A few commentators have already drawn attention to Tony Abbott’s failure shift from political bovver boy to prime ministerial trappings. His recent trip around Asia was marked by several gaffes including a bizarre apology to Malaysia for his own treatment of the asylum-seeker issue. And now, in the US, he still dragging up Labor bashing. From the SMH:
Tony Abbott’s use of a Washington Post interview to brand his Labor predecessors as ”wacko” and ”embarrassing” could set back his working relationship with the Obama adminstration, a leading US commentator says.
Norman Ornstein, an author and political scientist with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said he ”winced” when he read the interview in which Mr Abbott put the boot into the Rudd-Gillard government in unusually strong language for a foreign interview.
”It really does violate a basic principle of diplomacy to drag in your domestic politics when you go abroad,” Dr Ornstein said. ”It certainly can’t help in building a bond of any sort with President Obama to rip into a party, government and – at least implicitly – leader, with whom Obama has worked so closely.
‘Perhaps you can chalk it up to a rookie mistake. But it is a pretty big one.”
Last week PM Abbott also chose to adopt an extreme position on climate change, in an interview with an extreme commentator to boot, even as much of the nation agonised over Sydney fires that were unseasonal.
Over the weekend, the new PM also poured forth the kind of vague drivel one would expect from an Opposition spokesperson on the economy:
Tony Abbott has flagged significant tax cuts as soon as the next term of government and has promised a budget surplus in three years and strong, sustained surpluses within a decade.
Mr Abbott repeated his pledge to be delivering strong surpluses – defined as 1 per cent of GDP, or $15 billion in today’s terms – by the end of the decade. He added he wanted to hand out significant tax cuts in the interim.
“I would hope, that not only we’d be in a position of delivering sustained surpluses at that level, but that far out, should we be in government for that length of time, we would also have delivered significant tax cuts over and above the tax cuts that we committed to delivering during this term of Parliament,” he said.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch Australia chief economist Saul Eslake said the task would be enormously difficult.
…Budget expert Chris Richardson from Deloitte Access Economics said Mr Abbott’s ambition was achievable but there were two caveats: China’s growth and the Commission of Audit.
An attempted save by Chris but, let’s face it, this is drivel. Australia faces its greatest growth challenge in generations and the PM is talking about combined tax cuts and surpluses. In particular one has to ask why PM Abbott is selling this feel good chimera when his Treasurer and Trade Ministers are busy expanding debt ceilings, hosing down cost-cutting, trying to find growth wherever they can and generally presenting messages of difficult times ahead.
In short, there is no cogent narrative tying together the many policy moves underway across various portfolios. Nor one that can absorb the slings and arrows of fate. The only consistency I can find in PM Abbott’s statements is that each is politically motivated.
I was impressed at how disciplined and Prime Ministerial Abbott presented in the election campaign. But that was a controlled environment, with controlled issues and controlled messages. Being Prime Minister is something altogether different, requiring vision, cogency and an ability to articulate the national interest as events transpire and change. That in itself requires a balance of values, pragmatism, imagination and magnanimity.
It’s early days but right now PM Abbott is still behaving like a bovver boy.
