💧DUKE Clyde (HANSARD)CFW9 (Biden-Harris ELECT)💧 · @nobby15
9th Apr 2016 from TwitLonger
David Crowe - Malcolm Turnbull is too confident for his own good
Malcolm Turnbull is too confident for his own good. He is strolling to the election against rivals who are in much better shape and already running rings around him.
The Prime Minister’s personal lead over Bill Shorten is not enough to justify the complacency in government ranks. Oddly sure that they are above day-to-day politics, Turnbull and his colleagues routinely are trounced by their opponents.
The phony campaign before the real election fight shows that a Labor victory is quite possible. This would reward Shorten for hard campaigning, aggressive tactics and a willingness to take big policy risks.
The more obvious prospect is a narrow win for Turnbull that leaves him weakened throughout the next term of parliament, looking over his shoulder at Scott Morrison.
It is a dispiriting outlook. It is also a realistic one.
Remember the final three terms of John Howard’s government were marked by a phase when support for the leader waned and some of his MPs looked to Peter Costello. The pattern was cemented after 2007 when mid-term leadership rumblings turned into outright mutiny instead.
A stable term of parliament is the exception, not the rule. While Howard was safe in his first term, no leader has that security any longer.
Seeing this treacherous mountain ahead, who would arrive at the base of the cliff with just an old rope and a smile? Turnbull had a baton in his backpack but forgot to pack the cunning and discipline that are essential to the climb ahead.
Dismiss any stories you may read of panic in government ranks about their performance. The real problem is they are not worried enough. Turnbull has fumbled his tactics on negative gearing, a GST increase, income tax cuts and last week’s tax sharing offer to the states.
A new example of the same problem came up this week. On Wednesday morning he had to fix a dangerous vulnerability on school funding after belatedly realising he was exposed to a Labor attack for suggesting the states could run their schools alone. He used a doorstop to reject the idea that he was planning to withdraw commonwealth support.
The Coalition will always be on the defensive on schools when Labor offers more cash, but Turnbull was careless during the past week and made his challenge all the greater. Turnbull will not match Shorten on fully funding the Gonski reforms, a $37 billion program across a decade, but now has to allay voter fears that he will pull out of state schools altogether.
The Prime Minister took command of federal politics by staring down the Senate on voting reform, then issuing an ultimatum on a July 2 double-dissolution election. In the wake of each move, however, he was dragged back by ferocious Labor attacks. He needs a little ferocity of his own.
One old chestnut gives government MPs cause for hope: “Get the policies right and the politics will take care of themselves.” There is no doubt Turnbull has a more difficult task for as long as the government remains in policy limbo, waiting until releasing the budget on May 3 to reveal its hand on tax reform and savings programs that can fund new policies.
But will the politics really look after themselves? Even the best ideas can be enacted only with persistence and strategy, with a little guile for good measure. If Turnbull cannot get the practice of politics right, there is no hope for his program.
There is no sign that Australian politics will be equal to the policy problems ahead.
The disturbing findings on higher education this week, when the Parliamentary Budget Office showed the real impact of student debt, provide another example of this political inadequacy.
The PBO attributes the swelling student debts to a series of policy decisions since 2008, including the Coalition’s move to allow higher fees and Labor’s move to increase the number of places in tertiary education and expand the loan program to students in vocational education.
The response to the report proved the dismal state of politics, as the Coalition blamed Labor for allowing too many people to go to university while Labor blamed the Coalition for encouraging higher fees.
One of the government’s responses was to “welcome all ideas” on how to solve the problem. Is this an admission of failure? More than two years into this term, and more than eight years after government decisions put this new pressure on tertiary education, the country’s politicians are still searching for a solution. The Coalition is not helped by a Labor refusal to admit past mistakes or the Senate’s refusal to compromise.
Another dispute has confirmed the political inability to own up to the dire reversal in the nation’s fortunes. Turnbull’s warning about “fantasy promises” from the past was met with a Labor insistence that its old visions were still fully funded.
It is seven years since Wayne Swan’s second budget outlined the deficits that would come from the global financial crisis. There has been seven years of complacency about the quick return to budget surpluses. This smugness still colours the refusal in some quarters, especially among Labor and the Greens, to admit the need to reconsider old promises in the light of the new reality.
The true cost of grand rhetoric is slowly being revealed. The PBO report on education shows, for instance, that one of the bills from the university education revolution will swell from $1.7bn this year to $11.1bn in 2026.
What of other promises? A decade from now, the National Disability Insurance Scheme is estimated to cost $11.1bn a year. If Labor were to implement the full Gonski school reforms it would cost about $6bn in 2026.
The old Labor promises on hospital funding are even more expensive; it would cost more than $15bn in 2026 to restore the cash removed by Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey.
These are Treasury figures.
The Coalition has its own promises. For too long, Abbott talked of a budget emergency while planning a $5bn paid parental leave scheme. Now the government outlines a defence white paper that is likely to cost $30bn across a decade. Where is the evidence that it will save as much money elsewhere to avoid putting more weight on a shaky budget?
This does not mean the NDIS should be stopped, hospitals starved of cash or the air force grounded. But it does mean voters have been misled by easy claims from politicians about their “fully funded” ideas.
It will take policy skill to surmount these challenges. Some political talent would help as well.