Heir to the Menzies legacy

BARRY O'Farrell and Tony Abbott offer a study in contrasts.

Barry O'Farrell

ON March 9, 2010, shortly after he was elected federal Liberal leader, Tony Abbott told his partyroom: "We won't win the next election by adopting a Barry O'Farrell-style small-target strategy." Unsurprisingly, O'Farrell didn't appreciate the remarks, responding at the time: "I belong to that brand of Liberal that is actually loyal to other Liberals, so I'll leave that alone."

Yesterday, O'Farrell, now Premier of NSW, offered Abbott the chance to make good on his words. He said that "all options should be on the table" in respect to amending the GST: "Broadening the base, looking at the rate and also the rebates back to the states." There is nothing small-target about that sort of approach. 

Abbott put the GST back on the agenda the previous week, perhaps unintentionally, by announcing he would call for a comprehensive review of taxation policy if he's elected on September 14. Not wanting to limit his options, Abbott refused to follow Labor's lead and rule out adjusting the GST in particular. Opposition Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey has previously said the states would have to do the running on arguing for GST adjustments before the federal Liberals would start listening. O'Farrell has now done just that. 

Labor has predictably jumped on the issue, even though Abbott made it clear any changes in tax policy would only happen in a second term, once a fresh mandate for reform had been secured. 

O'Farrell praised Abbott's "courage" for putting the issue forward, although it is hard to imagine Abbott would have been happy with the NSW Premier highlighting it the way he did. 

There is no love lost between O'Farrell and Abbott. They hail from different wings of the Liberal Party and their careers have been marked by very different paths through the party. O'Farrell is what you might call a creature of the Liberal Party, having made his way up through the Young Liberal movement from an early age. His moderate credentials were on show recently when he came out in favour of gay marriage.

Abbott, on the other hand, nominates the Democratic Labor Party figure BA Santamaria as his first political mentor, before he gravitated towards John Howard in the late 1980s. Abbott is unashamedly conservative, whether it be on the monarchy or his opposition to even having a conscience vote on gay marriage in the Liberal partyroom, much less embracing such a change in policy.

But, as in many other cases in the Liberal Party, the pair's differences are as marked by personality clashes as they are by ideological differences. And insofar as ideological divides do exist, there is not a consistent line between liberalism and conservatism, either in the Liberal Party or between Abbott and O'Farrell. For example, O'Farrell imbibed some liberal economic principles while working for Howard in the 80s, whereas Abbott's brand of conservatism conjoins with Howard more in the social sphere than the economic.

Abbott and O'Farrell first came into conflict when the latter beat Abbott for the NSW state director's job in 1989, after which Abbott went to work as John Hewson's press secretary (on Howard's recommendation) during the now infamous "unlosable" GST election of 1993. 

Yesterday, when asked whether he or Abbott is more likely to reflect Howard's style of governing, O'Farrell quickly responded: "I'm a Menzies man, Tony's a Howard man."

By that he was attempting to cast Abbott in the mould of the conservative Liberal. It was Howard who in 1995 described himself as "the most conservative leader the Liberal Party has ever had". Since then Abbott has described himself as even more conservative than Howard, although colleagues note he has more recently undergone a transformation, as his daughters have grown older, giving him a different perspective on life.

Robert Menzies, in his 1967 book Afternoon Light: Some Memories of Men and Events, reflecting on his career in politics, wrote: "We took the name 'Liberal' because we were determined to be a progressive party." Moderates in the Liberal Party have long used that quote from Menzies to justify the broad church within the party, which prevents it from becoming a solely conservative organisation.

In fact, shortly after the Coalition lost the 2007 election, in a collection of essays on the party's future titled Liberals & Power: The Road Ahead, George Brandis suggested Menzies had more in common with the Deakinite tradition in the non-Labor parties than he did with conservatism. At the time, Abbott described Brandis as "verballing Menzies". Howard would likely agree.

Debates about the approaches O'Farrell, leader of the largest state in the federation, and Abbott, likely soon to be prime minister, take to government and political philosophy will escalate in the years ahead, given they are likely to remain the two most senior Liberals for the foreseeable future. 

Howard biographer and Adelaide University academic Wayne Errington says comparisons with Menzies have become largely outdated, even if they do tell us something about O'Farrell's desire to "preside" rather than "govern".

"For better or worse, voters have much higher expectations of governments today than in the 1950s," Errington says. "National governments are now more responsible for health and education than during Menzies' time. Politicians today spend their time responding to voters, the polls and media demands. Abbott shows no signs of being any different." 

How philosophically different, in fact, are Abbott and O'Farrell? What do their differences tell us about the sorts of governments they are likely to lead in the years to come? Will pragmatism in government narrow differences, real or perceived?

These are interesting questions, not least when considered alongside O'Farrell's need to champion the interests of NSW versus Abbott's historical advocacy for greater centralisation at the expense of federalist principles, an approach shared by Howard.

Yet O'Farrell's approach to his first term as Premier perhaps has more in common with Howard than he cares to recognise. And Abbott's approach from opposition has mirrored O'Farrell in more ways than he might like to admit, given earlier pronouncements that he didn't want to adopt "a Barry O'Farrell-style small-target strategy".

Until recently the Coalition had not announced a new policy for the forthcoming election since the policy script proposed ahead of the 2010 election. Abbott's successful approach to opposition during this term has mirrored the small-target approach that secured O'Farrell a thumping majority at the 2011 NSW state election. Abbott no doubt hopes the NSW results will be replicated federally. 

But in policy terms Errington worries that Abbott's small-target approach risks more at the national level than adopting such a style at the state level does. "Abbott is in danger of being more like (Malcolm) Fraser than Howard," he argues. "By that I mean winning a mandate only to replace an unpopular government. Howard's strategy at least included privatising Telstra. Abbott has a perfect opportunity to take a platform of tax reform to this election, but he is too cautious." 

Errington, who is co-authoring a book for Melbourne University Press on Julia Gillard's prime ministership titled 1000 Days in Hell, identifies Abbott's ability to tear down Labor as his greatest achievement in opposition. "He seems to want to extend that success into his first term of by unwinding Labor's plan rather than building a plan of his own," he says.

"I'm not sure it will make for a particularly good government."

Abbott says he will be busy using his first term to unwind Labor's mistakes and fix its mess. That approach bears marked similarities to the style O'Farrell has adopted, using his first term to focus on fixing the problems left in NSW by 16 years of Labor government. While Liberals in Canberra like to highlight that the premiers of Western Australian and Queensland are more revered than O'Farrell in the federal Coalition, a first-term Abbott administration is set to look more like the first-term O'Farrell government than any of the other state Liberal administrations. It may be that Abbott is following O'Farrell's example in more ways than he or his colleagues would care to admit. Now that O'Farrell has struck a deal with the federal Labor government on DisabilityCare and education, revealing in his interview yesterday on Australian Agenda on Sky News that Abbott had tried to talk him out of doing so on education, conservative columnists are lining up to target O'Farrell and side with Abbott. The divisions within the broader Liberal Party family are perhaps a potent sign of positioning wars to come.

This newspaper's columnist Christopher Pearson recently described O'Farrell as a "pretend conservative", lampooning him for signing up to the Gonski schools reforms. Janet Albrechtsen did likewise, going one step further by describing O'Farrell as "not a real Liberal". Yet it is hard to argue with O'Farrell doing a deal with Canberra when it involves better outcomes for his home state. As one senior Liberal insider put it, "I wonder if those columnists have even looked up the details in the Gonski package. It includes principles Liberals are supposed to support, like a devolution of authority to local schools." 

Abbott himself has, in fact, praised the education reforms suggested by Gonski, doing so again in a questions-and-answers session at his budget-in-reply lunch in Sydney last Friday. He just doesn't think that the money is there at the moment in the federal government's fiscal envelope to pay for expensive changes. But that is not O'Farrell's problem to worry about when he puts his Premier's hat on. As Paul Keating once said, never get between a premier and a bagful of money. Besides, O'Farrell's Education Minister has already found savings in the education budget to cover the extra money the state is required to stump up to go with more funds being provided by the commonwealth.

By signing up first to both schemes, O'Farrell got the best deal available to any of the premiers, because Gillard needed his signature. Howard made a virtue of striking deals with state administrations of differing partisan complexions. Is it any less Liberal (or conservative) to receive money being thrown around, as O'Farrell has done, than it is to be the one doing the throwing (Howard)? 

O'Farrell likes to compare himself to Menzies for purely philosophical reasons, choosing to see Menzies' conservatism as nothing more than a product of the times in which he lived. Perhaps Howard's pragmatism is the more useful point of comparison, as O'Farrell goes on doing deals in the way Howard did. We will have to wait until after September 14 to see which approach Abbott most closely matches. So far he has mirrored what Howard did pre-1996, by attempting to keep the focus on an unpopular government.

Peter van Onselen is a professor at the University of Western Australia.