The demise of Tony Abbott at the hands of Malcolm Turnbull has opened a new phase in Australian politics.
It is too early to assess the full ramifications of Turnbull’s party room victory, but we can clearly say that, politically, there is considerably more at stake in the removal of Abbott as prime minister than there was in the Rudd and Gillard merry-go-round in the ALP.
Hopes and expectations have been raised among the business establishment, large sections of the media and the voting public more generally, that the urbane silvertail Malcolm Turnbull can transform and modernise Australian politics. It will supposedly no longer be an embarrassment to be an Australian.
The Age’s chief political correspondent, Mark Kenny, was the most effusive, glowingly comparing the triumph of Turnbull to the victory of Gough Whitlam in 1972, with which “came a sense of optimism and opportunity bordering on elation in many quarters”.
The Age editorial proclaimed: “Under Tony Abbott, the government lurched from one folly to another yet proved almost incapable of learning from its mistakes. Mr Turnbull is an altogether more practised, more confident and potentially more persuasive spearhead for change”.
But it is not just the supposedly liberal Fairfax press. The removal of Abbott has been endorsed by various leading figures on the hard right of politics, who want to see more of a focus on boosting business profitability instead of polarising culture wars.
Prominent class warrior Peter Reith, who, as a minister in the Howard government, engineered the brutal assault on the Maritime Union of Australia in 1998 and who currently is a lobbyist for the multinational arms company Bechtel, was typical:
“Business expects Turnbull to fulfil his promise that economic policy will be at the centre of the Turnbull premiership and that includes labour market reform. It is not a policy issue that can be ignored … So in the case of Turnbull, yes he is progressive on some social issues but ‘dry’ on economics. Putting a badge on him means not much. His decisions will determine his and the government’s future. Performance is everything, not silly badges thrown around by shock jocks.”
The Abbott government had become increasingly incapable of offering a road forward. Abbott was not just deeply unpopular; bizarre “captain’s picks” such as the knighthood for prince Phillip made his government seem like a joke.
Abbott’s failure
Abbott had become consumed with hanging onto his own leadership through endless rounds of Muslim bashing to appeal to the socially conservative sections of the Liberal Party base.
The top ranks of the business establishment and their hirelings in the financial pages of the press were from the beginning far from impressed with Abbott’s lack of “vision” and “reforming” zeal. They were looking for a new round of neoliberal government initiatives (“reforms”) to revamp the economy.
In particular they wanted major tax changes to benefit the big end of town (including an increase in the GST and cuts to company taxes and taxes on the rich), tougher anti-union laws, a slashing of penalty rates, cuts to government spending on health, social welfare and higher education combined with stepped up infrastructure and military spending.
Hockey’s 2014 budget was an attempt to deliver some items on the big business wish list, but it proved to be a major political overreach. The ground had not been sufficiently prepared to win the case for harsh sacrifices.
After more than 20 years of economic expansion and rising real incomes, the mass of the population had simply not been softened up enough to accept sharp austerity measures. And given that the budget attacks were a clear breach of Abbott’s pre-election commitment not to institute major cuts in government expenditure, they were met with howls of outrage over broken promises. The talk of a budget emergency seemed like a monumental beat-up – simply the Liberals’ ideological agenda.
The poor were being clobbered whereas the Liberals’ mates – the property speculators, the wealthy superannuants and their ilk – got off scot free. Hockey and Mathias Cormann’s cigar smoking budget celebrations just confirmed this image. They seemed totally out of touch with the concerns of the average person.
Abbott tried to deflect the hostility to the budget via Muslim bashing, refugee bashing, terrorist scares, high profile police raids and warmongering. And with Labor and the bulk of the media falling into line behind him, Abbott was able to push through draconian anti-terror laws and attacks on civil liberties. Islamophobia became more and more entrenched.
Nevertheless, despite all the scaremongering and Muslim bashing, Abbott received no serious bounce in the polls. The budget remained decidedly unpopular and a much more important issue in most workers’ minds. Even amongst many workers who went along with much of the Muslim bashing and terrorist hysterics, there was cynicism that Abbott and his backers in the media were exploiting the issue to distract attention from the budget and other attacks on workers.
The Liberals remained stubbornly behind in the polls, yet Labor was hardly an inspiring alternative offering anything to workers. Bill Shorten seemed set to coast to victory simply because he was not Abbott. There was no shortage of discontent in society, but the mass of people remained switched off politically.
After the failure to sell the 2014 budget, the bosses pretty much gave up hope in the Abbott government. The corporate establishment seemed resigned to accepting that it was going to be, from its point of view, three wasted years under Abbott. Perhaps Labor under the right wing Shorten would be more successful in pursuing a neoliberal agenda.
The ruling class took advantage of higher levels of unemployment to go on a workplace-level offensive against wages, to cut costs and to attack working conditions. It met little resistance from the unions. For the workforce as a whole, real wages have been at best stagnant over the last two years, with wage cuts in many areas of the private sector and the elimination of many well-paid mining jobs.
Prospects for Turnbull
The first thing that Turnbull has going for him is that he is not Abbott. Pretty much anyone who replaced the unloved Abbott was going to get a boost in the polls. The media fanfare and acclaim of his supposedly suave, articulate, statesmanlike qualities have magnified this effect.
Second, he has the backing of pretty much all sections of big business and of the economic commentators who had given up on Abbott. They have rushed forward with their usual long wish list, demanding handouts to business and the rich, attacks on workers’ rights, cuts to social spending and an increase in the GST.
Third, he faces a Labor opposition that is thoroughly committed to neoliberal policies and seems incapable of inspiring or offering any hope to its working class supporters. The right wing, lacklustre Bill Shorten is no Jeremy Corbyn.
Let’s look at these points one by one.
The novelty of not being Abbott can begin to fade if, over time, Turnbull isn’t seen to deliver anything. With popular expectations being so low, he probably does not have to do much more than make a few token changes. Possibly not going on endlessly about “stopping the boats”, the evils of ISIS and how ugly wind farms supposedly are will be enough to see him through.
Turnbull clearly wants to present himself as a progressive moderniser on a range of social issues. He would like to move the Liberal Party away from the Tea Party-style politics of Abbott to be more in tune with the approach of the conservative parties in Britain, Ireland and some other parts of Europe, which have combined harsh austerity measures and attacks on workers with a “progressive” social gloss.
This would be a major shift in Australian politics, which have been dominated through both the Howard and Abbott eras by right wing culture wars. Such a shift would have the potential to win Turnbull votes among sections of the educated middle classes and less class conscious workers who were repelled by Abbott’s gauche social conservatism but who broadly accept the neoliberal consensus.
Turnbull is constrained, however, in how far he can go on same sex marriage, climate change, national security and refugees by the deals he has made with the Nationals and the socially conservative wing of the Liberal Party to win the leadership. It is too early to tell whether there is going to be ongoing internal turmoil in the party or whether the social conservatives and their shock jock supporters have been decisively routed.
From a left wing standpoint, there is a possible upside to Turnbull’s attempt to reshape the Liberal agenda away from social conservatism. It can potentially help clarify that the fundamental divide in society is along class lines rather than culture wars. That would be much better terrain for genuine leftists and militant workers.
And in the end, it was not his socially conservative policies that wrecked Abbott but the ongoing deep hostility to Hockey’s 2014 budget. Innumerable commentators have hailed Turnbull as a much better salesperson for austerity, but there is little hard evidence of that as yet. All we have gotten from Turnbull so far on the economy is a lot of blather about exciting times, optimism and creativity.
He faces a major obstacle in that, despite all the years of neoliberal propaganda and Labor’s abandonment of anything approaching a genuinely reformist project, a loose social democratic consciousness is far from being eliminated among considerable sections of the working class. This was most markedly reflected in the mass opposition to WorkChoices that brought down the Howard government and in the outrage at the lack of fairness in the 2014 budget.
Because of this, the supposedly friendly, affable Joe Hockey, also at one time hailed as a good spruiker for austerity, proved an abject failure. By comparison, a wealthy toff former merchant banker, who lives in a sprawling Point Piper mansion fit for a king and totally lacks the common touch, has considerable lead in his saddlebags when it comes to demanding sacrifice.
How hard Turnbull will actually push on the economic front in the lead-up to the elections is an open question. A couple of days after being installed as leader he said, “Tax reform is at the centre of our efforts to make Australia a more innovative, productive and prosperous economy”.
Last year he declared: “You see businesses, particularly hospitality businesses like cafes and restaurants and so forth, closed on weekends … because the penalty rates are so high. Now that’s nuts”.
New treasurer Scott Morrison in his first press conference foreshadowed further austerity measures and his intention to push ahead with the expenditure cuts from the previous budgets, which remain blocked in the Senate. “We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem”, he declared. “It’s a critical part of our plans to provide real opportunities for Australians who want to work, save and invest.”
To make his point crystal clear to all those workers out there with a few spare millions, he repeated the phrase “work, save and invest” numerous times throughout the press conference.
Maybe this is just Morrison playing to the gallery in the hardline neoliberal business press. We will see.
There is a tension here. The hope and expectations that have been raised among the business establishment and in the broader population are, in the context of a sluggish economy, ultimately counterposed.
And when hopes and expectations are dashed, the tide can quickly turn. For how long Turnbull can sail along is an open question. Maybe long enough to win the next election, maybe not.
The bosses would clearly prefer to have Liberals in government rather than Labor, so maybe they will give Turnbull time to turn the screws. On the other hand, Turnbull seems so full of himself that he could miscalculate how much he can get away with.
The final factor is point three: what will Labor and the unions do now? With Abbott as prime minister, Labor was in cruise control, expecting to coast to victory with a small target strategy.
Labor will now be under greater pressure to enunciate a clear policy alternative. But on this front, its own commitment to neoliberalism severely constrains its ability to elaborate a program that could enthuse its working class base.
Labor, of course, would like to have it both ways: offering a few crumbs to workers but also making it clear to business that it can be relied on to help boost profits. Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen expressed this contradiction starkly in late September. On the one hand, he said that Labor would oppose any increase in the GST. On the other hand, he declared, “I would like to see the corporate tax rate come down over time. I have previously said the nation should be aiming for a 25 percent corporate tax rate”.
Yes, that really is a policy to rally the masses who are facing cuts to penalty rates! Labor leaders like Bowen are undoubtedly Turnbull’s Trojan horse.
As for the unions, they have more and more focused on simply campaigning to get the vote out for Labor, without even putting serious demands on the party to deliver significant reforms for workers. This is an absolutely dead end strategy for fighting the attacks that seem set to come from Turnbull.
