Bernard Keane

from Crikey ......

Oppositions lose their bearings economically. Without the responsibility of office and tempted by populism, the sound managers of yesteryear become today's cheapjack advocates of sloppy policy. Labor turned its collective back on the Hawke-Keating years (some say merely reverting to its pre-1980s type). The list of reforms Labor opposed in the Beazley, Crean and Latham years make for shameful reading.

The Liberals in opposition have done the same. They rejected the "comprehensive" emissions trading scheme they promised voters in 2007; they rejected Labor's efforts to curb spending, they refused to honour the Charter of Budget Honesty process they established, they've even embraced the nonsense of anti-dumping. And like Mark Latham, Tony Abbott feels no compunction about using the traditional budget-in-reply address to entirely ignore fiscal and economic matters.

But Abbott went further in his weekend address to the Liberal's Federal Council, into a fantasy land. Abbott is, mostly, tactically brilliant as an opposition leader. But in policy terms, he's a shabby economic illiterate. If Julia Gillard is a poor successor to better Labor leaders, Abbott goes further and is actively trashing his party's tradition of economic management.

This was Abbott's version of Gillard's "the brickie and the socialite" speech. It reflected a leader's attempt to lay claim to his party's heritage, but revealed only his own shortcomings and misinterpretation of that heritage -- although at least the Prime Minister didn't crack an Irish joke, and better yet follow it by insisting she loved multiculturalism. Maybe Abbott momentarily thought he was back at the Sydney Uni SRC in the late '70s. Classy and prime ministerial as always.

First, there was the tired repetition of the claim of $50 billion in savings, which, in a perhaps accidental giveaway, Abbott now says would have only improved the fiscal balance by $11 billion over four years. That $11 billion is now 12 months out of date, and is contested by Treasury anyway. Joe Hockey's petulant reaction to being questioned about this at the Press Club shows just how sensitive the Liberals are about this.

And the savings won't include cuts to middle-class welfare. "Middle-income families with children are Australia's new poor," Abbott insisted. What on earth he meant by this extraordinary statement is one of the sublimer mysteries of the Abbott leadership. Where does it leave low-income families with children? Too old-fashioned for an en vogue politician such as Abbott?

Then there was Abbott's promise to massively lift spending on infrastructure -- not just the usual list of boondoggles likes the inland rail line, but investing in freight rail bottlenecks and integrated motorway and rail networks for capital cities. How would the tens of billions such a program requires be funded? Infrastructure charges? Congestion levies? Innovative public-private financing arrangements that address the now-critical issue of risk? New methods of encouraging superannuation funds to invest in infrastructure? Abbott didn't say.

It won't be from increased taxes, because Abbott promised to cut them. But who would get the tax cuts, how big would they be and what would they cost? Abbott didn't say. In fact, he complained that he couldn't work it out because he didn't have the resources to do it, "particularly in the absence of a Parliamentary Budget Office".

The PBO is being established now, with funding appropriated from July 1, and one of its roles is to cost policies at the request of MPs. Abbott doesn't need Gillard's offer of Treasury officials -- he can prepare a confidential request for the PBO to cost a tax policy now and have it worked up by the end of the year.

Instead, Abbott offers the sight of an alternative prime minister raising his hands in supplication and apologising for not explaining how he'll actually achieve the core goals of his program.

Abbott's helplessness must come as a shock to John Hewson, who along with Peter Reith and a team of advisers put together a comprehensive and fully costed tax reform plan in 1991. Abbott should know, after all -- he was Hewson's media adviser.

It might even come as a shock to Joe Hockey, who wanted to investigate ending the rort around trust funds. The work on fixing trusts has been done before, under Costello and Hockey himself a decade ago. But Hockey was publicly humiliated for his trouble.

The Fightback! example is relevant, though, because plainly Abbott feels there is no benefit from offering anything for Labor to target, lest the government use it to savage him like Paul Keating savaged John Hewson -- as if this government could savage its way out of a wet paper bag.

But Abbott wants it both ways -- the freedom to announce a package of goodies -- tax cuts! New road and rail networks! Welfare for everyone -- without the responsibility of explaining -- or even faintly alluding to -- how it will all be paid for.

The most plausible assumption is that Abbott is relying on the mining boom and resource sector revenues to fund any tax cuts, just like the Howard government did. Hockey outlined exactly that strategy at the Press Club when he spoke about governments needing to "grease the wheels" and give people handouts to ease resentment (entirely without foundation) that they weren't benefiting from the mining boom.

When the Howard government gave us this approach -- let's call it whingenomics -- it led to higher interest rates -- thereby punishing exactly the squeaky wheels Hockey wants to grease -- and left the budget in structural deficit and more exposed than before to cyclical downturns.

Abbott has always sat a little uncomfortably in the Liberal Party -- a big government enthusiast in the party of the free market and small government, a social reactionary in a party of liberalism. Now another difference is emerging, between those eager for the Opposition to start spelling out some detail of positive policy (and what better time than when, on the worst poll, the Coalition is 10 2PP points ahead) and Abbott's political instinct to stay negative and his incapacity to handle the basics of economic policy.

The pressure is coming from several directions -- on IR from Peter Reith and young Turks such as Steve Ciobo and Jamie Briggs -- both absurdly confined to the backbench by Abbott, who prefers clowns such as Kevin Andrews and Bronwyn Bishop -- and on economic policy from Joe Hockey and Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull, sensibly, continues to advocate a sovereign wealth fund -- a concept inimical to the Abbott idea of pissing the mining boom away again on handouts to "the new poor".

In the meantime, Abbott continues to trash the Liberal brand as the party of economic management

Poor old Peter Reith. Never quite knew what was going on. Always in the dark. Why, back in 1998, as John Howard's workplace relations minister, he was astounded to hear that serving defence personnel would be trained as scab wharfies in Dubai to break the maritime dispute.

And no, he'd been given no hint whatever of the rottweilers and balaclava'd goons sooled onto the docks to enforce the lockout.

In 2000, all bewildered innocence, he learned of a $50,000 bill on his government phone card, at least $1000 of that racked up by his son.

A year later, he was flabbergasted again when the Defence brass told him that evil boat people had not actually tossed their kiddies overboard from SIEV 4. ''Well, we'd better not see the video then,'' he cried in shock.

Then, just last weekend, the poor chap believed he had Tony Abbott's support as federal president of the Liberal Party, only to find the stuntman voting, almost ostentatiously, for his rival, Alan Stockdale. Gobsmacked again. He must have missed that famous confession to Kerry O'Brien, that you should always get an Abbott promise in writing.

Believing now that his leader's duplicity has released him from some vow of silence, Reith says he will publicly campaign for industrial relations reform, perhaps setting up yet another Melbourne ''think tank'' to advance the cause.

We know what this means: WorkChoices Mk2. Reform, in Reithspeak, is code for the crushing of trade unions and the industrial courts, abolition of the workers' right to bargain, sweated labour in the dark satanic mills, 13-year-olds toiling 60 hours a week down coal mines, a return to blackbirding on the Queensland cane fields.

The political puzzle is, why now? With WorkChoices thrown overboard and replaced by Labor's Fair Work Act, the industrial landscape has never been so tranquil.

The ACTU has vanished from the headlines; if you don't believe me, try to name its president and secretary.

There hasn't been a strike in ages, let alone a red-ragging revolution for the smashing of Capitalism and the triumph of the proletariat.

And best of all, at a time of virtually full employment there has not been a wages breakout to fuel inflation and smother productivity.

It doesn't come much better than this. Yet Reith and his fellow high Tory ideologues soldier on regardless, still fighting the industrial wars of the 19th century.

These days, all the noise is coming from the top-hatted capitalists bellyaching about how tough they are doing it. The racket is deafening.

We began the year with the likes of the retailers Gerry Harvey and Solly Lew - he of Coles Myer and the famous Yannon transaction - shouting that the internet was killing them and demanding that everyone pay GST on everything bought overseas.

The big miners, having successfully seen off both Kevin Rudd and his Resource Super Profits Tax, now keep up a drumbeat of outrage at its replacement, the Minerals Resource Rent Tax.

And the wicked carbon tax, of course. Not a day goes by without Rio Tinto's Tom Albanese, BHP's Marius Kloppers or Andrew ''Twiggy'' Forrest warning of national ruin if they pay a cent more tax than they feel is fair and proper.

At times this posturing rockets to new heights of absurdity, as with Gina Rinehart's funding of the latest visit of that loopy British climate denier, Lord Munchausen.

James Packer, meanwhile, pronounces that Julia Gillard is ''anti-business'', because, oh horror, the government's poker machine reforms might slug him $300 million a year when he is struggling to run a corporate jet and a mega-yacht or two.

Then we have the insensate fury of Big Tobacco. Corporate drug-dealers with the back-alley morals of Al Capone, their latest standover trick, from Philip Morris, is to sue for billions from the federal government if plain packaging laws get up.

Adding to the din on the sidelines is Melbourne's mysterious Institute of Public Affairs.

This a right-wing propaganda unit which floridly describes itself as ''an independent, non-profit public policy think tank, dedicated to preserving and strengthening the foundations of economic and political freedom''.

Independent of what, exactly? Where does the money come from to support its hordes of directors, senior fellows, research fellows, emeritus fellows and even adjunct fellows all furiously scribbling away at their reactionary tracts?

Perhaps the IPA's executive director, John Roskam, could demonstrate his commitment to public debate by revealing who his sponsors are.

If they are not Big Miners, Big Tobacco and the top end of Collins St, he could always say so.

This weekend will be the last that Allan Grant ''Angus'' Houston goes to bed with the fear that an early morning phone call will be to tell him of another digger dead in Afghanistan.

On Monday, he hangs up his four-star uniform as Chief of the Defence Force and retires after 41 years of service in the RAAF and to the nation.

His story is remarkable: the lanky kid from Scotland who emigrated here in 1968 at the age of 21, with just a few dollars to his name, rose to the summit of his chosen career, the profession of arms.

As you will know, your columnist is not given to splashing lavish praise around but in all my years in this trade I have not met a public figure of such integrity and decency. In the grubby milieu of Canberra and Defence politics, he shone like polished steel. It was Houston, remember, then acting Defence chief, who told the aforementioned Reith, at the height of the 2001 election campaign, that he could no longer get away with the children overboard scam. That the truth should come out.

His greatest strength was his humanity. I know for a fact that he genuinely shared the bereavement of every Australian family that lost a boy at war. Their pain was his, and he had the moral courage to show it. The ADF will miss him.

The new chief, General David Hurley, is a good man, too. With big boots to fill.

Mike Carlton

He [Abbott] should apologise to all the businesses, he should apologise to all the pensioners, he should apologise to all of the working families that the campaign has been directed at. 

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/mugged-by-the-truth-labor-goes-for-abbott-on-carbon-tax-20120826-24u6i.html#ixzz24dBkE3Jn