That was then…this is now
In 2011 Joe Hockey said “No qualifications, all the excuses that
Wayne Swan talks about – falling commodity prices, a high Australian
dollar, nominal growth not being up to standard. Somehow the GFC is
ongoing all the time. So yes, we are upset about this … they think the
Australian people over summer will forget the solemn promises.”
This week, when admitting that MYEFO will show the deficit has
deepened and the promise of a surplus in 2018-19 has been abandoned,
Hockey said “We have faced some significant headwinds this year.
Obviously the global economy has come off a bit, iron ore prices have
dropped dramatically and we have had some opposition in the Senate that
has made it harder.”
After rubbishing the Rudd government’s stimulus spending, Hockey now
says the delayed surplus was a deliberate measure to avoid dampening
economic activity with a sharp withdrawal of public money.
“We want to keep the economy going, we want to keep it strong …we want to keep that momentum going.”
And he isn’t the only one finding governing is a tad harder than bagging out the other guy.
When the Labor government sought a seat on the UN Security Council,
Julie Bishop said “There really has been no justification for the
benefit that will accrue to Australia by pursuing a seat at this time.”
Then, in a press conference in New York in November, Ms Bishop
delighted in taking an extra minute to remind journalists who’d failed
to ask about Australia’s achievements on the Security Council of the
“successful two years” our membership had delivered.
Julie has rather enjoyed basking in the limelight but she has also had her problems.
In an interview with the ABC in 2012 while in opposition, Ms Bishop
said climate change funding should not be “disguised as foreign aid
funding”.
“We would certainly not spend our foreign aid budget on climate change programs,” she said.
In an interview with the Australian in November last year, Mr Abbott
said “We are committed to dismantling the Bob Brown bank [the Clean
Energy Finance Corporation] at home so it would be impossible for us to
support a Bob Brown bank on an international scale.”
After a meeting with Angela Merkel in November this year, Tony Abbott
said of the Green Climate Fund “We also have a Clean Energy Finance
Corporation which was established by the former government and there is
$10bn in capital which has been allocated to this. In addition to those
two funds a proportion of our overseas aid, particularly in the
Pacific, is allocated for various environmental schemes including
schemes to deal with climate change. So, we are doing a very great deal
and I suppose given what we are doing we don’t intend, at this time, to
do more.”
Less than a month later, Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Foreign
Minister Julie Bishop said the government would take $200 million from
Australia’s foreign aid budget over four years to put into the Green
Climate Fund.
“I think it’s now fair and reasonable for the government to make a
modest, prudent and proportionate commitment to this climate mitigation
fund,” he said, adding that the $200 million would be “strictly”
invested in “practical” projects in the Asia Pacific region, even though
he has no part in the administration of the fund.
Keeping up with Christopher Pyne on education funding is harder than
working out Dutton’s GP co-payment or Abbott’s Paid Parental Leave
scheme.
One thing Pyne has continually stressed is the need to improve
teacher quality yet the budget tends to indicate he only wants to do
that in private schools.
“The Government will achieve savings of $19.9 million
over five years from 2013‑14 through efficiencies in the operations of
the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL)
including a refocus on core priorities.
This includes savings of $9.5 million over five years from 2013‑14 from
funding allocated to AITSL by the former Government for its National
Plan for School Improvement.
The savings from this measure will be redirected by the Government to repair the Budget and fund policy priorities.
The Government will provide $4.9 million over two years from 2013‑14
to the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership for the
continuation of the Australian Government Quality Teacher Programme
(AGQTP). The AGQTP provides funding to non‑government
education authorities in each state and territory to improve the
quality of education through projects and activities that offer teachers
and school leaders opportunities to develop their skills.”
If I was to try to list all the inconsistencies, backflips, and
hypocrisies being committed on a daily basis by this government it would
be a full-time job requiring daily updates. And they will be forced
into more because their entire approach to governing has been just
wrong.
Tony Abbott sees negotiation as weakness and compromise as failure.
He is utterly incapable of admitting to being wrong – “We had a good
policy, now we have a better one”. He must blame others for any
problems because it couldn’t possibly be that he is doing anything
amiss, even as we have Hockey now grudgingly realising the benefits of
stimulus spending.
Tony Abbott is so woeful even his most ardent admirers are forced to
report their disappointment. Fluff pieces with morning show hosts even
turn into fiascos as Ben Jenkins reports.
It’s actually just a case of the PM suffering from a
phenomenon political scientists call “being extremely shithouse at
interviews”.
While Abbott tries valiantly to smash the ship of state through the
iceberg of public opinion, it’s easy to forget that our prime minister
is, and always has been, a terrible interviewee. His complete inability
to change tack renders any interview a stilted exchange with a
distressingly sinewy random word generator, in which an answer matching a
question is purely a matter of chance.
True, it’s better than his previous strategy of “wordlessly stare
into Mark Riley’s soul until he leaves you alone out of pure
awkwardness”, but not by a huge margin. Abbott is so unwilling to back
down on any matter at all that when he calls David Koch “Chris” for a
second time during the interview, the PM doesn’t even acknowledge it,
let alone apologise.
When the script stinks and the lead actor is a ham who cannot
improvise who is supported by a cast of theatrical sycophants directed
by Rasputin in animal print our government is now a farce waiting to
become a tragedy.
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