Blood Oaths and Backflips

In the end, I suppose all of us have got to answer to our God and our consciences.

Tony Abbott, 29 September 2015

Australians value honesty in their political leaders. And for Tony Abbott, the opposition leader who zeroed in on Julia Gillard's broken pledge that there would be no carbon tax under a government she led, keeping his commitments was always going to be doubly important. Broken election promises were a huge problem for the Abbott government, made even worse by the paucity of an affirmative policy agenda and a tendency to deny obvious breaches of the electorate's faith. That so many promises were subsequently broken places the 2013 election campaign in a wider context: it suggests a leader who was not ready to make the transition to government. We start, though, with arguably the most important moment of Abbott's five years as leader of the Liberal Party.

A Promising Start

It is the night before the 2013 election. Tony Abbott is, characteristically, standing in a football field in the marginal Sydney seat of Lindsay with his most senior advisers around him, including chief of staff Peta Credlin. He is giving a low-profile interview with Anton Enus from SBS World News that would in due course become exhibit A in the case against Abbott's veracity. Pressed on spending cuts, Abbott said: 'I trust that everyone has listened to what Joe Hockey has said, last week and again this week: no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST, and no cuts to the ABC and SBS.'

Hockey told us that his reaction to that SBS interview was, 'Oh no!' The media release accompanying the costings document he and finance spokesman Andrew Robb had issued the day before did indeed include similar language, but Hockey had throughout the campaign used the qualification that the Coalition would audit spending following the election and cut waste wherever they found it. Abbott's phrasing on SBS wasn't a slip of the tongue. He had set out most of this list the previous Sunday on ABC Insiders and in his pre-election National Press Club address. Enus asked Abbott directly about public broadcasting, which led him to add guarantees for ABC and SBS. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Abbott's team thought the interview had gone well. They underestimated the backlash that would follow if the Coalition did make big spending cuts once in government to meet its other oft-recited promise to 'pay back the debt'. The similarities to Gillard's legendary 'no carbon tax under a government I lead' television appearance in the 2010 campaign are remarkable. It too was made towards the end of an election campaign and dominated months in office. With the 2010 election so evenly poised, Gillard's desire to take every opportunity to get the message out was understandable. Abbott didn't have that excuse in 2013. Indeed, one of his slogans was 'no surprises, no excuses'. These untruths would be quickly exposed in government. He compounded the duplicity during the campaign: 'I will do what I say we will do. I want to be known as someone who under-promises and over-delivers.'

The reference to Hockey in the SBS interview was often left out of the footage circulated online but it is vital to understanding Abbott's strategy. This is because, contrary to the claims of Abbott's defenders that it shows that he was referring people to Hockey's more detailed policy statements, it was typical of Abbott to make pithy, declarative statements and leave others to walk back his comments. Abbott had set himself up to break his final election promise of the campaign, neatly captured on video. Hockey, having seen the comments, complained to those around him about being drawn into Abbott's misleading construction of what the new government would and wouldn't do. He knew what was coming, even if he didn't see that it would destroy his political ambitions just as it would destroy Abbott's prime ministership.

The knowledgeable SBS audience might have wondered how that list of commitments, combined with the promise to increase defence spending and cut the carbon and mining taxes, could deliver a budget surplus. It could not. Pandering to the SBS audience wasn't a good look either. The idea that an incoming Coalition government would not give the ABC a haircut, just as the Fraser and Howard governments had done, lacked credibility. More to the point, the SBS audience was unlikely to be still undecided on election eve. Such a feat would have taken months of studied ignorance of informative programs like SBS World News. Abbott should have spent the twenty or so seconds it took to provide video evidence of his soon-to-be broken promise shaking a few more hands in the neighbouring seat of Greenway. Indeed, in that short space of time, Abbott encapsulated one of the primary divides he would face in government. The wider public places much trust in the public broadcasters, and while they agree in principle that governments waste money, they don't necessarily agree with cuts to specific programs. However, most Liberal Party activists and conservative commentators expected a new Coalition government to make cuts to the public broadcasters and across the breadth of government departments. Those words gave the Liberal Party cause to question what sort of prime minister Abbott would turn out to be. In time their doubts were justified.

The 2013 SBS interview wasn't the first time Abbott's truthfulness had come under question on national television. He once played a pivotal role in the founding of an organisation called Australians for Honest Politics — a trust established to bring court challenges to the development of Pauline Hanson's political organisation, One Nation. Abbott denied on ABC TV that he had any financial involvement with the legal challenges but this was quickly shown to be false. Abbott later joked to The Sydney Morning Herald in 2003 that 'misleading the ABC is not quite the same as misleading the parliament as a political crime'. He was forced to apologise for that remark. Unlike many political leaders who lose the trust of the electorate by being evasive, Abbott continued to make bald statements that were easy to disprove. A number of his colleagues to whom we spoke expressed the same sentiment about their private dealings with him. It was another lesson Abbott failed to learn from Howard, who, in spite of the ironic label of 'Honest John', usually employed a style of rhetoric which made him much harder to pin down than Rudd, with his grand rhetorical flourishes, and Abbott, with his more pithy but definitive slogans.

During the 2004 election campaign, Lateline's Tony Jones asked Abbott if he had met Sydney archbishop George Pell during the campaign. 'Not that I can recall,' he replied. When pressed by Jones about a meeting ten days earlier, Abbott got defensive. 'Ah, actually, now that you do mention it, I did meet with Cardinal Pell. So what?' Sadly, he is probably right that the electorate isn't too concerned about fibs to journalists over ephemeral matters. Broken policy promises, though, are taken seriously. During the same campaign in 2004 Abbott, then minister for health, told Four Corners that the government's Medicare Safety Net providing an 80 per cent rebate of out-of-pocket health expenses over a threshold was 'an absolutely rock-solid, ironclad commitment'. After the election, economic ministers in cabinet insisted on saving money by lifting the safety net thresholds. Abbott argued against having to break his pledge, and seriously considered resigning from cabinet. Fellow ministers were unsympathetic that Abbott had supported the policy in such colourful terms. He pleaded that he could not have foreseen the change of heart in cabinet once the government gained control of the Senate. Whether or not to resign was less a moral consideration than a matter of political positioning. In the end he decided he couldn't do it to Howard. Abbott eventually fronted the cameras with contrition. 'I am very sorry that that statement back in October has turned out not to be realised by events, but this is a Government which, in the end, has based its whole record, its whole claim to election and re-election, on economic responsibility,' he said. The trouble was that Abbott had been warned about the ballooning costs of the scheme prior to the election. He should have, at the very least, been careful of rhetorical over-reach, but such over-reach was becoming a trademark of his.

As press secretary during John Hewson's failed tilt at the prime ministership, Abbott — and he was hardly alone — learned the limitations of taking a detailed policy platform to the electorate from opposition. During his years as a Howard minister, Abbott used to laugh out loud when telling new staff members about Hewson's mistakes, assuring them that he wouldn't make such a mistake if he ever had the opportunity to lead a party in opposition. This revealed one of the many contradictions in Abbott — when writing about Howard he applauded the laying out of a 'policy framework' in opposition, but he lampooned Hewson's preparedness to detail his plans. Abbott has never been a details man. What he really admired about Howard was his ability to develop a world view on how to change the nation and maintain that narrative, broadly elaborating on such thinking in policy positions. Abbott learned to not give policy detail in his pre-election positioning, but failed to apply this lesson when ruling out change, ensuring that follow-up questions in interviews would catch him out. It was lazy politicking.

The most interesting commentator on Abbott's credibility has been the man himself. In 1999, Abbott's chief pitch against the constitutional model preferred by the Australian Republican Movement was that politicians, who would appoint the president, were not to be trusted. He returned to this theme as prime minister during the debate over whether to hold a plebiscite on same-sex marriage. Prior to becoming opposition leader in late 2009, Abbott differentiated between principles and policies:

The art of effective democratic statesmanship is of presenting your principles, presenting your convictions, in ways which sufficiently impress the public such that you are seen as a man or woman of principle, but which don't so worry the public that they think you would be a risk if you found yourself in a position of power.

Abbott had been making these distinctions since his dalliances with groups aligned with the BA Santamaria-led National Civic Council in the 1970s. He found himself agreeing with the principles but not always the policy preferences of an organisation that had been at its zenith in the 1950s. Making a distinction between principle and policy was a useful formulation for a minister who wanted to talk about a wide range of issues without breaking Prime Minister Howard's strict rules about ministers sticking to their portfolio areas. As leader, though, a different set of expectations would apply to Abbott. Quizzed by Kerry O'Brien on The 7.30 Report in the months prior to the 2010 election about the inconsistency between his rhetoric about not increasing taxes and the tax increase on business that was supposed to pay for his paid parental leave plan, Abbott said:

Sometimes, in the heat of discussion, you go a little bit further than you would if it was an absolutely calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark, which is one of the reasons why the statements that need to be taken absolutely as gospel truth are those carefully prepared scripted statements.

O'Brien: So every time you make a statement, we have to ask you whether it's carefully prepared ...

Abbott: All of us in the heat of verbal combat, so to speak, will sometimes say things that go a little bit further.

And so it went on for the rest of the interview, with O'Brien drawing the comparison with Howard's broken promises in his first budget, and his distinction between 'core' and non-core promises. While he shouldn't have allowed himself to be drawn into commentary, Abbott's distinction between oral and written communication was prescient. During his prime ministership, slippery rhetoric would be widely mocked in a way that historically hadn't been possible — via social media. This increasingly powerful platform was well suited to assisting in Abbott's unravelling and his gaffes as prime minister.

Abbott gave himself too much credit, though, in implying that a political leader, with decades of experience as a professional communicator, might somehow speak about a subject like taxation off the cuff. So too with the pre-election appearance on SBS. He didn't seem to care that he was making rock-solid promises he would not be able to keep. As he had said, sometimes it's better to seek forgiveness. The problem with the SBS broken promise, and the others in the first budget, was the time it took to accept the reality that his spin wasn't working. Being constrained by past public utterances is known as 'rhetorical path dependency'. Policy backflips are hardly unusual in politics. Trying to anticipate the trade-off between the longer term benefits of changing to a better policy while wearing the public opprobrium for broken promises is part of the art of leadership. Rather than facing up to his own words, however, and the irreconcilable rhetoric about keeping promises and minimising surprises, Abbott at first sought to deny, both in public and in the party-room, that promises were being broken. It was only well after being confronted by backbencher Craig Laundy in the party room months after the budget that Abbott conceded he'd gone back on his word. Laundy lampooned the 'verbal gymnastics', telling the prime minister that he was compounding the error. One of the ministers in his government who voted for him in both the February spill motion and the leadership ballot told us, 'After years of prosecuting the "Juliar" case there's no doubt that SBS interview turned people against us. The public thought Tony had promised that lying was a bad thing and he wanted to find a better way.'

Abbott's reputation as a 'weather vane' on policy matters came from the climate change debate within the Liberal Party that resulted in his elevation to the leadership. In Battlelines, Abbott had written:

It sounds like common sense to minimise human impact on the environment and to reduce the human contribution to increased atmospheric gas concentrations. It doesn't make much sense, though, to impose certain and substantial costs on the economy now in order to avoid unknown and perhaps even benign changes in the future.

This is the authentic conservative philosophical position on climate change: sceptical of grand claims and costly solutions while ensuring, as Abbott explained, 'prudent insurance against possible future harm'. Abbott was also on the record musing about a carbon tax as a simpler alternative to the 'artificially created markets' inherent in emissions trading. The distinction between scepticism of scientists' ability to predict the extent of future climate variation and outright denial of human-induced climate change, from the likes of Senator Nick Minchin and newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt, remains important. In November 2009, Minchin castigated the entire edifice of climate policy on Four Corners. 'For the extreme left,' he explained, 'it provides the opportunity to do what they've always wanted to do, to sort of de-industrialise the western world.' Prior to Minchin hurling a hand grenade into opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull's marathon negotiations with Rudd over an emissions trading scheme (ETS), Abbott seemed to be in the sceptic rather than the denialist camp. So it wasn't the 'scripted remark' Abbott who appealed to the prejudices of a community meeting in rural Victoria where he reportedly called climate science 'crap'. Abbott's version is that he said the idea that there is scientific consensus on the issue was 'crap'. The latter point of view might be a simple statement of the nature of scientific method, although this seems unlikely given the venue. Consistent with the pattern that emerged when he was leader, it also seems unlikely that this was a 'heat of the moment' comment but rather something Abbott had planned knowing he could 'clarify' his remark if necessary. He was pandering to his immediate audience and to his parliamentary colleagues. As a journalist, media adviser and politician, Abbott knew that his comment would make national news. Refer to his written remarks if you want the truth.

Along with a surprising party-room intervention from frontbencher Andrew Robb about the cost of an ETS on business, these events emboldened MPs hearing concerns about the ETS negotiations from their own electorates. The momentum for a challenge to Turnbull over the issue quickly escalated. The way in which Abbott had positioned himself as conservatives planned their attack on Turnbull's leadership through issues such as climate change was telling. This resulted in Abbott being installed as leader after the party tore itself apart over climate change, an issue on which Abbott had flipped and flopped. Hypocrisy is not unusual in politics. The important thing about policy backflips is to land on the right side of public opinion, which is not always easy. Abbott became the third leader in just over two years in opposition, but he quickly surprised the doubters, who included his closest allies, by winning the public debate on the ETS. It's not just leaders who distinguish between principle and policy. Voters wanted action on climate change in principle, and Labor had confidence in polls showing that view. But as the detail of emissions trading was debated and bipartisanship evaporated, the public's hip-pocket nerve was touched. When Abbott, as opposition leader, framed the ETS as 'a great big new tax on everything', it was hardly subtle but it was effective. His previous equivocation on the issue was less important to a public nervous about the effects of the global financial crisis.