On Monday there was a long piece by Laura Tingle in the Fin on how circumscribed the government’s cabinet process now is, replaced with the dominance of the Strategic Priorities and Budget Committee.  That’s the Prime Minister, the Treasurer, the deputy Prime Minister and the Finance Minister, often with portfolio ministers temporarily co-opted for specific issues.

It was a strange cue for Tony Abbott to promptly demonstrate that he too is prone to presidential-style policy-making.  One senior Liberal directly compared Abbott’s “appalling” paid parental leave policy with Kevin Rudd’s control freakery.

The parental leave policy (although it’s not clear whether it’s actual policy or a sort of “Green Paper” style proposal for discussion) has much in common with the coalition’s climate change policy, the only other piece of substantial policy we’ve seen from Abbott.  Both were assembled in haste; both represented direct departures from core Liberal philosophy in the direction of higher taxes and more interventionist Government.  Both drew immediate and fundamental criticism — in fact the climate action policy was entirely discredited by scientists, economists and market analysts within days — and in both cases the Opposition quickly responded to criticism by suggesting they would be temporary measures.

Abbott’s team hadn’t fully thought through the avoidance implications of setting an arbitrary taxation threshold for a substantial rise in the company tax rate (Abbott insists the 1.7% slug is a “modest” levy and is too small to change corporate behaviour — although apparently changes in the 1% Medicare surcharge would have been enough to change individual behaviour).

Lindsay Tanner seized on the error, noting that companies could easily restructure themselves to stay below the threshold. Joe Hockey complicated things by saying there’d be a tax credit for companies with their own parental leave scheme (yes, the Australian taxation system can always do with more tax expenditures), although this apparently hasn’t been costed into the policy — large firms are far more likely to have parental leave schemes than small and medium firms.

Developing policy in Opposition is tough.  The entire system is more or less biased in favour of the government.  You don’t have the resources of the bureaucracy, you only have access to publicly available data, and one small slip on something such as costings gets seized on by your opponents and paraded as evidence you’re somehow utterly unfit for office.

But the problems with the leave policy are a direct result of Abbott’s lack of consultation, not so much with his party room, which caused its own problems, but with business and tax experts. 

Even Barnaby Joyce, always at pains to describe himself as an “accountant from St George”, could have pointed out that arbitrary thresholds create perverse incentives for taxpayers.  The government’s line that the proposal was a “thought bubble” is certainly unfair given Abbott flagged his conversion to parental leave in his book last year, but the proposal doesn’t look like it has been subjected to any sort of stress testing or sceptical examination.

The first two examples of Abbott policy making have been poor. They need to be the last as we near the election and the coalition has to start unveiling its election commitments. Despite the media focus, the specific flaws in the climate and parental leave policies won’t register with most voters but if it keeps happening the Opposition will start to appear incompetent.  Fortunately its Policy Development Committee is now headed by Andrew Robb, who has a strong policy, economics and campaigning background, although he is still recovering from illness, and Helen Coonan did much of the hard work of costing up policies and trying to find offsetting savings when she was shadow finance minister.

Abbott this morning insisted that compared to the Prime Minister he was “a model of collegiality” and he’s dead right.  But his half-baked parental leave policy shows why he needs to keep it that way.