It’s becoming increasingly difficult to work out exactly what Tony Abbott’s view is on the importance of keeping election promises.
As opposition leader, Abbott was ferocious in his denunciation of Julia Gillard for breaking promises, most famously on the carbon price. He insisted he would never breach faith with voters, not even if the budget turned out to be significantly worse than he expected. “I’ll delay a return to surplus,” he once said, rather than break promises, assuring voters that he had conservatively costed his program to ensure that would never be a problem.
The Abbott government’s broken promises, of course, have been a theme throughout 2014, with the PM insisting for much of the year that he had broken none. In recent weeks, that appeared to soften, when he declared that he had “fundamentally” kept faith with voters. Today he admitted that his cuts to the ABC and SBS were “at odds” with his pre-election statement that he wouldn’t cut funding to the national broadcasters, but that circumstances had changed — a line used by Gillard about the carbon price.
Moreover, he urged Victorian Premier-elect Daniel Andrews to break his most prominent campaign promise, to dump the East West Link, as though voters would be relaxed about such a flagrant and immediate breach of faith.
So as far as we can work out, Abbott’s view is that a campaign promise should always be kept unless it’s an efficiency dividend, or an indexation adjustment, or a modest co-payment, or you’re a Labor government and Abbott dislikes your policy, or the budget situation requires it even if you specifically ruled out ever using the budget as an excuse to break a promise.
Politicians break promises, and oftentimes for good reasons. Hypocrisy is a core part of political debate, like it or not. But politicians who insist that they are above all that — that they will be better than all the rest — are simply inviting a comeuppance from voters. And it appears that is exactly what the Prime Minister is receiving.
At last the electorate notices that the emperor has no clothes.
For Real Toady, perhaps a “promise = something you can stick up your fundament”?
What are we voting for in an election if these moral reprobates are going to reinterpret what they said to get our vote, after they get what they want?
Perhaps we are in for a period of one term governments until there is someone worth voting for.
Abbott handled this issue poorly, but compared with the inability of some fervent followers of sacred cow dreams to understand major issues, his weaknesses are minor.
From a couple of years before the election, Abbott was claiming that Australia was in the grip of a dire budget emergency. Throughout the election campaign, he was claiming that Australia was still suffering through a dire budget emergency. So every promise that Abbott made pre-election, was proclaimed in the context of that alleged budget emergency. Therefore, any claim by Abbott that his broken promises are justified, because we are now supposedly in a budget emergency, should be rejected out of hand.