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October 28th, 2011 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda 28 October 2011
Will negative Abbott get a positive result?
When it comes time to pen her regular Friday column for the Australian Financial Review, Laura Tingle doesn’t mince words.
Today’s effort was no exception.
“Pledges in blood. Policy run on intestinal fortitude. We are supposed to be talking about who becomes prime minister here, not an action man movie.”
No prizes for guessing who the Financial Review’s political editor is writing about: none other than Tony Abbott. We are indeed talking about the alternative prime minister here: a man who could become our nation’s leader well before the next election, should even one Labor parliamentarian fall under the proverbial bus.
Tingle used her article to shine the spotlight on Abbott’s cascading negativity: his revanchist avowal to roll back seemingly every major policy of the current government. She also took a hard look at the obvious flaws in some of the Coalition’s policies, like the steadfast promise to turn back boats carrying asylum seekers, despite the overwhelming evidence (including from the head of the Department of Immigration) that this policy won’t work. Tingle concludes:
“Two years is a long time to get away with being such a negative, opportunistic and hollow man.”
So, scratch Laura Tingle off the Abbott family Christmas Card list. But let’s examine her criticism more closely. Just how negative, opportunistic and hollow is Tony Abbott as Opposition Leader? And even if he is all these things, does it really matter?
Is Abbott negative? Of this there can be little doubt. Tony Abbott is not just your run-of-the-mill opposition leader. He’s a man for whom “ruthless opposition” (his own phrase) has come to define his political identity.
Consider the Labor policies that Tony Abbott is against:
The carbon tax. The mining tax. Offshore processing of asylum seekers (except on Nauru). The National Broadband Network. Mandatory pre-commitment for poker machines. Means-testing for the private health insurance rebate. Raising the excise on alcopops. Stimulus spending in an economic downturn.
Taken together, these positions represent a repudiation of nearly the entire Rudd-Gillard Government’s agenda. Should an Abbott government gain office and carry out these pledges, the rollback will be almost complete. Almost no big policy achievement of the past two terms of office will be left intact.
There a few things that need to be said about this agenda. To begin with, it’s breathtakingly reactionary, in an almost 19th-century sense of the word. Under Abbott, the social conservatives and environmental sceptics in the Liberal Party have come to the fore, with the result that the Coalition is now committed to a particularly extreme attack on the current government and its priorities. In this view, the Gillard Government is not simply a poor government making regrettable policy decisions. It’s “the worst government in history” that has effected a “betrayal” of the Australian people by enacting “a bad tax based on a lie”. There is no sense that the Labor government is acting in good faith.
This negativity has been surprisingly influential amongst ordinary Coalition supporters. The highly coloured, emotionally charged tone of Abbott’s pronouncements as Opposition Leader have tended to infect that of much of his other party members, and indeed many sections of the community. Getting rid of the current government has been elevated above mere politics into a kind of counter-reformation or crusade. No wonder prominent shock jocks have called for the Prime Minister to be drowned.
As a result, immense political capital has now been invested in unscrambling the Gillard Government’s omelettes. Should a future Abbott government find itself unable to roll back some of these policies, whether because it is too administratively complex, too expensive, too politically difficult, or simply because of the numbers in the Senate, the cost to the future prime minister will be considerable.
What about the opportunism? Again, it’s hard to fault Tingle’s analysis. Tony Abbott has a long history of flexible policy positions on a number of the issues he currently opposes. On climate change, or instance, he has at various times said that he accepts the science of human-induced climate change, and at other times that he doubts it. When it comes to policy for dealing with climate change, he has sometimes supported emissions trading over a carbon tax, then at other times appeared to support carbon taxes over emissions trading schemes, while currently of course arguing against both. There doesn’t seem to be a coherent philosophy underlying these gymnastics (unlike, say, Malcolm Turnbull’s consistent support for emissions trading). What seems to drive them is political opportunity.
Is Tony Abbott hollow? It depends, I suppose, on what you mean by hollow. I don’t believe Tony Abbott is an insubstantial or empty politician. He has some very clear beliefs, particularly in the sphere of social values, which he has developed and explained in his book Battlelines. There is a core conservatism to Abbott’s thinking that is instinctual rather than reasoned, as he himself expounds in the book:
Conservatism prefers facts to theory; practical demonstration to metaphysical abstraction; what works to what’s in the mind’s eye. To a conservative, intuition is as important as reasoning; instinct as important as intellect.
You might disagree with this perspective of conservatism – many would stress different values, such as prudence or a commitment to the rule of law – but it’s hard to argue that this is a shallow way of thinking about the world.
But perhaps Tingle is using the phrase “hollow man” in the sense of the ABC TV series about spin doctors, The Hollowmen. If that’s the case, there’s plenty of evidence in her favour. A former journalist and press secretary, Abbott has proved adept at crafting a cut-through political persona built on simple slogans and arresting images. Judged by loftier standards of public debate, Abbott’s endless procession of pithy slogans, media stunts and “pic facs” – driving a truck, gutting a fish, ironing a shirt – are perfect examples of the politician’s darker arts. It’s not as though being able to stage a media opportunity in Queanbeyan has any bearing on his future policy about the European bond markets or the rise of China. Then again, reading the budget papers or going through the Reserve Bank’s minutes makes for lousy television. And what counts in the end is how you are judged by ordinary voters. So far, the evidence suggests that they take notice of the stunts and gambits, and take on board Abbott’s message that the Government is no good.
And this is the real stumbling block for those wishing to criticise Tony Abbott’s record as Opposition Leader. If Abbott is unprincipled and negative, it certainly doesn’t seem to be hurting him in the polls. Were an election to be held tomorrow, the Coalition would sweep Labor from office. This is a deeply unpopular government. Tony Abbott may not be the most popular Opposition Leader ever, but he is certainly one of the most effective.
It would be easy to conclude, therefore, that Abbott’s negativity is working. All too easy, actually. But is it?
Negativity is an inherently risky strategy. Voters who take on a negative message may simultaneously find the person or party purveying it to be distasteful, disrespectful and mean-spirited. A lot of the political commentary on Abbott has proceeded from the premise that negative campaigning works. But, in fact, there is very little peer-reviewed evidence in support of negative campaigning. As the US expert on the phenomenon, Rutgers University’s Richard Lau writes, “on balance … there is simply no support in the scientific literature for the hypothesis that negative campaigns are any more effective than any other type of campaign strategy.”
The problems of negativity were perfectly illustrated in the most recent example in Australia of a widespread negative campaign: the 2010 federal election. After a long, nasty and febrile campaign in which the Opposition’s campaign message was all about what it was not (not wasteful, not spendthrift, not free and easy on border security), the government suffered a brutal swing away from it. But the Opposition didn’t pick up much of that swing. Indeed, the combined two-party preferred Conservative vote across the country was under 50 per cent. Led by Tony Abbott, the Liberal-National vote was lower than in 2004, 2001 or even 1998. Most of the anti-Labor swing went to the party with the most positive message: the Greens.
Despite what most of the commentariat like to think, a Coalition victory at the next election is no sure thing. Yes, the Government is currently in the doldrums. Yes, Tony Abbott leads a party miles ahead in the polls. But two years is an eternity in politics; an eternity, moreover, in which the Government will be able to implement substantial parts of its agenda. By 2013 the economy may will be growing strongly, the carbon tax may well be fading from voters’ minds, and substantial numbers of consumers may be enjoying very fast broadband. So will voters still hate Julia Gillard and Labor? Who really knows?
Even if, in 2013, Tony Abbott wins office, he will still have a Greens-controlled Senate to deal with. At that point, we’ll get to see how he manages some of the other important skills of politics: skills like policy development, negotiation and problem-solving. Perhaps then we’ll finally get to see the Real Tony.
Ben Eltham is a writer, journalist, researcher and creative producer from Melbourne, Australia.
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