Increasingly, Malcolm Turnbull’s judgement is being brought into question.
Up until last week he had foothered and dithered under the guise of having an “adult conversation” with “all things on the table.” And then he made his “bold move.”
Turnbull was to deliver “the most fundamental reform to the federation in generations”.
What we got was a very obvious marketing exercise with the slogans to accompany its inevitable failure all ready to go.
If they had truly been considering this move for months then where was the modelling to show the Premiers how much they would receive under this proposal? Where was the logistical plan on how it would be implemented?
There was nothing. Not one paragraph.
The government came to COAG knowing the most important item on the agenda was the looming shortfall in funding for schools and hospitals caused by the 2014 budget from hell. Instead of a credible plan for the future, they threw some crumbs to delay the hospital funding crisis for a few months but had no plan at all for education.
How to divert? I know, we’ll make it the states’ fault.
And out came the usual suspects spruiking the preprepared advertising strategy.
Morrison tells us that Turnbull has “called the states and territories’ bluff” – if they won’t raise taxes then they can’t expect us to.
The PM calls it a “moment of clarity” and resorts back to the Abbotism “they now have to live within their means”, a view repeated by Mathias Cormann who said “at least now we know where we stand. We know that all of us, state and federal governments, have got to live within our means.”
The suggestion that having the states fund public schools while the Commonwealth retained the responsibility for private schools was met with horror, with the NSW Education Minister saying it would create a two-tier system.
Cue Simon Birmingham who immediately brought out the old “class envy” chestnut.
Turnbull claimed Labor’s historic commitments to health and education made in the Gillard government’s 2013 budget were a “fantasy – the money was never there”.
Kelly O’Dwyer also slammed what she called the “fantasy figures” underpinning the former Labor Government’s education policy as did Morrison who told the ABC the Government would not be mimicking the “unfunded, fantasy promises of Julia Gillard” when it came to education funding.
Like a doll having its string pulled, Cormann said on Insiders, “the Gillard Government made unfunded, unaffordable, pie in the sky spending promises.”
In case you missed it, a minute later he said “we inherited from the previous government… unfunded, unsustainable, unaffordable pie in the sky spending promises.”
As Paul Bongiorno points out:
In budget forecasts the money is never there. It is based on assumptions. Those assumptions do become more problematic when they go beyond the budget four-year estimates out to a decade. But they are a statement of commitment.
The fact is, these projections are no more or less fanciful than the Turnbull government’s own promise to spend $195 billion over the next decade on defence.
If one looks at Swan’s 2013 budget, he identified savings over five years of $43 billion and took a lot of political heat to do so with $2.8 billion worth of cuts to the universities and self education in order to free up funds for its Gonski school reforms.
He also scrapped the baby bonus and froze indexation of Family Tax Benefit upper income cut-offs.
There were revenue measures like increasing the tobacco excise, cracking down on FBT for novated leases, and taxation changes for very high superannuation incomes.
Under a suite of changes headlined ”protecting the corporate tax base”, Labor proposed tightening the rules on profit shifting and removal of immediate deductibility for expenditure on exploration. These measures were estimated to collect nearly $4.2 billion for the budget over four years.
When Turnbull rolled Abbott over six months ago he promised a different style of leadership. “We need advocacy, not slogans. We need to respect the intelligence of the Australian people.”
Well all I am hearing is a bunch of tired old slogans and a reversion back to blame Labor. It’s hard to advocate for a plan when you don’t have one so it appears we will be stuck with the same old poll-driven, manipulative marketing.
