There is nothing newsworthy about politicians breaking promises nowadays. Yet the conservative Australian government led by prime minister Tony Abbott has handed down its first budget since coming to office – and it turns out that this budget of broken promises was big news to the Australian people. Throughout the campaign prior to the last election in September 2013, which saw the government come to power, the Liberal-National coalition led by Abbott doled out promise after promise to voters in an effort to reassure Australians that they would not be hurt by voting conservative.
Even on the eve of the election, Abbott personally reiterated these promises: no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no cuts to the publicly funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation or Special Broadcasting Service.
Australian voters put their faith in Abbott, and elected him on this platform. But in the budget, the prime minister U-turned. Not a single one of these promises has been kept.
The prime minister must be held to account for telling us 13 hours before polling booths opened that there would be no cuts to health. In fact, $2.8bn will be cut from public hospitals over the next five years. The Abbott government will also impose a $7 tax on visits to a doctor, something, it has been suggested, a second-term David Cameron government might well introduce.
Abbott also told us there would be no cuts to education, and now $181m is to be cut over the next five years, to be followed by much bigger cuts to school funding beyond 2018. Cuts followed to pensions, family tax benefits and our much loved ABC and SBS, with even more to follow. They are slashing the budgets of the states and territories in what Liberal state premiers have described as ‘unreasonable cost-shifting’. This blatant attempt to force state government to bear the political pain of having to ask for an increase taxes to pay for existing levels of service, is not dissimilar to what George Osborne has done to English local government. In another unlikely turn of events, this will in turn break yet another election promise of ‘no change to the GST’, Australia’s equally regressive version of VAT. In higher education, despite ruling out plans to increase university fees before the election, the Abbott government announced plans to deregulate the entire industry, knowing that this means fees will skyrocket.
I do not need to tell our British cousins about conservative governments hiking up VAT or tuition fees. Nor point out the similarities in approach.
Abbott said his government would be about reducing taxes, not increasing taxes. Instead, he has announced a temporary increase in income tax of two per cent for incomes over $180,000, and brought back indexation of petrol tax increases. The budget also gives $400m back to big business by unwinding tax integrity measures, and shows this government has the wrong priorities. Not everyday working Australians who want an economy that works for them.
The prime minister said that he would be the ‘prime minister for Aboriginal Affairs’. Abbott promised bipartisan support for Closing the Gap, a range of measures to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians. Yet the scissors are out again and the Abbott government cut over $530m from Indigenous affairs programmes in the 2014 federal budget.
Promise after promise, commitment after commitment made before the last election has been broken. The prime minister’s actions are made even worse by the fact that he staked his entire reputation on the idea of honesty. On election night, after being made prime minister of Australia, he promised us:
‘… a government that says what it means and means what it says, a government of no surprises, and no excuses, a government that understands the limits of power as well as its potential. And a government that accepts that it will be judged more by its deeds than by its mere words.’
Never have voters who took Abbott at his word been so misled since Margaret Thatcher quoted St Francis of Assisi on her arrival in Downing Street. This is not governing the country with integrity. The very idea of fairness that is a foundation of Australian society is something that Abbott invoked repeatedly during his campaign, and now seeks to undermine with his budget of broken promises.
This budget is a betrayal but not out of character. While it is the role of the Australian voter to hold Abbott accountable for this deception at the ballot box, there are lessons for our friends in the British Labour party. The Lynton Crosby strategy is well rehearsed: it is a method of campaigning but also of governing that can be seen in both our centre-right prime minsters.
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Sam Dastyari is Australian Labor party senator for New South Wales. He tweets @SamDastyari
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