Turns out you can teach an old government new tricks.
Or maybe the lessons of the 2014 budget have finally sunk in.
The federal education minister, Simon Birmingham, waxed so lyrically on Wednesday about the Turnbull government’s commitment to equality and fairness that you could be forgiven for thinking he was a Labor government minister.
Basking in the glow of Gonski 2.0, Birmingham told me and my Sky News co-host, Peter van Onselen, that the government’s motivation for its new school funding package lay in its core commitment to fairness:
All of us were driven by a sense of fairness and wanting to make sure that there’s an equitable degree of opportunity for all students regardless of their background. Yes, that’s fundamental to me ... but I can’t say that it was me alone driving the fairness equation. It was one that certainly Malcolm shared and ultimately the cabinet was driven by too.
To be fair, I believe Birmingham is genuine in his statement. He is one of a small handful of ministers in the Turnbull government who attended a public high school. He is a man who generally speaks from core social justice convictions, albeit with a dash of liberal individualism thrown in.
The Abbott-Turnbull government is terrified of the word “unfair”. The tag Bill Shorten put on the 2014 budget – that it was unfair – resonated with the public and has stuck. The Greens, GetUp! and the 2014 crossbench agreed. Pensioners, workers at the ABC, teachers, the unemployed, doctors, patients and parents agreed. Unfairness is now the Coalition’s kryptonite.
The reality of the 2014 budget became the perception: this Coalition government unfairly goes after the poor, the sick, the old and the young. It is out of touch, elitist and protects its mates in big business. Mr Harbourside Mansion can’t be bothered to know, much less meet, ordinary Australians in western Sydney or south-east Queensland.
In 2017 Malcolm Turnbull and his cabinet mates are going to be anything but unfair. And that, I suggest, will be their subliminal, or perhaps even intentional, message in the budget.
Cuts to legal aid services? No more. New money has been found to fill this hole.
Gonski is not gonski. It is now proposed to be the law of the land, with Gonski himself adding an imprimatur. Yes, Gonski 2.0 is worth $22bn less than Gonski 1.0 over the next decade for Australian schools, but try to get that detail to stick in anyone’s mind when the most holy Saint David Gonski is standing there next to the prime minister, giving Turnbull’s announcement his solemn blessing. The centre-left canonised Gonski – they can hardly complain that he’s sinning against them now.
Debt and deficit emergency? Emergency schmergency. That is so 2013. It’s literally all about the vibe of the thing now. Good debt and bad debt is what is in vogue these days. Good debt is the “new black”, so to speak.
If you are wondering what the technical definition of good debt is, let me help: it is whatever the treasurer of the day says it is. Right now, good debt funds airports. And probably the Snowy Hydro scheme. And maybe some new train lines, to be determined, somewhere. And a few road projects in rural Australia that don’t stack up on any cost benefit analysis, but do look good in National party brochures. Oh, and definitely the extra $19bn on Gonski 2.0. But not university funding. That’s bad debt. So too is subsidising university student fees.
But lifting the freeze on the Medicare rebate is good debt. Most certainly. In fact, I would bet my house (if I owned the house I live in – I rent) that the government will announce it is lifting the freeze on the Medicare rebate in the next few days.
If all this keeps up, Turnbull could go down in history as the biggest spending, biggest taxing, most socialist prime minister in modern times. Or maybe in all of federation. (I’m getting carried away with the headiness of it all.)
Also the most protectionist. Notice how the government is no longer trumpeting how it completed three free trade deals? The trade minister, Steve Ciobo, one of the government’s better performing ministers, seems to have been put on ice. Turnbull didn’t even take Ciobo with him to India recently, and one of the main topics up for discussion was the proposed Australian-Indian free trade agreement. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead, buried and cremated, and now it’s all about “Aussie jobs” first. Foreigners are out, and Australians are in. At last, Aussie deer farmers and blacksmiths are going to get a fair go now that all those 457 visa workers are out of the way.
When I became planning minister in NSW, a former Labor premier gave me some advice: “Government is easy. You just give people what they want.”
OK, he was speaking tongue-in-cheek (or half tongue-in-cheek, at least). But there is an element of truth to his wisdom, and it is one that seems to have dawned on Turnbull. It only took 11 losing Newspolls in a row for the PM to work this out: give the people what they want.
They want the government to give a Gonski. Well then, give them David Gonski.
Turnbull may well feel satisfied about what has been a pretty good couple of weeks for his government. The past fortnight is the closest the Turnbull government has come since the 2016 election competency, if we measure that by producing policy and managing the media narrative. But the Turnbull government does not have a path to victory yet. It’s won a few battles, but by no means can it claim the war is over.
Still, if I was opposition leader, I’d feel a bit more trepidation than previously.
Mind you, Turnbull will need to get a poll bounce, and soon, from this recent outburst of big-spending, pro-Aussie announcements. As someone who was certainly not a NSW Labor premier, Abraham Lincoln, once said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
In a dark corner of the Liberal party room, there’s a group of MPs horrified by all this debt and all this spending. I imagine them poring lovingly over the 2014 budget. They’re lamenting the unfairness of losing a first term prime minister. They’re biding their time. They’re not fooled by Malcolm 2.0.
