Tony Abbott’s 'Battlelines' and future directions for the Coalition

While the “new” Tony Abbott is at great pains to not appear overtly sexist, it is the role he prescribes for women that is implicitly sexist. Women who read Battlelines will be left in no doubt that it is their patriotic duty to breed; and there is seemingly no recognition that women who do not have children can contribute to the nation in a publicly meaningful way.

Abbott preaches small government and lower taxes on the one hand - but then proposes initiatives with large budget impacts on the other. Abolishing means testing for the Family Tax Benefit(A) is costed at $2 billion per year - with the suggestion that this may be paid for by further increasing the age of pension eligibility. There’s an extra $1 billion a year for performance pay for teachers. The commitment to abolish the means test on the baby bonus is left uncosted. Including dentistry in Medicare will include another $4 billion per year in 2007 dollars. He also proposes an added level of bureaucracy in the form of hospital boards and school councils which would no doubt have a budget impact. So if Abbott is a small government, low spending conservative as he claims- where are the savings going to come from to pay for his pet projects?

Abbott makes numerous complaints about the Commonwealth-State relations and vertical fiscal imbalance. His concerns in this regard are commendable, but at the end of the day the solution he offers is a Commonwealth power grab. If there are any disputes between Canberra and the states, the will of the Commonwealth should always prevail. Despite noting John Howard’s view that transferring governance of schools and hospitals from one bureaucracy to another is not likely to lead to any reduction in bureaucracy - this is still his preferred solution.

Abbott decries the state-run education and health systems as “highly bureaucratic structures that are unresponsive to peoples needs”. His solution to this problem is the imposition of another layer of bureaucracy - local school and hospital boards. These measures would seem to run counter to his hypothesis of the problems facing both systems. Whether in relation to schools, hospitals or the response to climate change, Abbott seems to favour bureaucratic, inefficient solutions whilst at the same time arguing for smaller government and less bureaucracy - his thinking is completely muddled in this regard.

So what to make of future direction of Coalition policy under Tony Abbott’s leadership? Perhaps the best characterisation is a non-existent economic policy attached to a high cost, conservative social policy. Abbott lowered himself to pick up the Coalition leadership by appealing to the climate change sceptical, religious and socially conservative fringe. In hindsight, the battlelines featured in his book were as much about creating internal divisions within the Liberal party as they were about spelling out policy directions for the nation. Perhaps the great unanswered question for Tony Abbott is whether he can step over the bodies left within his own party room.