All things considered, the Coalition government isn't going too badly when on the first anniversary of its election it is only trailing the Labor Party in the opinion polls by 48 per cent to 52 per cent.
The question now is what Tony Abbott will do in the remaining two years of his first term. Will he remain "ideological" and "tribal" (as Michelle Grattan put it last week) or will he become "centrist" and "pragmatic" (as many pollsters and commentators are urging).
It's debatable just how ideological the Abbott government has been anyway. The PM dropped his promise to restore freedom of speech, Joe Hockey's budget wasn't particularly tough (other than on those people with incomes above $180,000 who have seen their top tax rate increase), and Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane is fighting any substantial change to the renewable energy targets.
The argument could be made that if anything the Coalition has bent over backwards to prove just how non-ideological it is. This observation prompted an astute comment on Professor Sinclair Davidson's Catallaxy Files blog. It was pointed out that one difference between the Labor Party and the Coalition is the Labor Party believe their supporters' interests are in the national interest, while the Coalition sometimes think their supporters' interests "are somehow different from the national interest".
Balancing ideology and pragmatism will be a recurring theme for the life of the Abbott government, as indeed it is for all governments (and oppositions). Already pragmatism is the watchword for the Coalition's dealings in the Senate.
SWING TO THE LEFT
The problem for any political party of the centre-right in Australia that attempts to govern from the "centre", is that the centre of policy and political discussion in this country is moving to the left. There are a few exceptions to this rule, such as border protection — but not many.
The question for the Liberal Party is whether it follows the political centre leftward or whether it tries to swing the centre back to where it once was. The evidence of the drift of the political centre to the left is not hard to find.
A commitment from public commentators in this country to the importance of freedom of speech and a free press would once have been taken for granted. Now a belief in freedom of speech is regularly labelled as "ideological" and even, bizarrely, as something that's "right wing". Both sides of politics now accept that reductions in government spending can only ever be "fair" if taxes on the wealthy are raised at the same time.
Beyond the issue of domestic policy, it once would have been uncontroversial to argue that a country like Israel, a liberal democracy surrounded by terrorist and authoritarian regimes, would have the right to defend itself if attacked. The urging of some Liberal MPs for Australia to be more "neutral" in what's rightly been called a battle between civilisation and barbarism reflects how attitudes towards Middle East politics have changed. When it comes to foreign affairs, governing from the centre would require Tony Abbott to abandon the Australian government's support for Israel.
Exactly why so many Liberals are so eager to occupy the centre of Australian politics, when the centre has so obviously moved to the left, is a mystery. One of the reasons might be that it's easy.
Another reason might be that fewer and fewer Liberal MPs are willing to engage in the battle of ideas. Not enough Liberals understand for example that the reason the political left is so keen to describe every effort of the Liberal Party to redress the balance of debate in this country as the reigniting of the "culture war" is that the left has already won that war.
When the curriculum that is taught to every school student in Australia has environmentalism as one its three defining themes it's reasonably clear which side has won.
Many of the policy reforms the national interest requires — particularly of industrial relations — are at the moment outside the centre of Australian politics.
Merely accepting the status quo and governing from the centre means there's no chance the electoral environment will ever be created that will allow Tony Abbott to make the reforms the national interest requires.
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