Saved by security as Coalition asks what's next

Saved by security as Coalition asks what's next

By ABC's

Jonathan Green

Posted
53 minutes agoThu 4 Sep 2014, 7:20am

Photo:
Bricks, mortar and bitumen aside, the job Tony Abbott advertised for himself, is all but done. (AAP: Alan Porritt)

So what's next for a government that
finds its narrow pre-election agenda largely, and so quickly, fulfilled?
In steps national security, writes Jonathan Green.

And
there it was. Just days from its first anniversary the Abbott
government came within a freeway extension of delivering its first-term
agenda.

Axe the carbon tax. Check.

Get rid of the mining tax. Check.

Stop the boats. Check.

Which, were it not for the nation's sudden war footing, would leave something of a Peggy Lee moment, a yawning sense of, is that all there is?

For
now, we're still waiting to see living proof that our Prime Minister
will in fact be "an infrastructure Prime Minister" ... and proof would
be handy if only to better define just precisely what "an infrastructure
Prime Minister" is. A man, a plan, a canal: Panama? No. That's a
palindrome, not a political precedent.

But bricks, mortar and bitumen aside, the job, as advertised, is all but done.

As Tony Abbott put it, in his National Press Club address five days before polling:

My message to the Australian people is clear.

If
you vote for the Coalition on Saturday, this is what you’ll get: a
stronger and more diverse five pillar economy with innovative
manufacturing, agriculture, services and education as well as mining and
two million new jobs over a decade.

We'll build a stronger
economy so that everyone can get ahead, abolish the carbon tax, end the
waste, stop the boats, and build the roads of the 21st century because I
want to be known as an infrastructure prime minister.

Clear
and simple. Former participants in the vehicle manufacture sector might
have some quibbles in respect of "innovative manufacturing";
"education" has proved something of a mystery bag post-election and,
with unemployment on the rise, the two-million job target looks shaky.

But
all of that is to get tied down in detail of the type the Coalition
campaign of 2013 quite deliberately set out to minimise. This was
meta-politics of a sort, a campaign in which the Coalition's proposal
was less a coherent and precisely detailed platform aimed toward the
implementation of a coherent social and economic vision: rather it was a
campaign that simply proposed an antithesis.

It was the simplest, most unadorned of selling propositions: vote for us, we are not them.

There
have been flaws in the execution. We can point to a budget still in
Senatorial purgatory, be shamed collectively that the boats have stopped
thanks only to acts of deliberate, exemplary cruelty, and look also at a
range of cuts, tweaks and outright restructures - actions not dignified
by disclosure pre-election.

But the central conditions the
government set, the yardsticks it offered and by which it would be
judged post election, are all but achieved. There was commentary early
that the simplicity of the stop the boats, axe the taxes mantra was
something of a trap, it was too binary ... that it set the government up
for a fall. Not so much.

It's rather been the unintended
consequences of the Coalition's election that have proved problematic
and politically damaging: the sudden enthusiasm for the pet projects of
ideologues, and the too-ready embrace of the Liberal Party's lunar
fringe.

But perhaps the more ominous issue for a Government whose
ambitions were so narrowly defined, is defining exactly what it might do
for the remainder of its term, other than lean on a series of shovels
as it watches the unwinding progress of various roads of the
twenty-first century.

It's work - as advertised - is all but done, a situation that creates something of a vacuum.

In
that situation the voter's natural instinct might be to focus on the
unfolding detail of economic performance, the impression of solid and
disciplined purpose from the government, and the enunciation of a more
detailed plan for future reform. In fact attention has already drifted
in these directions, revealing the shoddy sequence of mistake-prone
fumbling that has characterised the parliamentary winter.

Of course national security is an answer to all of that.

The
government's enthusiastic embrace of the slowly escalating sense of
menace from Syria and Iraq and the lingering outrage that followed the
downing of MH17 over Ukraine, has given it that other thing it promised
pre-election, but has so far proved elusive: a sense of steady maturity.

That
may be illusory of course, or at best a temporary stilling of the
gaffes and committed crusades that in those dark days before MH17 had
the government teetering on the verge of poisonous unpopularity.

It's
straightened up now, is giving a greater sense of flying right, the
sombre voiced, furrow browed seriousness of war and terror proving an
antidote to the flapping flights of ideological think tank fancy that
had previously been filling the activity vacuum.

The temptation
though is to push too far, and at times in recent days the Prime
Minister has seemed a little too eager for a fight. Any fight. As he
said yesterday in response to the latest televised and deliberately
provocative atrocity from Islamic State:

We are right
to be appalled, absolutely appalled by what is happening in Iraq - it
is abominable, unspeakable, repellent, abhorrent - but we obviously have
to use our judgment in our response.

The last part is perhaps the most significant.

This
is not to impugn the government's motives for the sudden national
security focus in any way, but there must be a sense somewhere in its
thinking that it has been gifted with its own Tampa moment: an
emblematic and external threat that offers the mantle of government as
protector while also proving a symbolic container for other less noble
but more populist strands of politicking.

We might also ask
ourselves, reflecting both on the Howard years and the sudden grave
dignity and purpose that conflict and fear have granted this Abbott
government, how it is that our politics could be so routinely rotten and
ludicrously contemptible that only the threat of war and violence can
save it.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.

Topics:
abbott-tony,
tax,
government-and-politics,
federal-elections,
defence-and-national-security