The end of the parliamentary year couldn’t have come soon enough for the new government, which is unexpectedly ending 2013 beset by problems both of its own making and thrust upon it by outside forces.
The General Motors announcement has provided Labor with the platform for a strong ending to the year, enabling the inexperienced Bill Shorten to hammer the government yesterday over an issue on which Labor still has an edge with voters — managing the economy to provide jobs. It was Shorten’s strongest parliamentary performance to date.
It is now up to Treasurer Joe Hockey to end the year on a stronger note with Tuesday’s Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Hockey must get the Coalition on the front foot and begin re-prosecuting the government’s narrative that whatever the problem, it’s all Labor’s fault. It appears that Hockey, who put the case for no longer propping up the car industry in Parliament this week, will have to play the role of economic hard man in this government while his Prime Minister sits on the sidelines.
Abbott appears unsure of himself on economics and, alarmingly, appeared yesterday to urge the Reserve Bank to spend the $9 billion gifted to it by Hockey, to intervene against the Australian dollar.
While much of the blame for the government’s problems rests with external causes, it’s much easier to be knocked off course by external events if you don’t have a clear sense of where you’re going. The impression emerging from this government is that it is led by a Prime Minister pulled in different directions by both the Coalition he leads and his own, often decidedly un-Liberal, economic views.
When Parliament resumes on February 11, Tony Abbott must be more sure of where he wants to take Australia.
Well he can hardly do much worse in 2014. He’s already killed the NBN, permanently damaged our diplomatic relations with Indonesia (Labor is also to blame for that mind you), stuffed up the Gonski reforms, is about to sign away our Internet rights and liberties with the TPP, is about to give foreign businesses the ability to sue our governments (again, thanks to the TPP), has taken money from child and aged care workers, allowed the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef… The list goes on.
Frankly, if he DOES do worse next year, I shudder to think what Australia will look like by the end of it.
“Abbott appears unsure of himself on economics”? What a turn up for the books?
Why is it, that when a Labor government is in power it seems all Right for everything that goes wrong to be sheeted home to them – but when a Coal-ition takes over, suddenly there’s “external forces at play”?
The countenancing of external factors now, are just as irrelevant as they were for Labor, surely?
I’m guessing that’s Abbott’s chickening out of his threat to sit thru Xmas is now dead in the water.
Not that ist was ever likely as good ole Aussie Abbott was doing the patriotic thing and heading off to Europe for his holidays.
Oh well at least his absence will raise the decency quotient in Australia but what has Europe done wrong to deserve his presence
I mean how bad can you be when you make Hockey look good by comparison
Crikey, calling this government “new” is a misnomer. It is actually a tired and discredited old government, lurching like zombies out of the political grave of John Howard. Except for a couple of yapping young mediocrities whose names slip me at the moment the rest are dusted off old guard for whom the clock stopped in 2007. At least during the Rudd-Gillard period there was, in spite of Labor’s internal turmoil, some semblance of progressive governance. How this country has fallen!