It’s never good for a government to look mean, tricky and incompetent at the same time.
One of the three, and you should be ok. Even two of the three may see you get a tick from the voters. But when it’s all three, you’re pretty well stuffed.
The ALP under Rudd and Gillard for the most part suffered – sometimes due to poor media reporting – from the perception that they were incompetent. Even when they had the facts on their side they struggled to convince voters the hand on the rudder was stable. And being incompetent at persuading voters that you are competent is never a good sign.
“But in the past few weeks it has become obvious to all that Abbott’s position is constantly fluid and that this fluidity now applies to his whole government.”
The ALP got a fair degree of leeway because there was the sense that they were not being overly mean. Then things turned that way. The Malaysian deal on asylum seekers, the cuts to benefits for single parents: all gave it a taint of meanness. Plus, it became very clear that they were being mean and tricky to each other.
The Rudd dumping looked mean and certainly tricky. The Gillard dumping looked almost more mean and certainly given the 2 year campaign, decidedly as tricky. So loud was the noise of internal fighting that voters came to believe they were spending more time worried about their own jobs than those of voters.
Stir that together and what do you get? We no longer have an ALP government.
The Abbott government had meanness as its foundation.
Scott Morrison seemed desperate to go out of his way to be mean to asylum seekers, and certainly given his secrecy, he rather revelled in the trickiness as well. But at least he appeared competent.
While the number of votes to be gained from being mean to asylum seekers may be overstated, there certainly doesn’t appear to be a lot of evidence that conservative governments at least suffer from it – so long as they are competent. Unfortunately, the only measure most count in terms of competency is official boat arrivals.
But the meanness quickly spread to other areas.
Joe Hockey and Kevin Andrews made it clear they viewed people on welfare as lesser folk who are letting down the side by not doing enough lifting. This talk was backed up by the May Budget which was a Broadway musical of meanness.
It also saw the government take a very tricky turn as they clearly broke a stack of election promises and yet refused to admit they did. The phrasing used to keep up the refusals reached inane heights pretty quickly and remained there, and so too has the sense of trickiness.
Clearly, the government had some issues it needed to deal with. Thus this week, with parliament and any scrutiny that it might entail finished for the year, the Government decided to start dumping some of its rancid waste.
On Sunday, Abbott announced that his signature policy of the paid parental leave scheme was to be massively changed. While he might catch some flak for this, if the child care side of the policy ends up being good, it won’t matter too much. But given there seems to be a tendency for the government to focus on subsidies for in-home child care (ie nannies) the likelihood of a good policy remains very much in doubt.
Then, on Tuesday the big move of the week came in the announcement that the $7 GP co-payment was being dumped.
But of course it wasn’t being dumped at all. The government struggling with a policy that is viewed as mean, decided to take the tricky route and shift the onus onto the doctors.
Abbott announced that the $7 co-payment was to be dropped and replaced by cutting the Medicare rebate by $5 – effectively forcing GPs to charge $5 extra or else take a 13% pay cut. With perhaps the most pure example of disingenuousness you will ever be unfortunate enough to witness, Abbott repeatedly suggested the $5 fee would be “optional”.
This is standard operating procedure for this government – it cuts funding to the ABC, health, education, and then suggests any cuts to services or increases to fees that occur as a result has nothing to do with the cuts.
It’s tricky. Worse, it is transparently so.
Even worse, in this instance it is poor policy given the cuts are to primary health care, despite the fact that such care is essential for keeping health costs down. Accessible GPs take pressure of emergency wards and regular GP consultations are a lot more cost effective than leaving it to the point where a hospital stay is required.
Thus far, because the government has actually done very little, the issue of their competency has largely rested on policy development rather than program delivery. But the difficulty for voters is that there appears little consistency and even less of a sense that the government is capable of developing clear and considered policy.
Lazy commentators have in the past suggested that regardless of what you thought of Abbott, you knew what he stood for. Such a line has only ever been possible to write if you are good at ignoring all evidence. But in the past few weeks it has become obvious to all that Abbott’s position is constantly fluid and that this fluidity now applies to his whole government.
Is the PPL scheme set in stone? Well, yes ... then no. On the GP co-payment he is not for turning ... and then he does (or at least wants you to believe he has). On the global Green Climate Change Fund he says Australia won’t commit funds ... and then this week it does. Yet the $200m we have committed comes out of the foreign aid budget – directly contradicting Julie Bishop’s statement in 2011 that they “would certainly not spend our foreign aid budget on climate change programs”. Of course, she denies this is a contradiction.
In opposition, Malcolm Turnbull was against internet filtering, this week he announces the government will attempt to filter torrent sites in a pathetically futile attempt to stop movies and TV shows being downloaded for free. Of course he denies that this is an example of filtering.
Added to the complete lack of consistency is the growing soap-opera inside the government, which has reached such a level that both Julie Bishop and Peta Credlin felt the need to go on the record that they had a wonderful working relationship. As the experience of the ALP has shown, if internal conflicts go on, it begins very quickly to reflect upon your competency.
The view of the government as mean is pretty much set in stone. That’s fine so long as they can convince people that they are being up-front about it, and that it is for a good purpose.
But the government is now doing its best to appear tricky and is struggling to come up with policies that have any sense of competency attached to them.
As the polls show, being mean, tricky and incompetent is not the way to get re-elected. The next election is still a while away, but given the past 18 months I’d suggest the mean and tricky vibe is going to be hard to shake, their only hope is to at least be seen as competent.
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