Abbott government going around in circles

Illustration. Eric Lobbecke. Inquirer. 05/09/2015. Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey on carousel.

The Abbott government turns two on Monday. It’s not a happy birthday. It’s a mile behind in the polls and this is causing intense morale problems and fuelling new leadership speculation.

The government is in something like a long-term crisis. It could still fight its way out. Its best prospect of doing that will be by winning the Canning by-election on September 19, regrouping around Tony Abbott, refreshing itself with a significant cabinet reshuffle after parliament rises in December and focusing on an economic agenda.

An early election is by no means out of the question, although such a radical step would require a certain very particular set of circumstances.

However, the government’s performance in internal coherence, communications strategy, political management and policy clarity will need to lift substantially if it is to bring the polls back to a position from which it can win.

It is not only the government that is in crisis. There is a separate crisis of the Liberal Party as an organisation across most of Australia. That the Liberals could win 53 per cent of the vote in South Australia and not win office, that Campbell Newman could burn a decisive mandate in Queensland, that Ted Baillieu and Denis Napthine could achieve almost nothing in Victoria, bears out this grim assessment.

Nor does the crisis end there. The Labor Party is also in crisis, being dragged by its union dependence ever further left, ever further from policies that could sustain it or the nation in government. Bill Shorten faces his own crisis. The Opposition Leader’s extraordinary position of opposition to the China free trade agreement, which puts him at odds with all the Labor premiers, is potentially enough to wreck his leadership and furnish a huge part of a government revival.

There is an element in common across both parties’ crises. That is the growing influence on politics of the worst tendencies in social media, and the inexorable rise of the trade union movement as the richest, most powerful and most destructive campaigning force in Australian politics.

The substantial abdication of the business community from political battle damages not only the Liberal Party but Labor as well. It makes the achievement of mainstream, workable policy exceedingly difficult for either side.

The retreat of business from most meaningful engagement in the political process is the latest example of an eroding will, and crisis of identity, among leading institutions. Its retreat from meaningful policy advocacy is leaving the field open to the union movement, as well as to extremists, populists and single issue obsessives.

None of this is an excuse for the political inadequacies of the Abbott government. The government certainly exists in a relentlessly toxic and destructive political culture that may make sensible government from anyone all but impossible. Nonetheless, it has been responsible for a lot of its own misery.

The worst failures are tactical mismanagement. After the federal budget, the government staged a recovery in the polls.

The budget itself was well received. Abbott was earning respect for the measured, but tough-minded way he dealt with national security. The trade union royal commission was exposing serious alleged criminality, and also less serious but still disturbing malpractice, in the trade union movement.

Shorten was on the ropes. He was less popular than Abbott. TheSydney Morning Herald called for him to stand down from Labor leadership. The government’s supporters, including millions of Australians who simply wanted better government, could look ahead to a revived government and a better policy debate.

But it was all derailed by a series of tactical missteps that have had a grievous impact cumulatively. The biggest was the Bronwyn Bishop helicopter saga. Bishop has been a noble warrior for the Liberal Party, but it is to her grave discredit that she was so slow and bitterly reluctant to resign when the whole world knew she could not possibly stay in the face of such massive public backlash.

The government’s tactical maladroitness lay in two areas. The lesser problem was taking so long to change the political context by showing that so many Labor politicians had done more or less what Bishop did. The larger fault was letting the problem run and run. Many backbenchers knew from the moment of Bishop’s first disastrous press conference that she was gone. Delay was disaster.

A prime minister has to be ruthless in protecting the interests of his government and the nation. Contrast the slowness in resolving the Bishop matter with the speed with which John Howard required Ian Campbell, the former environment minister, to resign in 2007, simply because he had met the disgraced Labor lobbyist and former WA Premier Brian Burke.

Howard was attacking Kevin Rudd for his dealings with Burke. Sacking Campbell was pretty rough, but it is a measure of the ruthlessness with which the otherwise gentlemanly Howard defended his government.

Then came the revelation that Liberal backbencher Warren Entsch was going to sponsor a bill instituting same-sex marriage. This should have forced the government to work out this matter. The logical thing would have been for a freewheeling cabinet discussion about the best approach.

But it is now very difficult for cabinet to have discussions on issues as sensitive as that because they often leak. A partyroom meeting was essential eventually, and the result was a good one, a plebiscite and a conscience vote after the next election, but it totally overshadowed the efforts by Greg Hunt, one of the government’s strongest performers, to garner coverage for his carbon abatement targets.

Then came the Dyson Heydon affair. This is mostly confected outrage, but it was foolish for any branch of the Liberal Party to invite Heydon to speak while he was a royal commissioner, even if the event was to be held after the commission’s scheduled finish. Again the government’s tactical response was slow. All of the examples of serving judges speaking to Labor Party-sponsored functions should have been available to the government within an hour of the subject breaking.

The China FTA may be a critical issue not only to our economic future but to politics as well. But the government has been slow to make a big effort to explain its benefits. It has been very slow to recognise how powerful the CFMEU-led campaign was becoming. The last two weeks the Abbott government has responded powerfully on this and all the Labor premiers have come in behind the FTA because its benefits are such a no-brainer. But for the moment the FTA is actually a polling negative for the government. It nonetheless has the potential to destroy Shorten because of the deep division — between good policy and populism — it opens on his side of politics.

Then last Friday the Australian Border Force issued a positively demented press release that gave rise to the reasonable inference that it was planning to stop and interrogate people at random about their visa status. Any official who cannot understand how the words in the release would sound to many people of migrant backgrounds in this country is a dunce. Of course, the Border Force never had any such intention.

Naturally, Twitter went mad, the usual suspects assembled for a tiny demonstration (thus providing TV footage) and the ABC and the Fairfax press beat the story up mercilessly. The tactical slowness here was for the government not to recognise it was going to take a terrible bath over this and get out quickly with a clear, indeed passionate, denial, apology and grovelling retraction. Instead, the press conference was late, it was fronted by an official instead of a member of the government and the wording was equivocal in admitting the mistake.

It is probably true that Fairfax and the ABC would have gone bananas over the story anyway, but a rapid, absolutely clear government denial would have had to be included in their coverage.

All these incidents are explicable and even in a sense forgivable. But they add up to serial tactical failure. They suggest a government with clogged internal processes that cannot respond nimbly and quickly. Modern politics requires response within the cycle and the cycle is getting shorter.

Not all the government’s failures are tactical. There are structural problems. Joe Hockey as Treasurer has lost credibility and traction with both the public and the business community. Economic competence is the Liberals’ core brand, the foundation of its electoral appeal.

Everyone thinks Hockey a good person. But his problems are fourfold. He has had no success in creating or sustaining any narrative of economic policy. In opposition there was one speech about an end to the age of entitlement, with precisely no follow up. In the first year of government there was a debt and deficit emergency. Now there are to be tax cuts. Can you follow that?

Second, he makes too many mistakes — poor people don’t drive cars, and so on.

Third, he is not a relentless retail politician. He often goes missing from the debate. Mathias Cormann is the government’s best economic spokesman followed closely by Josh Frydenberg.

Fourth, Hockey gets distracted by nonsense — chairing the republic push, exempting tampons from the GST, and more.

The government’s other structural problem is the constant and only sometimes subterranean leadership speculation. The Liberal Party is one of the last Westminster parties in which the leadership is solely and at a moment’s notice the prerogative of the parliamentary caucus. Consistent poor polls mean there is a leadership subtext to everything.

Abbott is still by a vast distance the Liberals’ best option. If the party should lose the Canning by-election, however, there will be renewed leadership trouble. The blood and gore involved in a leadership assassination would almost certainly condemn the Liberals to electoral failure.

But the political culture has become febrile and neurotic. Rudd lost the prime ministership when he was still ahead in the polls, but his caucus panicked. Abbott is the Liberals’ best campaigner and provided he wins in Canning he has the chance to put things right.

A cabinet reshuffle is likely after parliament rises at the end of the year. There need to be two or three cabinet departures so there can be a major refresh and reset.

All this does not spell nirvana for Shorten. If he rejects the China FTA he will have undertaken one of the greatest acts of national vandalism in modern Australian politics. But the broader crisis for Shorten is that his party is drifting far to the left of sustainable policy. He has no credible ideas on taming the deficit, his renewable energy targets would impose massive costs, he opposes every savings measure the government produces and he supports the biggest version of every social spending proposal.

In the very short term, Shorten is the beneficiary of the wild populism embodied in the CFMEU’s anti-China campaign. But his fundamental failure of leadership will haunt him.

At the same time, the political power and financial muscle in political matters of the union movement is a great asset for Labor. But the arrogance of this power will produce in time a savage backlash. If Shorten is elected, he could be a one-term prime minister who fails on policy and politics.

In the meantime, if Shorten does reject the FTA in parliament Abbott will surely consider an election on the twin issues of Labor’s economic vandalism and curbing union abuses and standing up to union power. Abbott could well lose such an election. But he could well win it. Any victory in those circumstances would give his government an overwhelming mandate and restore Abbott’s authority within his party.

This thinking is speculative, but it cannot be ruled out.

Incidentally, the failure of business, with the exception of the miners, to put any serious grunt behind a pro-FTA campaign shows a terrible erosion of their culture and their understanding of the long-term threat to their social licence. US business fights for good policy. In Australia, the unions now function like a giant American political action committee on the left, and there is no equivalent on the centre right.

Business will advertise in support of gay marriage, in part to soften its image, but is extremely reluctant to put dollars behind the bedrock of good policy.

A final feature of the crisis in our political culture hurts the Liberals particularly. Social media like Twitter skew heavily to the left. Only about 10 per cent of Australians use Twitter. But journalists at Fairfax and the ABC are heavily influenced in their assessment of the importance of issues by it.

Social media hurts the Liberals in another way. It massively empowers the populists and extremists on the right, so that centre right vote is now likely to fracture as the centre left vote has.

Abbott confronts problems no Liberal prime minister has ever confronted before. But that’s what Australians pay him for.