Tony Abbott needs to be careful. It's one thing for him to be cautious. But it's another thing when he starts ruling out policies which are based on core Liberal Party principles, which is what happened when he said an Abbott government would not reintroduce individual statutory employment contracts. There's no policy rationale for such a policy position. The only justification for it is political.
Abbott's statement was designed to blunt the inevitable ALP/ACTU attack on the Coalition's industrial relations policy come the election. However, it's difficult to imagine how Abbott's strategy will succeed. Regardless of what he promises, the ALP/ACTU will claim he can't be trusted. And if the ALP and the ACTU want to prove politicians don't keep their promises, they can just point to Julia Gillard's ''no carbon tax'' commitment. Of course the ALP and ACTU won't. The electorate can draw its own conclusions about the most spectacular broken promise since John Howard's ''never ever'' GST.
The worry is that with potentially two years to go to the election, based on what's happened so far there's a lot of other things Abbott could be ruling out too. For politicians in opposition the temptation to reduce the potential for controversy is overwhelming. In Victoria, Ted Baillieu said he wouldn't cut public service numbers -- now in government he's labouring under a promise that could be impossible to keep.
Opposition politicians have to balance two competing interests. They need to have some policies, but they need to be pragmatic enough to get elected.
Too much policy and you get John Hewson in 1993. Too much pragmatism and you get Julia Gillard in 2010. Hewson lost in 1993 and Gillard won in 2010. However, for all the good it's done her and the Labor Party, she may as well have lost last year's election.
On issues ranging from protection for the manufacturing industry to plain packaging of tobacco and alcohol and to the regulation of freedom of speech, Abbott has been less than clear-throated in his support of what many would have assumed were Liberal Party values.
Free trade, personal choice and responsibility, and free expression should be non-negotiable. Federalism and ensuring the appropriate division of power between the commonwealth and state governments should also be part of any Liberal Party package. But on federalism, it looks like Abbott would be no less a centralist than was Gough Whitlam.
Peter Costello recently took Abbott to task for the Opposition Leader's seeming lack of interest in economic reform. Costello put it down to Abbott's intellectual upbringing in the traditions of the Democratic Labor Party. This might be true. But you don't need to have read Milton Friedman by your 18th birthday to qualify as an economic reformer. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating weren't completely hopeless on the economic reform front. The challenge for Abbott will be to create and take advantage of the opportunities for reform just as Hawke and Keating and Howard and Costello did. Economics is not Abbott's passion and he's right not to pretend it is. Given this, what Abbott needs is people around him who are as interested in economic reform as he isn't.
And in any case, no one person can be passionate about everything -- and if they say they are, they're lying.
What's undeniable is that Tony Abbott does have a passionate commitment to improving the living conditions of indigenous Australians. If ever Abbott became prime minister and if ever he could bring about a lasting improvement in the quality of life for Aborigines, most Australians would gladly trade off a little bit of economic reform for such an achievement.
Abbott's reluctance to embrace a reform agenda on economics or industrial relations is partly because he feels he'll have to do all the heavy lifting by himself. He knows he can't rely on the business community to count the arguments for reform -- and he's absolutely right. Not too long ago most business organisations embraced the carbon tax and stood silent while the labour market was re-regulated.
The Australian business community is now more politically opportunistic than at any time since the 1970s. While this might be frustrating for the federal Liberal Party, they shouldn't use it as an excuse. Abbott is better than that and it is not the sort of leadership the country needs. At the moment the attitude of some Liberals is ''if business can't be bothered, I can't be bothered''.
If the Liberals carry this approach into government, it means they'll end up never doing anything.
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