The judgement that health is a vote winner for Labor presumably comes from running a finger down the list of the parties’ strongest issues and stopping at the one on which Labor scores best. It seems as though Rudd has taken this to heart by challenging Abbott to debate health next week. Rudd clearly wants to have some issue to take Abbott up on while the climate change agenda stays in limbo, with no sign of revival now until at least June. But despite the best intentions of Gerard and Dennis, health may not be the clear-cut answer for the government it may seem.

There is something very politically useful in Labor’s health reform plan for the government, namely the anti-political attack it implies on the state governments. But what is the basis for that attack? Namely that state governments, especially Labor state governments, are seen as no longer capable of effectively running state services, or at least no better than the Liberals.

When state governments began depoliticising during the 1990s, and being about little more than public services, Labor’s natural links with the public service unions, and the way that translated into higher state spending in health and education, appeared as an advantage. However, given it was one of the reasons for the depoliticisation of state government in the first place, the erosion of Labor’s links with the unions started to work its away through. Combined with no real difference on spending priorities, Labor’s advantage has fallen away and in fact is now getting blamed for the state of public services. Having nothing to oppose doesn’t help the Liberals either, but they only have to look viable for even a few weeks before the election and suddenly they are in with a chance.

This problem of the impact of Labor’s eroding social base is being reproduced at the Federal level and suggests Labor in Canberra will have no more to offer running public services than state Labor did. An example of the political problems this can cause was on display last night on The 7.30 Report with Gillard talking about the claims in The Australian that the cost of the school buildings was blowing out. There was this interesting exchange about where some of these claims came from:

KERRY O’BRIEN: The New South Wales Teachers’ Federation talks about principals, teachers and parents being concerned about estimates blowing out and payments to builders way beyond normal construction costs. They’re the people on the ground.

Are you confident that the various audits are actually efficient themselves, are actually preventing waste, or arriving, as I said, after the horse has bolted?

JULIA GILLARD: Kerry, give me a break. The New South Wales Teachers’ Federation is in a vicious dispute with the Government because they’re anti MySchool. They don’t want the My School website, they never wanted it and, of course, they’re talking about boycotting the national tests.

Part of the issue for teachers here is the way that the MySchool website has turned the performance of school students into wholly being about the school (and teachers) rather than the socio-economic background that they came from. Even a cursory look at where the good and bad performing schools are would reveal it to be also a map of something else. This, plus the bypassing of state teacher unions that the national tests and curriculum represent, would not have been possible in the past from a Labor government, but is certainly possible now and especially led by someone as anti-union as Gillard. Yet by doing so Labor loses the backing of the unions in carrying out such public service shake-ups and, as in this case, even to the point where they will feed stories to the government’s critics.

We have been here before. The insulation saga was not even a traditional public works program but entering into homes in a low unionised industry and again the unions played a part in publicising the program’s problems. Abbott in his reply on health yesterday naturally made this direct link between the government’s running of the insulation program and its future ability to run the health system. There are similarities why the federal government could be vulnerable. Once again in health, a key part of Labor’s plan is to bypass the state health unions, as well as the state governments, and rely on the less dependable goodwill of those like the AMA who will win out at the local level.

In defending against Abbott’s linking of health to insulation, it hasn’t helped that the government still has not got control of the insulation issue. Rudd’s mea culpa was effective at knocking the dynamic out of the story but there was no follow though and it is still running. The government’s approach seemed to be to throw money at it and hope it will go away. What would have been tactically more sensible would be to have turned the debate around and go in hard on firms defying the regulation. It not only would have taken control of the story but would have made the Coalition vulnerable given Abbott’s natural resistance to regulation, especially on worker safety. It should have been the government going first and highlighting every case of shoddy installation it could find, rather than letting Abbott go around at his leisure to each new case as he did yesterday.

Labor’s defence against Abbott is to remind everyone that Abbott ‘ripped a billion out of the health system’, which, whether true or not, is perhaps not really where a government that started by insisting Howard’s ‘reckless spending must stop’ wants to end up. But anyway, in reality Abbott is not the one the federal government should be attacking, but rather its own state governments, for the reasons that may see two of them fall this weekend.

It is important when looking at Abbott’s leadership to separate two distinct developments that are being mixed up in the media. The first is Abbott benefiting from the government’s central problem that has now come out in the open. A government with no social base for a domestic program, and so reliant on an international one, is now finding less support there as well. The result is a problem of credibility and authority, that plagued Howard in the early years of his government, and Rudd now has to manage. It is this anti-politics sentiment that Abbott has had some success in tapping into.

When Abbott called the ETS a ‘Great Big New Tax’, it had some resonance not because people don’t like taxes as such. Polls have consistently shown that the electorate thought action against global warming was important enough to pay for. The problem was that after Copenhagen revealed the lack of momentum from the international community to climate change action, the ETS became about little more than just a tax.

Australia’s small impact on world carbon levels always meant that any capping of carbon here was always more a moral position than a practical one. However, while there was a sense of an international plan of action, the argument that Australia needed to have its own in order to play an influence on the global stage, may have overstated Australia’s international significance, but at least made some sense. Without any clear international momentum, such justification does not.

Rudd has lost some of the moral credibility that climate change action gave him and has opened him up to the charge of being all spin and no substance to which his lack of base always made him vulnerable. Abbott’s attack on the ETS especially resonated with sections of the electorate that never trusted government even at the best of times and has encouraged climate change scepticism to become a focus for anti-political sentiment. It is no coincidence that Abbott’s former private secretary, David Oldfield, shown accompanying him on the program, managed to spend his time while working for Abbott setting up One Nation to use anti-immigration to do a similar thing.

Yet like One Nation, Abbott’s accession to the leadership is being confused with another phenomenon – the revival of the right. You would think for a program looking at the significance of the Abbott leadership, the starting place would be the political situation now and what Abbott brings to it. But no. To find the ‘true’ Abbott apparently, we need to be hurled back thirty years to him mouthing off as a student politician and then packing himself off to a seminary. This is all meant to show how much Abbott is brimming with right-wing ideas that he is preparing to unleash on the nation. We even go to the small town of Beaufort, where Abbott last year claimed the climate change argument was ‘absolute crap’ and finally up to the smug faces of Minchin and Bernardi as they described why they wanted Abbott to take the leadership because of their opposition to the climate change agenda.

And then it stops. What happened after Abbott took the leadership is not even discussed. We all know what Minchin and Bernardi think about climate change from the Four Corners program last year, so hearing it again was pointless. The question now would have been, why have they since recanted? Why have Minchin and Bernardi both taken pains to say they think climate change and carbon emissions are a problem and why has Abbott proposed spending billions to deal with it?

Liberal powerbrokers like Minchin clearly want Abbott to popularise a right agenda and revive the relevance of what they see as the Liberal party’s core agenda, and saw climate change scepticism as one way of doing it, as revealed in this exchange about the thinking that led them to take up a sceptical position:

LIZ JACKSON: Tony Abbott says that while driving back to Melbourne, he spoke with Senator Minchin and this crystallised his views. He now accepted that voting for ETS would fracture the Coalition, while opposing it would give them the chance to campaign against Labor’s giant new tax on everything. Politically, it was the way to go.

NICK MINCHIN: I like to pride myself on keeping my finger on the pulse both of internal opinion and the mood of our own grassroots and of public opinion at large. So I was talking to him on that basis on a number of occasions.

LIZ JACKSON: The politics rather than the science?

NICK MINCHIN: Yeah, Yeah.

The problem is that the political conditions aren’t allowing them to do it. Even on climate change, despite it being a focus for distrust of government, there is still overwhelming support for climate change action, and still majority support for an ETS. That is why Minchin et al had to recant as they took over the leadership. The irony is even though scepticism has grown over the last eight months, the old guard have had to become publicly less sceptical as they regain the leadership and face the electoral consequences of what they think.

Whatever Abbott’s personal views, his capacity to make it a political reality is another matter. It is why for someone who considers himself such a straight talker, he has a remarkable inability to give a straight answer, as seen by his ducking and weaving over his opinion about women who have abortions. The problem with the program was that it took the left view of subtly talking up the dangers of Abbott’s ideas rather than his inability to bring them about.

In fact, one of the reasons you suspect Abbott is where he is today is his ability to play this double game. Hewson, who saw him in action as his press secretary in the early 1990s, nicely described Abbott’s two-faced game:

What you’ve got is constant colour and movement, and he’s very good at it. His strengths are, he’s obviously very bright, but he’s very cunning, and I think that cunningness shows. And he can see an issue and he can grab an issue. And how does he handle it? He gets right in your face. He exaggerates; he grabs the headlines, even if he knows that the next day he’s gonna have to back that off.

Good example is the accusation last week of, you know, a bribe to Channel 7 with the reduction in the TV license fees. The word bribe appears, it gets the headline, it creates all the atmosphere. Next day he doesn’t actually repeat that; he just says it doesn’t look good, let’s go on. And he’s played that role out.

This may be a suitable political tactic to manage the Liberals’ current political dilemma but such political games have limited appeal. This two step can especially become a problem now that he is leader and the both sides Abbott is playing are being taken more seriously. Even despite recent improvement, Abbott’s poll ratings are mediocre for a new opposition leader and even that is more reliant on tapping into government troubles than his own virtues.

One thing though, it has at least brought out all the right-wing warriors for one last turn in the sun. It was a joy to once again hear that persecuted, nasal whine of our former Prime Minister on Tuesday night. Like a whacked mole, Howard has emerged from his hole after losing his government and his seat, blinking into the sunlight on the hope that it is now safe to come out. Howard clearly thinks 2007 was an aberration and that Abbott will be a vindication of the loss and the way he had to throw away his program to stave it off, and, let’s face it, no one does self-pitying vindication like Howard.

As Howard couldn’t but remind us, his spotting of Abbott’s talent is based on his innate understanding of the Australian people that made him such an election winner (rather than say an exhausted opposition and a handy War on Terror) – right up to the point, of course, when he wasn’t, and despite spending half his government below the level of popularity that is supposed to be worrying Rudd at the moment. It is this political acumen that allows Howard to know that Abbott is also a winner after his own heart. We’ll see.

Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party have delivered the most obstructionist Senate in thirty years.

S Conroy 10 March 2010

What, when Fraser lost control of the senate in 1980? Well no. Conroy of course means thirty-five years ago when Whitlam faced the hostile Senate that blocked Supply. Leaving aside this government’s sensitivity to being compared to Whitlam’s, it is useful for a moment to go back to that period. In 1975, the Coalition used its power in the Senate to help business slow down Whitlam’s expansion of government and ultimately to wrest power from Labor. Now we are looking at the Coalition using its powers in the Senate not on behalf of business or even winning power, but as a way of trying to define itself. The trouble is that there is no coherent agenda behind it.

This is the central flaw in the Abbott ‘experiment’. While his predecessors also struggled balancing the need of the old guard to define the party’s ‘values’ and the electoral impossibility of doing so, Abbott has brought the old guard to the fore and promised confrontation. However, the electoral difficulty of reviving a right-wing agenda has meant he is struggling to define what that opposition should be about. He is opposing on empty, and last week began to get caught out.

It is perhaps understandable that instead of honing in on this, there were those in the ALP who preferred to do the opposite, namely portray Abbott as an extreme right-winger. This may have made them feel terribly left-wing and good about themselves, but disguised Abbott’s weakness. The ACTU have been running ads using Abbott to revive the Workchoices bogeyman, but the fact that they have been running the ads on sites such as Crikey only shows that this more about internal jostling than actually attracting votes in the electorate. Certainly making scare campaigns about the next government is more convenient than thinking about the disappointments of this one.

But the fact is that there is no way that, even on the remote possibility of Abbott getting elected, he will be able to bring in a recognisably right-wing program – for the simple reason that nobody, except certain sections of the Liberal party, have any need for it. Least of all big business, which, for example, were perfectly content with industrial relations even before Howard started fiddling with it. Now that Labor has effectively reconciled the union movement to an industrial relations scene pretty well how Howard left it, they can’t be any less satisfied.

The confusion over Abbott’s agenda is summed up by the Old Man himself, who in an interview in The Australian, complains that Rudd has brought in no major reforms in the first two years. This is a bizarre complaint from someone who has just been in power for eleven and a half years. What exactly does Howard think needs sorting out? Presumably Howard did everything that needed to be done and left everything tickety-boo. A long-standing Prime Minister should be complaining about any major reforms being done after he has gone, not demanding them.

What a giveaway. This idea of reform for the sake of it, sums up the hollowness that was at the centre of Howard’s government, who spent most of it desperately trying to look busy and summon up crises from thin air so he could solve them. It was also why at the end of his government even the little that it was about had to be wound up, and we saw retreats on WorkChoices, a proposed ETS and some politically correct blathering about an indigenous preamble in the constitution, none of which Abbott, or Howard himself, wishes to remember. If Howard couldn’t sustain a distinctive agenda in the run up to the 2007 election, why should Abbott after 2010?

That Abbott’s core weakness is not his right-wing agenda but the lack of it, was why he started to run into problems last week not from a right-wing proposal, but one normally associated with the left, his plans for paid maternity leave. That someone who considers himself such an attack dog for business that he was prepared to publicly impugn the motives of the terminally ill on their behalf, will now suddenly turn around and force big business not only to pay generous maternity pay for their own staff, but for everyone else’s as well (including the government’s), clearly defies credibility. On top of that, it went against what is recognisable as a right-wing agenda and had the party wondering even more what this populism malarkey was about.

But it also allowed the government to finally score a victory against Abbott. On Tuesday Abbott was saying that it would mean that he would probably be opposing the government’s PPL plan. The government seized on the incoherence of Abbott’s position on Wednesday to wheel out Ministers highlighting the obstructions in the Senate. By Thursday, Abbott had to back down and say he would be supporting them after all. Abbott had been caught out acting as an ordinary opportunist politician playing empty political games instead of the ordinary straight-shooter he is trying to project. It will be interesting to see whether the government sticks to the ‘Whinging Tony’ theme, because it goes to the heart of Abbott’s problem.

The government is honing in now on Abbott’s weakness, but given the way it still can’t tie up the insulation fiasco, it still has weaknesses of its own. Last week also saw the start of the international strategy it has needed since Copenhagen. SBY’s visit allowed Rudd to continue to internationalise the border control issue so forcing Abbott to respond with the unusual tactic of criticising government policy while addressing SBY in Parliament (a breach of protocol for which Rudd paid him back handsomely by dragging SBY through the assembled Liberals to introduce him to Turnbull with whom they spoke in front of annoyed Liberals for what seemed like an age). Rudd desperately needs the Obama visit this month and the possibility he might not come is not good news. Rudd may appear relaxed on whether he comes or not, but it is a safe bet that the Lodge will be working overtime to make it happen.

Voluntary paid maternity leave: yes; compulsory paid maternity leave: over this Government’s dead body, frankly. It just won’t happen.

T Abbott 22 July 2002

Whoops. When Abbott was blocking the possibility of paid maternity leave in 2002, he was doing no more than articulating the interests of business. That used to be the role of the Liberal party – to articulate the needs of business in as popular a way as possible. To be frank, Abbott never used to be that good at it. He may have known what the needs of business were all right, but dressing it up to make it palatable was never his style. Gerard Henderson seems to think Abbott’s reputation for lousy people skills was a figment of left wing journalists’ collective imagination, but they didn’t dream up Abbott’s historically rotten poll ratings. Taking the side of big business so far as to attack someone dying from asbestos-related illness like Bernie Banton, was the sort of thing that drove them.

That was then, of course. From being the keeper of the right’s flame, now we have Tony the populist – kind of. He’s still not getting anywhere near the level of support that Turnbull got at a similar stage, but it’s enough to get Henderson excited. What Abbott is doing, of course, is trying to wrap a revival of traditional conservative values around what is really anti-political attack on the government. So far he has got away with it as the government has become more vulnerable after Copenhagen. But trying to revive an establishment party of big business on the back of anti-establishment sentiment is a tricky business and sooner or later it will come unstuck. Especially as the government has recovered its poise somewhat with an anti-political agenda of its own.

It could be argued that Abbott’s paid parental leave is trying to detract attention away from Rudd’s hospital plan and is in line with a traditional conservative upholding of family values. But the whole point of the right’s ‘family values’ is to make sure the family (women) take the strain and not put it onto business. Making business pay for parental leave rather misses the point.

Abbott’s policy on the run has been compared to Latham’s but the reasons are quite different. Latham’s style was possible because, despite all the moaning in his diaries, he, like Rudd, faced a party too exhausted to assert its own agenda and happy to let them get on with it if it delivered power. The Liberals are not at that stage yet. Latham and Rudd may have not needed to consult their party, Abbott didn’t dare consult his. He has only got where he is on the promise to restore the brand. Yet as we have already seen with what Joyce has done to the coalition’s economic credentials, and now with this latest manoeuvre, trying to be populist is likely to only undermine it.

And I’d say to state health bureaucrats and disgruntled State politicians and other opposition types, I think it’s time just to get out of the way of fundamental reform.

K Rudd 5 March 2010

What is striking about those “opposition types” or, as we used to say, “political opponents”, is that they now stretch right across the political class.

The panel on Insiders were bemused at Rudd’s political aggression towards the states, while noting the lack of policy detail in Rudd’s health plan. But this is all about a political attack, dressed up in the guise of a policy initiative. After all, if the issue here is about federal funding to make up for inadequate state revenue, Canberra could just give them more money like it did last year. The only real policy meat in the proposal is to take control off the states and give it to local boards, as Abbott wanted to do. This is above all a political attack on the states and it is that political attack that has made it such a popular proposal.

The general view in the media appears to be that Rudd has abandoned ‘cooperative federalism’ and followed Howard in his war on the states running up to the last election. But Rudd’s attack on the states this time is quite different. In 2007, Howard used the wall-to-wall Labor states to try and make a traditional political point about Labor’s inability to manage spending compared to the Coalition. In reality, either at the state level, or in Canberra under Rudd, there was no real difference in approach to government spending between the two parties. Howard was trying to make a political point that didn’t exist. So he left it open for Rudd to accuse of him merely playing politics and “the blame game”.

That was the real basis to Rudd’s cooperative federalism, namely that given the lack of real political difference in mainstream politics, the states and Canberra were unjustified doing anything else but cooperating. This applied as much to Liberal state governments as Labor. This is essentially the same point behind Rudd’s attacks now. He is taking advantage of unpopular state governments unable to make a political case why they should oppose power being taken away from them, other than wanting power for its own sake. Gillard on Friday morning’s Today made the point bluntly to Abbott:

If you want to back state Premiers on health, you do that. We’ll be backing the national interest.

Rudd and Gillard are campaigning against an arm of government. However, it is worth noting that they are also campaigning against the parties running them, including their own. Of course, this is not the first time state and federal governments on the same political side have fought each other in public. The difference this time is that Rudd is now challenging the state government’s right to do so.

Pretty well from the moment Rudd stepped out of Parliament House to meet the insulation employers to tell them, and everyone else, “he gets it”, the government has been slowly recovering the poise it lost following Copenhagen, Abbott’s anti-political attack and the insulation saga. Rudd’s political agenda that he used in 2007 is coming back into place. Empathy? Check. Anti-politics? Check. The only part he is still missing from what he had in 2007 is the international agenda that would give him the moral high ground and prevent his critics from accusing him of playing hollow political games as well. Without it he is vulnerable and forced to raise the levels of attack on any critics. Fortunately he has Obama’s visit at least in March to presumably play the traditional role US Presidents play for their Australian counterpart at this stage in the electoral cycle.