a terrific campaign speech. It was often quite funny. His description of the ludicrously wasteful $308 million set-top box scheme for pensioners as “Building the Entertainment Revolution” was a laugh-out-loud line and a clever swipe at Labor’s management of school stimulus spending.
But at some stage Tony Abbott is going to have to shift beyond political stand-up and invective and spell out his own vision. His failure to do so in either of the budget speeches he has delivered thus far bolsters the sledge from his former colleague Peter Costello that Abbott has no interest in or grasp of economic matters.
It is particularly important for the nation that Tony Abbott get his act together and tell us what he’s going to do as he’s pretty much our nominal prime minister anyway. Most of the polls have the Coalition so far ahead, and Abbott so close to Julia Gillard as preferred PM, that there seems to be nothing stopping him from defeating this fatally compromised Gillard/Green/Independent Government.
Cheekily requesting that Julia Gillard call an early election to seek a mandate for the carbon tax isn’t going to make Tony Abbott PM. But the one thing which could stop him from becoming PM is being light on detail about policy or evasive as to what his policy intent really is.
Abbott frequently uses the line that the chief role of government should be “to do no harm”. It’s a line which appeals to my libertarian sensibilities, and I am sure that many other Australians also hold the philosophical view that the less governments do, the better the country will generally be. But to a lot of voters it’s a line which may sound suspect or tricky or vague. Abbott has to come clean with us all at some point about what his government would do and what his government wouldn’t do.
At the last election Abbott was on the run from his former self, signing a gimmicky pledge on day one of the campaign saying that the number-one most sacred policy goal of the conservatives, labour market deregulation, was officially off the agenda for this term. At the moment Abbott has not said whether industrial reform would or should be a part of an Abbott Coalition Government if he is elected at the next poll. His alternative vision is wholly framed around not doing things – no carbon tax, no mining tax, no national broadband network.
Clearly it is possible to win office without promising anything. In NSW Barry O’Farrell was swept to a power with the biggest swing in 60 years by simply running on a detail-free but reassuring promise that he wasn’t the NSW Labor Party. O’Farrell had the luxury of being up against a government which had been in for 16 years and had set a world record for ministerial scandal. He was also a political cleanskin who had never been in power or made an unpopular decision. Abbott does not have either of these advantages. He must use the next 12 months to shift beyond the kind of scattergun narkiness which makes a good opening five-minute spray on talkback radio, but tells us nothing about how things would be different if (or when) he is in charge.
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