The AFR has revealed today that Prime Minister Tony Abbott has finally conceded to the Coalition party room that he needs to give ground on paid parental leave (PPL) if the policy is ever to come to fruition:
Coalition MPs are predicting Tony Abbott will water down his paid parental leave scheme in order to salvage it after the Prime Minister confided with colleagues that more change to the policy should be expected…
According to details of the conversation now circulating throughout the Coalition, Mr Abbott told the gathering “there’s been some water under the bridge” on the PPL. which was a reference to his recent decision to cap the maximum payment at $50,000 for six months, down from $75,000.
Mr Abbott then added: “I suspect there’s a lot more to go.’’
About bloody time. Abbott has shown a ringing tin ear in letting the PPL fiasco drag on. The Coalition has spent considerable political capital trying to sell the scheme, and in doing so has undermined its message of “ending the age of entitlement” and the need to cut expenditure to overcome the “Budget emergency”.
Further, almost nobody – not economists, not the opposition parties, nor most Coalition members – genuinely believe that PPL is a good idea. Indeed, one of the key reasons why so many Coalition MPs have expressed dissent on the issue is that it has prevented them from being able to sell the Budget to a sceptical electorate.
Rather than belatedly seeking to compromise on PPL, Abbott would be well-advised to junk the policy altogether. There is no way his mentor, John Howard, would have clung so strongly to PPL. Howard would have gauged early on that there was dissent within the electorate, in the party room, and in the Senate and would have staged a dignified reversal before the issue wrought significant political damage.
Abbott needs to kick his ego to the curb, and put the rabid PPL dog out of its misery once and for all before it causes more damage to the Coalition’s reputation and further derails its Budget agenda.
