The front-page of The Australian on Thursday made Liberal spin-doctors cringe. The main headline — “Hockey’s budget warning: we all have to contribute” — was just what they wanted. But the big colour photograph underneath jarred.
It showed Joe Hockey posing in front of framed prints of thoroughbred horses, surrounded by plush red-and-white striped wingback chairs, looking like a member of the landed gentry in an expensive and exclusive club.
“All Australians must help to do the heavy lifting,” Hockey told his audience.
And that is the key, of course. It is more likely the need for sacrifice will be accepted if it is clear that everyone is sharing the burden.
The task of selling the changes will be a lot more difficult if there are seen to be exceptions. And that is where the prime minister’s extraordinarily generous paid parental leave scheme comes in.
Like the Hockey photograph, it undercuts the message — but much, much more seriously. “Joe Hockey has no credibility arguing in favour of means-testing when they’re putting forward a paid parental leave system that is the opposite of means-testing,” Labor’s finance spokesman, Tony Burke said.
“Means-testing is about saying the less money you’ve got, the more help you’ll receive. Their paid parental leave scheme is about saying the more money you’ve got, the more extra the government will give you.”
Hockey sounds weak when he tries to defend Tony Abbott’s gold-plated scheme because his heart is not in it. Many in the coalition wish the prime minister would dump the thing, but he won’t. Recent opinion polls reveal at least part of the reason.
Fairfax Media’s latest Nielsen poll showed 46 per cent of men approve Abbott’s performance compared with only 41 per cent of women, and 48 per cent of men prefer Abbott as prime minister while the figure for women was just 41 per cent.
An interesting sidelight to the government’s newfound determination to target support to the most needy via means-testing is that it involves yet another Abbott backflip — and a dramatic one.
In his book Battlelines, written in 2009 with a new edition published last year, Abbott argued fiercely against means-testing. He bluntly posed the question: Why should people who can’t provide for themselves be the only ones to get government support?
Abbott wrote that a “relatively achievable change” would be to remove the means-test on Family Tax Benefit Part A, and he proposed financing abolition of the means test on age pensions by ending superannuation concessions.
If any minister rolled up with ideas like that now, the Prime Minister would join Hockey in ridiculing them and sending them on their way.
So there it is,backflips and economic mumbo jumbo,there will be no equal sharing of the heavy lifting,quite the opposite. hockey has no credibility,if he fails to confront abbott,over the ridiculous policy whic is the PPL.
