The Australian Government is in trouble. The Governments own newspaper says so. The Australian: ACCORDING to the Newspoll released on Tuesday, if an election were held last weekend Tony Abbott would have suffered the largest two-party-preferred defeat since Gough Whitlam’s in 1975. Worse than Paul Keating’s in 1996, worse than John Howard’s in 2007 and worse than Kevin Rudd’s in September last year. Of course it was only one poll, and there are more than two years to go before an election is due. But a worrying trend of Coalition unpopularity is forming within the Abbott government’s first year in office. This week’s two-party-preferred vote of just 45 per cent for the Coalition emulates the first Newspoll after the budget in mid-May. At the time, senior ministers, including the Prime Minister, sought to mislead the public by suggesting that tough budgets always result in a dip in the polls. They pointed to Peter Costello’s first budget in late 1996, which was certainly tough. But in fact after that budget the Coalition’s polling improved, Howard’s satisfaction rating increased, and polls evaluating the fairness of the budget were also positive. Team Abbott needs to decide if it deliberately sought to rewrite the history books, or simply wasn’t aware of what happened in a first-term Howard government of which many of the team were members. It is tempting to blame the current generation of voters for being more selfish than the last, and therefore unable to grasp the need for the fiscal belt-tightening contained within the budget. But that’s a one-dimensional analysis. The budget also represents broken promises, poorly crafted policies, numerous contradictions and woefully sold initiatives. It took Howard eight years after being elected as prime minister to see the Coalition’s two-party vote dip to 45 per cent, in March 2004. It took Abbott’s government just eight months, and the poor result was reflected again this week, as mentioned. Howard’s two-party-preferred Newspoll dip of March 2004 wasn’t repeated until December 2006, when Rudd was elected Labor leader and the Coalition had been in power for nearly 11 years. Abbott hasn’t even been in office for 11 months. Team Abbott has a problem, and it’s not just a selfish electorate who doesn’t know what’s good for it. Howard’s most common phrase was to acknowledge that the voting public always gets it right. To be sure, polls sometimes do not, and with time between now and polling day the dissatisfaction Newspoll is highlighting can be turned around by the government. But we aren’t talking about one rogue poll. Newspoll results are reflected by Fairfax polls, Galaxy, Essential Media and the Seven Network’s ReachTEL polls. No one wants the political class to be poll-driven — we saw how that worked out for Rudd in his first term. By the same token, showing a tin ear to the polls — as Julia Gillard did in Labor’s second term — can only end one way for a PM and a government. There is a middle ground. Understanding why people are turning off a leader and a government — and finding a way to respond to them without losing philosophical purpose — is the art of professional politics. One good reason why Howard endured as PM for so long at the same time as legislating reforms of substance was because of the (mostly focus-group) work done by his pollster, Mark Textor. Abbott and Textor don’t get on, to say the least, and as a consequence Abbott’s tin ear is showing. It is hard to think of a PM in greater need of the advice of someone such as Textor on how to better connect with voters. This week’s Newspoll also revealed that Abbott’s dissatisfaction rating with voters has slumped to 62 per cent. After a similar amount of time as PM, Howard’s was 35 per cent. Gillard prematurely aged as a PM because of the way she took office (deposing Rudd in his first term and immediately fighting a difficult election). She also broke her election promise not to introduce a carbon tax. Yet even Gillard’s dissatisfaction rating this far into her prime ministership was only 47 per cent, compared with Abbott’s 62 per cent. If the government sticks to its mantra that the budget was both necessary and well-crafted, it will meet its proverbial political maker, perhaps becoming the first one-term government in this country since James Scullin’s in 1931. I still think the more likely scenario is that, closer to the election, enough voters will baulk at re-electing Labor so soon after the Rudd/Gillard era, handing the Coalition a tentative three more years. But if that is all that secures Abbott a second term, it would be a Pyrrhic victory. Keep in mind that the budget is supposed to be only the first step towards serious reform. What’s contained in Joe Hockey’s first budget is far from reforming. Tinkering with pensions, welfare payments and some tax increases does not constitute major reform. Necessary, perhaps. Broken promises, certainly. But reforming, hardly. The reform the nation needs will come in the shape of what follows: how the government responds to Patrick McClure’s final report of simplifying the welfare sector, what the Coalition takes to the next election on the industrial relations front, what meat is put on the bones of the federation white paper announced last weekend, and whether this term’s planned tax summit leads to legislative changes in a second term. Does anyone seriously think that the Abbott government can go into these fights and inevitably lose skin, having already been skinned alive electorally over how it has handled its first budget? Probably not is the answer, and it has no one to blame but itself. Yes, winning weighty arguments is tough in the social-media age we live in: a time when voters are busy and perhaps even conditioned to take prosperity for granted. But good politicians know how to draw the attention of the electorate to the debates the nation must have. Team Abbott could have done that if it hadn’t limited its options with unnecessary promises made in opposition not to do things. Doing so has diluted its chances of winning the arguments Australia needs to have, turning the Coalition into little more than a government of hypocrisy: prepared to hold Labor to its promises but unwilling to live by the same creed. It is a situation entirely of Abbott’s making. Peter van Onselen is a professor at the University of Western Australia.
Posted on: Fri, 04 Jul 2014 23:03:04 +0000
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