Ethics and Tony Abbott's Medicare safety net promise

Little did I appreciate at the time that this was the beginning of the end of the Medicare deal, and possibly a number of other policy commitments. During the 2004 election, Tony Abbott used a Four Corners interview to give his "absolutely rock-solid, ironclad commitment" that the Government would not, after the election, lift the thresholds for the Medicare rebates.

One reason would have been that Abbott knew, before the election and so before any knowledge of a likely government majority in the Senate, that he could not go back to the Senate Independents and get them to change their views. But another would seem to be that Abbott himself believed in the sustainability of the Medicare thresholds.

We now know that the Expenditure Review Committee of Cabinet came to another view of the matter of sustainability. In his famous AM interview of April 15, Howard justified the policy change as a reversion to the Government's original threshold levels: the ones originally preferred before succumbing to the threats of the Senate Independents not to pass the package until the thresholds were lowered. This was one of those unpopular but hard decisions that responsible governments have to make. Further, he pointedly refused to "to give an ironclad guarantee" that the limits would not be again raised later, ironically teaching a lesson to other ministers on the merits of explicitly avoiding the agony of ironcladding.

All this emerged while Tony Abbott was on leave with his family. On his return, Abbott faced the media head-on, claiming that when he gave his original election commitments he had "not the slightest inkling that the Government would want to change it". That is, Abbott's election commitment was "my absolute belief", shared with other ministers (like Costello) about "what we honestly believed to be the position".

So what had changed? One view within Government is that Cabinet had rediscovered the need to make unpopular decisions, especially at the first Budget after an election. This is the view promoted by Howard on his way to the airport before departing for China.

Another view is that the Government discovered that it no longer needed the Senate Independents and that it could return to its original position before Abbott cut the deal with them. This is the view of Senators Brian Harradine and Meg Lees, two of the four who cut the deal with Abbott. Lees says the Government's action "gives politics an appalling name", which might be a backhanded way of praising Abbott for not being party to the reversal of election commitments.

But her view was polite chatter compared with that of Harradine, the father of the Senate, who is about to retire to make way for the new Howard majority. Writing in The Canberra Times on April 20, Harradine argued that the real policy problem was that the Government, including Abbott, lacked any commitment to adequate funding of Medicare's bulk-billing system. Only against this background, he argued, could voters appreciate the merits of the 2004 deal to make the legislated safety net lower than the Government's preferred original offer, to which the Government has now reverted. Real policy responsibility, he argued, meant making Medicare sustainable.

Then there is the Abbott view, caught somehow in between these two. When speaking to Laurie Oakes, Abbott said the Government was being responsible because it was changing opinions when circumstances changed. Taking an unacknowledged swipe at the "mendacity" mantra of Raymond Gaita's recent “Breach of Trust” (Quarterly Essay No 16), Abbott said "that's not mendacity. That's responsibility." The underlying change in "circumstance" was the unpredictably high take-up rate of the Medicare rebate. Abbott tried to convince Oakes that governments have to balance a set of three competing values.

The first value is "keeping commitments". Honourable as this commitment is, it has to be weighed in the balance against the others. Promises can be broken when they rub up against the second value of "economic responsibility". In shorthand, this value means a balanced Budget, for governments if not for the governed, in need of health care. And the third in this set of core values? Abbott chanced his luck with this value of "solidarity with the team", which could cut either way, to force Abbott back into the tent or to kick some of the other ministers out of it.

Nothing in Terms of Trust quite captures this sense of ethics as a team sport. Abbott is an interesting individual because he is one who can say "sorry" when required. In this case, he states, "I made a categoric statement that turned out not to be true". But sorry for whom? The political team he plays for or the ordinary followers who support the team and performances he has led them to expect?

Speaking to The Weekend Australian in mid- April, Abbott confessed, "Obviously I have a moral obligation to do what I sincerely think best." The Independent Senators thought that was what they were getting in the 2004 Medicare deal. But Abbott now says, "Plainly it's good to honour the last syllable of the last pledge but it's also good to honour the team. So I'll be supporting the team."

As with any form of group ethics, this sense of team play is only as good as the cause motivating the team. Voters will make up their own minds about this latest version of the terms of trust governments use to convince us of their sustainable right to the responsibilities of office.