Baggage. Tony Abbott remarked this week – somewhat pointedly – that Malcolm Turnbull wasn’t weighed down by much of his own.
“As a potential reformer, Malcolm Turnbull has the advantage of being relatively unbound by previous commitments,” he wrote in his Spectator Diary. Silent subtext (by my reading): “Like the promises I had to make to get this government elected in the first place ... and then break in office.”
Abbott is right, Turnbull’s real baggage is not any promises he made to the electorate, it is the policy burdens he inherited from his predecessor, or felt forced to maintain.
But the bad news for Abbott and his remaining coterie of conservative supporters is that the more they talk up those policies, the more the electorate is likely to back Turnbull in ditching them. (In more bad news, whenever they talk about all the seething resentment being harboured by conservatives over ministers who didn’t do or say enough to warn or save Abbott, they just serve to highlight how little anyone else cares.)
Abbott goes on in the diary to warn Turnbull that he still faces the problem of “how to deal with the ‘no one can be worse off’ mindset”, which makes “serious reform so hard”.
But the electorate vividly remembers the “make the poorest worse off” mindset of Abbott’s first budget, and not in a good way. Turnbull has a far better chance of finding budget savings if he makes good on his promise to enact policies that are clearly fair.
Even striding the world stage for the first time for the end of year “summit season”, Turnbull’s only real encumbrances are those he has been lumped with.
At the G20 in Antalya over the weekend he will have to go along with the idea that Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey presided over a global triumph at the previous meeting in Brisbane last year, even though the evidence suggests otherwise.
The great achievements of that meeting were hailed as the “Brisbane Action Plan” – a series of pledges that was going to increase growth in the major economies by 2.1% by 2018 ($2tn worth) – and a “global infrastructure hub”, based in Sydney, that was supposed to unlock another $2tn in private infrastructure investment around the world. Nothing like headlines with trillions in them to get some attention.
Twelve months on, and economic growth across the G20 countries is – in diplomatic nice-speak – “below expectations”. The “peer pressure” that was supposed to ensure countries did all the things they promised hasn’t really worked – not even for the super-enthusiastic host nation.
In fact, many of Australia’s pledges have been dumped or remain stuck in the Senate – things like paying unemployment benefits for only six months of the year to under 30s; the paid parental leave scheme; the higher education reforms; reintroducing the Australian Building and Construction Commission; the changes to the fair work laws; and cuts to family tax benefits to fund childcare.
And so far the “hub” appears to be a website and a business plan. It has a chief executive and a board, but does not seem to have done much yet. Of its $50m funding, $30m comes from Australia and the money is designed to last four years. With just three years to go and a pretty vague brief to establish a knowledge network and share information and research, it’s not really clear what the project can achieve in such a short time.
This is not to suggest either exercise was pointless, nor to take away from the efforts Hockey in particular put into the Brisbane meeting, just to remind how leaders have to hype the tangible achievements of such meetings – and how Turnbull may have to continue to do so in defiance of the available facts.
Even more than in Brisbane, where US president Obama highlighted the need for global action on climate change, and the impact on the Great Barrier Reef if it doesn’t happen, and the Abbott government convulsed with unhinged fury, the impending Paris summit makes global warming a “top of mind” issue. It will be raised at every meeting.
But here, more than anywhere, Turnbull has to tiptoe. Despite having once said, “I will not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am,” he does. He has been forced to agree to lacklustre long-term international reduction pledges and a domestic policy that has no chance of achieving them.
It is true, given the spoiling role so often played by Abbott and former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, for example at Chogm, that world leaders are likely to greet their successors with a sense of relief.
And it’s true there have been signs of some diplomatic shifts – for example Australia resuming the position as co-chair of the Green Climate Fund. But Australia will also be under pressure to prove that something tangible has changed, in particular to offer more on climate financing and at least signal that a more credible policy is coming.
Turnbull is very, very wary of ditching this particular piece of ballast, but as the dust settles on the six years of climate wars, business is becoming bolder in demanding policy clarity, and preferably a carbon price.
And then there’s asylum policy – also front of mind in both Germany and Turkey. Turkey has taken more than 2 million refugees from the conflicts on its borders. Germany, where Turnbull made a brief stop on his way to the Turkish G20, is expecting 800,000 to arrive this year. Australia is taking 12,000 from Syria, but has a dramatically different approach to asylum seekers arriving at our door – an approach Turnbull has inherited and endorsed. While Germany has also recently revised its “open door” policy and said it would return refugees to the first safe country they passed through, it was also very critical of Australia’s policy at a recent human rights review at the UN. Turkey called on Australia to immediately cease transferring asylum seekers to third countries.
Turnbull is locked in to the bipartisan consensus on asylum policy, but the collateral damage of that stance is the human tragedy of indefinite detention on Manus and Christmas islands, and Nauru.That will follow him wherever he goes, until he finds a resettlement solution that works.
Perhaps the best thing Abbott could do for the new Coalition team right now is give a few more speeches on Direct Action and asylum.
