By retreating from attack to defence in just 18 months the worry is the Abbott Government has given up on economic reform and will be remembered as another missed opportunity like the Fraser project.
The Liberal Party is not as obsessed with its own history — and its role in Australian history — as the Labor Party is.
But they do still care about the past. Coalition governments measure themselves against the hero governments of Robert Menzies and John Howard and against the missed opportunities of Malcolm Fraser.
There was quiet, worried chatter before the 2013 election that Tony Abbott's Government, if it didn't grasp the nettle of economic reform, might be a similarly missed opportunity. It might be Malcolm Fraser Mark II.
So you could see what the Government was thinking with the 2014 budget. Don't worry — there will be no missed opportunity under our watch. The budget was aggressive and transformative. It was all very un-Fraser.
By contrast, last week's budget is the opposite of reformist. It adopts the same hold-the-ship-steady-and-hope-the-tides-will-wash-us-back-to-surplus approach that Wayne Swan took. And in other areas of reform — like tax or the federation or the financial sector — it's hard to see any enthusiasm in the Abbott Government for substantial change.
The about-face on fiscal repair between last year's budget and this year's effort has to rank with one of the largest ideological turnarounds in Australian politics.
In part this is because the Abbott opposition went into government with two different stories about its historical role. First, it wanted to fix the budget emergency. Labor had left Australia's public finances in crisis. Tough decisions, fortitude and spending cuts were required. The age of entitlement was over and so forth.
But they also told another story: that the Abbott Government would be the restoration of the old Howard order; stable, secure, "adult government". Abbott would bring long term continuity rather than change. Hence the emphasis on old Howard ministry hands.
The Abbott Government has swung wildly between these two extremes. From September 2013 to May 2014 it marketed itself as adult stability. Then it had a turn at radical reformism. Then, with the turn to national security in August last year, it grasped its way back to adult stability again. Last week's budget is the end of that process. All of last year's problems have been stowed away or thrown overboard. Equilibrium has been reached.
Within the Liberal Party, the Fraser government has a reputation for slovenliness. But it too had some substantial early ambitions. In many ways the Fraser government has been unfairly maligned.
For instance, Fraser's new federalism remains the best attempt to resolve the problems and contradictions of Australia's federation. The Fraser government temporarily indexed income tax rates, getting rid of the bracket creep through which inflation lifts us all into a higher tax bracket without adding to our real incomes.
In hindsight, these things look pretty good. Abbott expressed some interest in reform of the federation, evolving from his anti-states position in his 2009 book Battlelines to a more interesting devolution position in recent years. There's even been intermittent chatter about returning tax powers to the states. But the federation white paper process has dropped off the face of the earth.
Joe Hockey's tax review is likely to enter history as just another pointless tax review. Far from eliminating bracket creep, the Abbott Government is relying on it to raise taxes. And nobody thinks that Abbott's Murray inquiry into financial regulation will do anything like what Fraser's Campbell committee did for the Australian economy.
The Fraser project died a slow death. Particularly in its latter years the government reverted to simple tax and spend politics. The Campbell committee's report languished, leaving the opportunity for financial deregulation to the Hawke government.
But this is the natural way of things. Governments tend to atrophy. They get lazy and comfortable. They move from critics of the status quo to its most loyal defenders.
The worry is that the Abbott Government has accelerated its own decay. It's retreated from attack to defence in just eighteen months.
One of the central ideas in the Labor tradition is that the Labor Party is the agent of change in Australian history. Labor is the party of action and initiative (the party of Chifley and Whitlam and Keating) and the Coalition is the party of reaction and resistance (staid old Menzies and Howard). Julia Gillard's former speechwriter Michael Cooney restates this idea in his recent book.
It's hard to begrudge Labor its own self-serving mythology. But the trajectory of the Abbott and Fraser governments show how useless the initiative-versus-resistance story is.
We've spent the last year listening to Bill Shorten defend the status quo against the extreme "Tories". Labor has done its fair share of resistance. And the Coalition has offered its fair share of radicalism. But it might be many years before a Coalition government offers bold economic reform again.
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