Tony Abbott really is Australia’s answer to George W. Bush. His homespun slogans are attractive to the punters (we’ll call them the great unwashed) , as is his masculine demeanor. The same characteristics alienate the educated and chardonnay sipping middle classes (we’ll call them the wankers) who don’t really matter politically given most of Australia’s swing seats are in working class mortgage belts on city fringes.
There is a recent parallel here in US politics. George W. Bush’s appeal for the great unwashed was similar and was enhanced by his in(famous) clumsiness with language, even as this was ceaseless source of sneering enjoyment to the wankers. It worked for him for a while but eventually led to the calamitous downfall of the Republican Party as sophisticated issues in Iraq, in the economy and in wider politics appeared to overtake the Republican’s simple frame of reference
Tony Abbott is not as blundering as George W. Bush but his raw articulation of issues and reductive reasoning for policy is similarly both a political asset and policy liability. Homespun slogans are attractive to the great unwashed. A carbon price is just a tax. Refugees are just boats full of queue jumpers. The end of the mining boom and the productivity challenge is just a case of being “open for business”. These can win you power.
But they start to run out of puff when you have make real decisions that affect real people’s lives. Simplistic slogans won’t carry the polity through a sophisticated reform process, for instance. This is one major reason why the Government’s Budget has damn near killed it in the polls. And as the process fails, the resulting decline in economic prospects will be blamed upon it.
Another example of this conundrum on display today with Tony Abbott seeking to deflect criticism about foreign investment in property. From a speech last night:
Prime Minister Tony Abbott says we have all benefited from Britain’s original foreign investment because Australia was “unsettled” before the British arrived.
Delivering the keynote address at The Australian-Melbourne Institute conference on Thursday night, Mr Abbott was asked about the importance of foreign investment in residential real estate and its contribution to economic growth.
Mr Abbott said it was a contentious issue, and also an “emotional” one, because “if I want to sell my place [then] foreign investment might make sense, but if my neighbour wants to sell his place [then] foreign investment might be the last thing we want”.
When explaining why foreign investment was so important for a country like Australia, Mr Abbott said the country would be unimaginable without it.
“As a general principle we support foreign investment. Always have and always will,” he said.
“Our country is unimaginable without foreign investment.”
“I guess our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um, scarcely settled, Great South Land,” he said.
This is unwise rhetoric. British settlers may have been foreign investors in some very broad sense. But they also displaced the indigenous population. Implicitly analogising Australians as aboriginals and Chinese investors as British settlers is not going to reassure either the wankers or the great unwashed, nor is it going bring either into a centrist discussion about how foreign investment should be handled. On the contrary.
I’m labouring this George W. Bush comparison with our own PM. But, my point is simple enough. The nation needs much better communications from its leader than it’s currently getting if we’re going to head off the economic decline on the offing. More to the point, the Government needs much better communications from its leader than its getting if it is to avoid being blamed for it.
