This thread is a companion piece to Mark’s post on how a Gillard minority government might ideally operate. The advice about parliamentary reform and processes of governance and policy formulation surely applies to both sides, so I’ve decided to vary the form of the question and ask – what would an Abbott government look like?
I suspect Tony Abbott’s understanding of process issues doesn’t go much beyond the staple promises oppositions always make – a better question time and an independent or more independent Speaker. The Parliamentary Budget Office idea was Malcolm Turnbull’s.
Abbott is not talking a more inclusive game, but as of today, he’s still completely unable to say anything without making his standard litany of partisan points, and effectively trying to steamroller himself into office.
My own answer to the question, and I hope very much we don’t see it tested in practice, is that an Abbott government would be likely to be “nasty, brutish and short”, to quote Thomas Hobbes, who’s probably lurking somewhere behind what passes for Abbott’s political credo.
I get hung up at “how would an Abbott minority government form”, because “by the independents tugging the forelock” just doesn’t seem credible to me.
Assuming for now that they do stitch up a deal I think to be credible it would have to go “the Coalition pass the following Independent-proposed legislation, then we will vote for the Coalition stuff in turn”. I suspect we would see at least one of the resulting bills fail to pass, probably because a National MP crosses the floor (or just mysteriously vanishes when the vote is called). I’m not convinced they could hold out until they lose the senate, let alone for three years.
One real prospect is the ALP (or Greens) voting for Independent-sponsored bills, making National irritation irrelevant. If that happened it could cause real ructions between the Coalition partners, especially if it was on something like an ETS (or less likely, gay marriage).
One real threat would be Barnaby Joyce resigning when it became obvious that his demotion to the backbench as a condition of the deal was for real.
I don’t want Abbott as PM. However this campaign has proven that he’s very politically smart and we can’t underestimate him again.
I don’t think that it will be ‘nasty, brutish and short’ but will be pretty mild and uncontroversial and will bid his time. If he manages to avoid any major disasters he will go into the next election with the advantage of incumbency and as he is likely to win quite handsomely he will then unleash his right wing agenda on the second term.
“I suspect Tony Abbott’s understanding of process issues doesn’t go much beyond the staple promises oppositions always make … ”
And what do you base that on? He was actually Leader of Government Business in the Howard Government. Today he mentioned that in that time he instituted reforms to the Matter of Public Importance process. Do you even know what that is?
I cant see how a coalition-led govt could last 12 months. Post July, things get worse for them, and the senate could start rescinding bills and sending them back to the lower house.
Of course, it is hard to see how the Indies could support the government unless it was caving on the NBN and on a price on carbon and the mining tax and maybe on offshore processing. That won’t be a good look for Mr Authentic Weathervane …
He couldn’t have a DD either because the stuff that the senate would block would not get through the HoR. The Indies would not want another election, especially as a result of passing stuff they were against.
I also see a conscience vote early on gay marriage as something that would throw the proverbial spanner into the works.
What would a Tony Abbott govt be like?
Very successful I am sure, the media, led by the OO, oops change that back to the GG, will be reassuring us constantly how they made the right decision.
Guido said:
pfft … He managed to hide behind the barrage of inaninity thrown up by the bullsh*t press, moth slogans and slag off the state governments of QLD and NSW.
That’s about as smart as checking your attire before leaving the toilet — highly advisable, but hardly something for which one should be credited.
@3 – Yes, I know what that is, and you could lose the condescending tone in your comment. I listened carefully to what he said on several occasions about his experience as Leader of the House, and I assure you it didn’t go beyond what I’ve summarised.
I think the x factor in a minority Abbott Government would be how well behaved the Turnbull faction are. Even if they’re a distinct minority, a couple of renegade MPs could do a lot of damage if there’s any legislation the small-l liberals didn’t like.
Coalition government will throw out their election promises after “review” of state of the country. They will come in quick with a battery of populist initiatives and sell them with fanfares all round from the media.
For next July (new Senate) they will swing in their own grubby core policies that will not be able to be supported by the Senate balance of power (or if the Greens do, then they get destroyed by their own constituency).
The Government will call a double dissolution before end 2011 and be returned for a decade leaving an opposition that will split before end of the decade into Right Labor and a Left Labor which will include most of the Greens.
The World will of course have passed by by then.
I don’t know why so many lefties fear the notion of an Abbott government.He has a most modest agenda that mainly revolves around fixing the stuff ups created under Labor.Any other conspiracy theories about a second term agenda are just stupid.
@7 well maybe you should lose the prejudice
I assume that Abbott is sufficiently intelligent to recognise that the new Senate to be installed in July 2011 represents a sea change in Australian politics.
No longer will it be possible for the Libs to expect a compliant Senate. During the Howard era the Libs achieved this object twice — the first time when they duped the Democrats into supporting the GST, the second time in the aftermath of the Latham fiasco in 2004.
On both occasions the Libs relentlessly pursued their maximalist agenda.
Abbott would love to reimpose WorkChoices but he knows that this is now impossible in the circumstances.
More likely is a grandstanding attempt to introduce a constitutional amendment declaring that marriage is to be defined in the constitution as between a man and a woman only.
If enabling legislation doesn’t go through the Senate, so much the better for Abbott.
Obstructionism to declarations of “traditional values” would make excellent election fodder for Abbott and the Libs.
Matt C@3: do you know how important that is? Not very.
“No longer”? It will come around again, Katz.
Not for a long time Andrew E.
The Greens are here to stay and time and demographics are on their side.
Reinu @ 9.
Incoming governments that change their policies after a so-called review usually use that as an excuse to junk some spending promises they never intended to keep.
So how does TA get on using his review to suddenly find buckets of money for an NBN that he said wasn’t there? And the rest of the independent’s wish list.
I would say that an Abbott minority government has a much stronger interest in getting a Double Dissolution election than a Gillard minority government. The see the non-Coaliton vote as now irrevocably split between Labor and the Greens, they have seen the ALP play its “Tony Abbott scare campaign” card, they know that the ALP is demoralised, they can get plenty of cash from the mining industry, and by the end of 2011 they may well have two more state governments in their own camp (NSW and QLD).
An interesting way in which the Libs can square the buckets of cash needed to lure the rural independents with a wedge issue is one of their forgotten commitments, which is to privatise Medibank Private. The ALP will oppose that – albeit without a great deal of enthusiasm – and it is highly likely that the Greens would also oppose it, even though it would seem somewhat distant from the Greens’ platform to a lot of their new voters.
[This probably should go in the "what a Gillard gov" post, but for reasons that'll be obvious I'll put the comment here]
Reading Rob Oakshott’s comments this morning, I have a suggestion:
Gillard has PM, Swan as Treasurer, Turnbull as Finance Minister (with Andrew Leigh in a junior role), Greg Hunt as Environment Minister. There’s probably a few other Libs worth pulling in too – purhaps one of the remaining small L Liberals who support a compassionate refugee policy as Immigration Minister.
As well as the politics of saying we’ve picked the best for the job regardless of party. It should help Gillard deal with difficult issues. It’d be hard for Abbott to run his current spurious arguments: “stop the boats”, “big debt”, “great big new tax”, when it’s his side making it happen.
An Abbott Government would not do anything beyond manufacturing stories to discredit Labor. After the ALP gets justifiably annihilated in NSW next March, they would co-operate with the new Liberal government there to instigate inquiries and parliamentary debates and information leaks to create one sensational anti-Labor story after another (god knows there’s likely to be a plentiful supply). When they judged the ALP was as on-the-nose as it was possible to make it, call a new election.
No I don’t believe they’d want a double dissolution. Much smarter to keep forcing Labor in the Senate to choose between getting into bed with the Greens to oppose legislation the aspirational classes like, or join with the government in passing legislation that further alienates progressive labor voters.
What would an Abbott minority government look like? Short.
What happens if there is a by-election in the QLD electorate of Griffith over the next 12 months, because its incumbent was offered and took a position at the UN?
Talk of demographics is bunkum, Katz. If you believe that then you’ll believe that Labor is the authentic, inerringly accurate party of the working class, and that it always always won every election because the working class outnumbered the toffs.
They’ll morph and in two or three elections, people shrieking about WorkChoices (“Nanna, what’s a WorkChoice?”) will just look lame.
2 or 3 elections might cover a shorter time span from now on.
the first time when they duped the Democrats into supporting the GST
You mean that time that the Democrats assisted the Coalition to come good on their electoral mandate to introduce the GST?
The Greens are here to stay
Only until the electorate realise that they are running a “false flag” operation, and that their socialist agenda takes priority over their environmental one. Or equal standing at least.
Lest I be misunderstood, I have no problem with those who earnestly hold socialist views. It’s the deception of hiding behind an apparent environmental/conservationist front that I object to.
Moreover, when it comes to complete false advertising, how hypocritical is it of Mr Abbott to have been mouthing “grown up government” when his campaign slogans included, among other infantilisms, great big new tax?
If nothing else, I hope that one factor in the negative LNP vote on Saturday was the Australian electorate’s disdain for the assumption of the ruling party that the electorate’s average IQ is lower than that of a 5-year-old’s.
ooops mods please fix my mistake. Tnx,
What’s the deception?? Their non-environment policies have been pretty up-front.
And such as they are, the Greens’ social justice agenda is not socialist in any meaningful way. It’s secular liberal humanism, which for reactionaries sounds like socialism.
That says more about how far they have moved away from liberalism than how close the Greens have drawn to socialism.
Thank you so much, Kim. Going to bed now, so no more mistakes tonight
After reading the title the only thing I could think of was “Lord of the flies”.
An Abbott minority government is doomed to be incompetent because there just is no talent in their team to hold down any portfolio particularly well.
Once the has-beens and ne’er-do-wells line up at the ministerial trough the country will begin to laugh then cry at what they created.
In not much time Turnbull will take over but the damage will already be done. Even the msm will not be able to disguise what damage these fools will do to the economy and our society.
what would an Abbott minority government be like? Wrist slashingly terrible.
The more I think on it the more the current politics is played out against the backdrop of the senate’s current accessability to the libs, against next year when the senate when the senate balance goes to the more centrist greens.
Abbott would dearly love power now, because any later attempts to re entrench hard toryism would be resisted by a more rational senate.
labor goes back, there ought to be a chance for more rational government, but only if the labor right wing elements finally see through neoliberalism and start backing a more community oriented government.
Bligh’s rubbish yesterday indicates that if labor is in federally, the states will only further erode the common cause in pursuit of selfish parochial and likely venal, projects, that further alienate the public.
But if labor can get thru a year, the senate becomes a handbrake on the likely excesses of Abottism, even if a new election then has labor assigned back to the sin bin to again attempt to learn what it failed to learn, first time round, during the Howard years.
Terry @ 21:
What would happen if there were a bye-election in Griffith?
Nothing.
Griffith is probably one of the safest Labor seats in the country.
There is no longer such a thing as a safe Labor seat. Grayndler user to be a safe Labor seat. Sydney and Melbourne used to be safe Labor seats. There was a 25 per cent swing against Labor in the NSW by-election in Penrith, following a 20% + swing in Cabramatta. There is no point thinking like that any more. There are especially no safe Labor seats in Queensland, where the mood is profoundly anti-Labor.
Kevin Rudd barely ran as a Labor candidate in Griffith. He ran as “Kevin Rudd – standing up for the south side”. The corollary is that if he is running as a kind of personality cult candidate – the Bob Katter of Stones Corner – much of that vote ebbs away with his departure from the scene.
I guess everyone but you can see the ridiculousness of that statement, Andrew E.
(Hint: it’s the stuff after “If”.)
And then this:
So what is a Liberal Party for? Undoing the damage done by the Howardite purge of small L liberalism will consume the party for a generation, if indeed such a restitution is possible.
Katz @ 39, Libs spend a lot less time being anxious about purity of doctrine when the opportunity of power exists. A basic tenet of modern conservatism is the need to be tactically flexible in order to achieve goals, and Abbott is steeped in that ethos. Its when they depart from that script, as with Work Choices, that they get into trouble. At any rate, minority government with Katter et. al. puts a lid on ideologues in the Coalition ranks during this parliament. If people want to complain about large amounts of cash being shovelled into Far North Qld, they will be advised to tell the IPA about it, not raise it in the media. That sort of tactical pragmatism was always Howard’s trump card against Costello, and Abbott is definitely a Howard acolyte.
The trouble, in the discernment of the goals, then?
I think Abbott and his spectrum of politics are regressive and reactionary.
The other issue emerging is the extent to which the Greens’ lower house aspirations are starting to mesh with Liberal strategies to do Labor damage. Basically, to win inner city seats, the Greens need Liberal preferences to get ahead of Labor in the 2PP vote. Therefore, if the Libs can continue to get third in inner city electorates like Sydney and Grayndler but still get over 20% of the vote, the Greens will take out Albanese and Plibersek as they did Tanner, who jumped before he was ousted by Adam Bandt.
As I am sure there will be a by-election in Griffith before there is a general election – is Kevin Rudd really going to sit quietly in a shadow cabinet led by Julia Gillard while he still has enough reputation to get a high level UN job? – that would be another seat where this could occur. The net effect is to diminish Labor’s talent pool, cause demoralisation in Labor ranks, and accentuate the wedge between the inner city (Greens) and the outer suburbs (Labor).
Underestimate Tony Abbott? Sure. People did it with John Howard for a decade. Bob Ellis still thinks Paul Keating won the 1996 election because his rhetorical strategies were far more compelling.
Ralph Willis, of late regret..
A rehashed Howard philistinism in Catholic garb
i think it was Dickens that coined the term Mooreeffoc. it Abbott wins that is where we will be living. tho here in Oz it might be Bupeht, you will find me in the country town of Egnuol Seidal.
I generally agree Kim…but not w/ the “short”. Not w/ a media empire behind him that is willing to threaten Indies by bombarding Bob Katter.
When Abbott Comes A Calling
http://cafewhispers.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/when-abbott-comes-a-calling/
N’
PeterTB,
I’m (almost) fascinated by those who insist on calling the Greens socialist. I’m a Green but I would never consider myself a socialist, though occasionally a radical and sometimes a progressive. I’ve looked at the Socialist Alliance policies, and respect what they have to say on climate change issues, but I would never vote for a party with that name. Why? Because socialism seems like a 19th century ideology which has little relevance in a postmodern world. When few consider themselves working class, whatever the reality, and upperclass now means working for a hedge fund, then we need new words to describe new political realities.
Greens parties from around the world are a new political alignment that sees our relationship with ecosystems as being just as important as our relationship with financial systems. As Bob might say, let’s move into the 21st century.
An Abbott minority government will bide its time, shower the rural independents with largesse, wait to see if the ALP implodes, and use the benefits of incumbency to sandbag marginal electorates. it will also dump Tony Smith as Communications Minister, and put in Malcolm Turnbull or Paul Fletcher, and steal the most useful bits of Labor’s NBN policy.
If Abbott is relying on the ALP to implode, he is an idiot. Abbott is not an idiot.
However, Abbott will soon perceive, if he has not already perceived, that rightist legislation is impossible in the short term and exceedingly uncertain of success in the medium term.
Terry’s prognostications cast Abbott as a latterday Menzies overseeing a Menzian consensus that consisted largely of legislative reforms enacted by the Curtin and Chifley governments.
Abbott is no Menzies. He is not even John Howard. He is disinclined to administer a political economy and a cultural establishment that are inimical to his strongly held views.
Some other leader of the Liberal Party, perhaps Turnbull, might be willing to fulfill that role. But not Abbott.
the green vote on Saturday may have been partly a protest vote but there is also a long run trend lurking behind it. it harnessed enrgy and engagement by community members who had not been part of the political process before and discovered that they enjoyed it.
the exact balance between the increase in the long run suport for the Greens and the protest vote element will only become apparent in the long term but anyone who thinks the entire increase was simply a protest vote is making a mistake in my estimate.
Things would have to change dramatically before Abbott would contemplate a double dissolution in the foreseeable future. Whatever the effect on the Labor party, on the present percentages I back-of-the-envelope calculate that would increase the number of Green senators from 11 to 13 or 14 (out of 70). There’d be virtually no way for the LNP to get a senate majority out of it. Of course, things can – as we found out over the last year – change dramatically, but it always would be a hell of a risk.
I mentioned the Mandate song and a coworker asked what song I would use for this election. I decided that “Already Yesterday” by The Church would be appropriate.
What are the rules for Fantasy Cabinet again? I could only find the rules for Fantasy Football.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_football_%28Association%29
I guess they’d be somewhat similar…
FYI Fantasy cricket at http://cricket.virtualsports.com.au/
Terry @ 41 “Basically, to win inner city seats, the Greens need Liberal preferences to get ahead of Labor”
Or, do a Fremantle, and run dead/ not at all.
It’s a no brainer really: in these seats with a sizeable green primary, the watermelons’ preferences, (85-90% of the green primary) will always keep the tories out. They might as well suck it up, bite the bullet, hold their nose, and help the greens do what they can’t. The surest way for greens to take out labor is not to risk having them come second and then harvest tory prefs, but just vacate the field with a purposeful flourish and get their constituency to back the Green straight into #1, like they did for Carles in Fremantle. (I’m not suggesting the gruesome ensuing quid pro quo script there be followed).
They missed their chance when Beattie suddenly absconded and triggered a bye election in 2007. It happened so quick, and in the middle of the Fed election, that the tories were caught with their candidate selection pants down.
It was Green v Labor in the last count, per the above script. The green got to 42%, all that was missing to roll labor in the premier’s seat ( a pr coup?) was the tories putting their shoulders to the wheel: they just didn’t turn up on the day, a full one third of electors, presumably erstwhile tory voters, didn’t vote. Up here for thinking.