Abbott's scheme is perfectly Liberal

THE visceral response directed at Tony Abbott by sections of the fourth estate since the release of his big business-funded paid parental leave scheme has been remarkable.

Abbott has been accused of selling out Liberal Party principles by wanting to slug big business with a levy. He has been accused of political opportunism. He has been ridiculed for changing his mind on the need for such a scheme. Abbott has also been charged with making policy on the run.

Let's deal with these unfair assessments before examining what should be the core of the matter: whether giving working parents (women in particular) six months' leave with full salary to have a child is good policy.

The idea that the Liberal Party is the party of big business and it therefore can't slug big business with a tax, because doing so would go against core principles, shows a misunderstanding of what the Liberal Party was founded on and what has made it successful.

Unlike the Labor Party, which has a formal affiliation with the union movement, the Liberal Party has no such ties on which it can rely. This is one of the reasons the conservatives sometimes struggle in opposition: they don't have a structured base for funding, recruiting personnel and policy assistance.

Big business certainly has never filled the void. If we are to assign an informal base to the Liberal Party, it would be small business -- the section of the economy Abbott has specifically excluded from having to pay for his parental leave levy.

Even if you don't accept my view about small versus big business as the informal core of the Liberal Party, what is the difference between Julia Gillard taking on the unions, as she did with the teachers union over her My Schools website, and Abbott taking on big business over his funding levy?

I don't recall a plethora of articles about Labor selling out its core principles by the journalists who are now attacking Abbott for supposedly having done so.

Big business is a non-ideological grouping that is prepared to finance both sides of politics and stay out of the political fray to preserve its interests. Don't take my word for it; peruse the political donations registry, which highlights that big business gives roughly equally to both sides of the major party divide.

Before Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party in 1945, he made speech after speech about the party's commitment to "the forgotten people", railing against the vested interests of big business and the union movement. While big business might now feel forgotten by Gillard and her new Fair Work Act, the more forgotten quotient of the population in recent years (and that includes those shamefully forgotten by the Howard government) have been working women (and men) in need of adequate parental leave assistance. Abbott wants to redress the failure.

The notion that Liberals aren't supposed to embrace big-picture ideas that promote social policy improvements ignores the words of Menzies when he pointed out that most Australians "see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole."

Nearly 70 years on, that sounds like a good reason to back a generous parental leave scheme.

If Abbott is only being politically opportunistic (and I don't doubt he is aware that the policy will be popular with families), accusations of opportunism need to start at the beginning of his change of heart.. In late 2008, Abbott was drafting his chapter on paid maternity leave for his policy manifesto, Battlelines. It is not as if he is a Johnny-come-lately to the debate.

But that doesn't excuse Abbott's failure to first take the idea to his shadow cabinet for approval. He didn't do so and chose to announce it publicly because he wanted to force the Liberal front bench to support the policy, which duly happened. Abbott did so in order to get an important policy on the agenda, but this is no way to run a political party.

Yes, Abbott's position on paid maternity leave has evolved. He has done a U-turn on the subject since he was in government. John Maynard Keynes said: "When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do?" While the facts in favour of generous paid maternity leave haven't changed, Abbott has started to pay attention to them.

They are these: having children is financially difficult, losing one income for a sustained period makes families less likely to have more kids, the effects of our ageing population can be combated with improvements in the fertility rate, Abbott's standardised levy makes sure businesses don't avoid hiring women to avoid paying maternity leave, and maintaining your salary while on leave for 26 weeks beats going on the minimum wage for 18 weeks (Rudd's scheme).

While Abbott's funding mechanism is certainly a impost on big business, and Liberals do like to bang the drum about lowering taxes, the question that most people should be asking is this: is the initiative worth the pain? More than 70 per cent of people support paid maternity leave, according to polling. Just as when Paul Keating forced everyone to save for their retirement with compulsory superannuation (and big business squealed), Abbott's scheme makes possible a societal transforming goal worth upsetting sectional interests to achieve.

It would be a mistake for Abbott to block Labor's scheme while arguing for his own. By all means force amendments to raise the stingy provisions in Rudd's scheme. But if the government doesn't come to the negotiating table, Abbott has to pass Labor's policy: something is better than nothing. The early indications are that he won't block it.

Meanwhile, the union movement's response to Abbott's policy proves it is prepared to put its affiliation with Labor ahead of the interests of working families. Instead of patting Abbott on the back for a scheme that is far more generous than Rudd's, the ACTU has attacked Abbott. But consider the following submission by the ACTU to the Productivity Commission's investigations into paid parental leave: "The ACTU continues to advocate that parents receive their full income while on paid leave . . . less than full replacement wage undermines the objective of `normalising' parental leave . . . less than full replacement wage entrenches gender roles further because of the gap between actual earnings and the paid parental leave payment."

Abbott couldn't have said it better himself.