Who’d have thought Tony Abbott would be under fire for the stinginess of his paid parental leave scheme when for so long he was attacked for its profligacy, and that this attack would be the big threat to his plan to use a giveaway budget to reset the political debate?
The Coalition wanted to use its softer 2015 budget to get traction for the “Labor are wreckers with no savings alternatives” line, which tanked last year because most of the savings in question were also rejected by the voters and the crossbench in the Senate.
The finance minister, Mathias Cormann, tried to revive this attack ahead of Bill Shorten’s budget speech in reply, demanding the Labor leader explain how he would cut $52bn in spending – the Coalition’s calculation of the cost of the savings Labor has blocked and the policies it has promised to reinstate.
Shorten, unsurprisingly, did not oblige. More surprisingly, he did not even try – announcing significant new spending without any new offsetting savings, other than restating Labor’s commitment to a multinational tax avoidance crackdown and a modest cut to superannuation tax concessions.
His message was pitched in a similar fashion to the government’s budget – all about having a plan to create the jobs of the future that would replace the mining boom – but the policy details were scant. Its main aim was rhetorical – to remind everyone watching the televised speech about last year’s unfairness and insisting that its “meanness of spirit” lives on.
But that rhetoric had been bolstered by Labor’s attack on the paid parental leave cuts, which pried back open the “unfairness” theme. As the hours ticked down to Shorten’s speech, the government’s policy started to quite spectacularly unravel.
Ministers had referred to the idea of employees receiving both an employer-funded scheme and a government-funded scheme as “double-dipping” and described it as a “rort” and a “fraud”, but then the assistant treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, said he and his wife had “double-dipped” themselves, and Cormann appeared to have done the same.
The prime minister tried to change tack and say the saving was justified because its major beneficiaries were (apparently undeserving) public servants, but then had to backpedal when asked about the generous scheme offered by the Australian federal police (also public servants). And then the social services minister, Scott Morrison, tried to say it was targeting only a “Labor/union deal” but appeared lost for words when asked why the Coalition had voted for it five years ago and not mentioned any concerns in the interim.
The government still has almost $10bn dollars in small business and childcare funding to flick the switch to economic and political optimism and achieve the political breathing space it is seeking, not to mention lots of other smaller goodies to give away.
But Labor’s attack on paid parental leave shows how quickly the debate can be diverted back to last year’s devastatingly damaging themes.
