Hockey facing his crunch time
During that week of near-death for Tony Abbott back in February, some Liberal backbenchers went to visit Treasurer Joe Hockey.
Abbott might have been visibly shaken by events of February 9, but Hockey was chastened, too.
Both were told, in forceful terms by Liberals, that they could not afford repeating the themes or content of the 2014 Budget.
Thanks to the Australian columnist Niki Savva, we know a similar message was delivered as recently as a fortnight ago from coalition Whip Scott Buchholz on behalf of the backbench.
Buchholz, a Queensland Liberal National Party MP, reportedly told Abbott that if the Budget failed, Hockey would have to go. Abbott denied this account yesterday, but Liberals confirmed this was what they’d been hearing.
Advice for the PM and the Treasurer on its Budget positioning was flying thick the week before 39 Liberals voted no confidence in their economic stewardship.
Some of the best advice came from friendly quarters.
Andrew Robb, a Cabinet minister and a former party Federal director, gave a series of interviews in the first week of February that offered wise counsel.
Robb singled out the Medicare co-payment and the education changes to make a broader point.
“Many people woke up on the Wednesday morning after the Budget and found two very big packages looking to provide a solution to problems that they weren’t aware that we had,” he told Sky News on February 5.
“In other words, we hadn’t tilled the soil, we hadn’t developed an argument for why there needed to be behavioural changes in health, and why there needed to be a greater focus and specialisation in universities and how these changes would deliver those.”
That was the first of two pieces of sage advice from Robb.
The second was about returning the Federal Budget to what a called a more “traditional” event that was more an exercise in fiscal issues and balance sheets.
“There has been a tendency, by both sides of politics in recent years, to start to announce major structural reforms within the Budget. When that happens, they’re not preceded by the debate that’s necessary,” he said.
“If you’re going to make fiscal changes sometimes we can’t have a debate because it will affect the markets and all the rest, people will game that particular issue, but that’s not true of big structural changes. This is the mistake I think we made.”
His point was that governments needed to tell their story throughout the year, not just on the second Tuesday in the fifth month.
The Budget has become the event it is now because of two men, Paul Keating and Peter Costello.
Both were natural showmen who cherished their moments in the limelight as treasurer. Both were leaders-in-waiting, even if one of them had his ambition foiled by the wily John Howard.
Hockey, it turns out, is an unnatural frontman. Indeed, he opted to share the Budget limelight last year with Finance Minister Mathias Cormann. And no one seriously entertains the idea of a Hockey prime ministership any more.
Implicit in Robb’s analysis was that if you don’t have a chief salesman at the top of his game, the risks are enormous if you make him responsible for the entire shop floor.
Tellingly, the PM was emphasising how the Budget was a team effort belonging to no individual minister but all of his team, especially the budget razor gang.
“That’s me, that’s Warren Truss, that’s Joe Hockey, that’s Mathias Cormann, that’s Scott Morrison and it’s Josh Frydenberg,” Abbott told 3AW.
Imagine how such a comment from the Prime Minister would have rankled Keating and Costello just five days out from their annual Big Show.
In the wake of the leadership upset in February, Abbott held firm against backbench agitation that he deliver the scalps of Hockey and/or his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, but he has substantially overhauled his own style and image.
One Liberal MP remarked yesterday how Abbott had rasped away some of his sharper edges in the past three months.
With every consecutive decision done competently or mistake-free, Abbott seeks to rebuild the confidence of his colleagues.
But he can’t breathe easily unless Hockey’s second Budget is landed successfully.
When Abbott said the Budget would be a “dull and boring” affair, it was in part because Robb’s advice about tilling the soil would be heeded.
For the first time in recent memory, the Treasurer is not doing any pre-Budget interviews with individual media outlets.
Instead, the media is being fed words and pictures such as the terribly awkward appearance with Abbott staged for the benefit of cameras (and Twitter memes) on Tuesday.
Much of the story-telling is being left to other people. Primarily Morrison. He’s bobbed up everywhere in recent weeks on childcare and pensions. So much so, that next Tuesday is looking like the ScoMo Budget than it is anyone else’s.
He’s done what a competent minister does: tasked with a job to reconfigure policy and jag some savings, he’s consulted widely, studied the problems and devised some solutions.
Even the potentially divisive expansion of childcare subsidies to nannies was navigated nattily by Morrison, restricting funding to a trial among folk far from the silvertail cohort that many presumed would be the beneficiaries.
By the time the Budget comes along, most of what the Government intends in Morrison’s portfolio will be known. That’s as Robb’s preferred model would have it.
But the fact that Morrison’s competent performance is being celebrated is a measure of how desperate the coalition partyroom is for success.
Hockey’s pass mark won’t be competence this time around. He needs to smash it out of the park.
