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Little Winston Dreams This Is His Finest Hour

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  • Little Winston Dreams This Is His Finest Hour

    LITTLE WINSTON DREAMS THIS IS HIS FINEST HOUR
    Anne Summers

    Sydney Morning Herald
    http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/litt le-winston-dreams-this-is-his-finest-hour-20100401 -rhxw.html
    April 2 2010
    Australia

    "When Winston Churchill drove to Buckingham Palace in the dark days of
    1940 to accept the King's commission, he felt his whole life had been
    but a preparation for this moment, or so he recounts in his memoirs.

    This is not wartime Britain. And I am certainly not Winston Churchill.

    Still, I feel well equipped to take on the leadership of the party
    in what are testing times for the conservative side of politics".

    Tony Abbott concluded the afterword to the new edition of his book
    Battlelines with these words. He wrote them just four months ago,
    on December 4, after his surprise elevation to the leadership of the
    Liberal Party three days earlier.

    Abbott's comparison is instructive. He clearly sees parallels between
    himself and Britain's wartime leader, both of them political mavericks,
    both seen as last-resort leaders and, perhaps not incidentally,
    both of them writers.

    Like Churchill, Abbott has been a journalist and has now written
    a book although, unlike Churchill, he probably won't win the Nobel
    Prize for Literature.

    Abbott had not expected to win. "I couldn't decide whether to be
    disappointed or relieved that the next leader would not be me,"
    he wrote. Yet once the leadership was bestowed on him, he did not
    hesitate. "As I went to sleep at about 3am, I was conscious of
    a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give
    directions over the whole scene."

    This is Churchill, not Abbott, but it is from the same passage in
    Churchill's memoirs quoted above by the Opposition Leader and it is
    not drawing too long a bow to suggest that this is the way Abbott
    felt, too.

    It is certainly how he acted. He immediately set about using his
    newfound "authority to give directions over the whole scene" in ways
    that startled even his most loyal colleagues.

    First, he denounced the government's emissions trading scheme, even
    though it by now contained hard-fought amendments insisted on by the
    Coalition. It was just a "great, big, new tax", he said, and would
    no longer have the support of the opposition.

    Next, he took the unprecedented step of appointing a National
    Party member as finance spokesman. By itself that would have been
    controversial enough - surrendering a key economic portfolio to the
    junior Coalition partner - but by selecting the politically unreliable
    Barnaby Joyce, he embarked on a high-risk course that was to prove
    disastrous.

    Then he announced a hugely expensive paid parental leave scheme that
    benefited very high-income earners and would be paid for by an impost
    on big business. Abbott did not take this policy to the party room,
    or even the full shadow cabinet, but anyone who had read Battlelines
    should have seen it coming. The only difference between what was
    outlined there and what Abbott subsequently announced was the cost,
    which had mysteriously dropped from $4.4 billion to $2.7 billion.

    But then budgets and economics have never been Abbott's strong suit.

    Even his "headland" speech on Tuesday, designed to cloak him with
    economic credentials - "for nine years I was a minister in the Howard
    government and thoroughly absorbed its economic ethos" - was not
    only sparse on specifics about what an Abbott government would do
    differently from Rudd's, it was littered with errors of fact and
    assumption.

    Other commentators have pointed out Abbott's spurious contention that
    the global financial crisis was mostly a "North Atlantic" crisis which,
    therefore, did not require the second stimulus package. And his claim
    six European countries had smaller stimuli than Australia, yet have
    lower unemployment, is flawed because these are countries where workers
    cannot be sacked. Then there's Abbott's central economic mantra: the
    Coalition will return the budget to surplus and will confine future
    expenditures to 25 per cent of GDP.

    "The next Coalition government will maintain the tightest fiscal
    discipline but it will also aim to maximise Australia's economic
    growth," Abbott said on Tuesday. Exactly how he proposes to do this was
    not spelt out, but a reading of the speech, together with Battlelines,
    suggests a disregard for pesky financial restraints that would do
    his mentor Churchill proud.

    Not only is Abbott unrepentant about his parental leave policy
    (despite the widespread criticism, including from his colleagues,
    about the cost and the equity of the scheme), he proposes to remove
    means testing from a number of key welfare payments. These will cost
    very big bucks. Interestingly, all these reforms are justified as
    being necessary to improve women's workforce participation while
    encouraging women to still have children.

    In his speech, Abbott made reference to "a recent Goldman Sachs JBWere
    report" that claims "bridging the productivity gap with men should
    boost GDP by 20 per cent".

    The report is Australia's Hidden Resource: The Economic Case
    for Increasing Female Participation and it was prepared by three
    of the firm's economists and released last November. It was an
    "Australianised" version of a similar document produced by the firm in
    the US. That report argued that if women's labour force participation
    were to equal men's, GDP in the US would increase by "as much as 10
    per cent". Equally impressive was the finding that the GDP increase
    in the Eurozone would be 14 per cent, while for Japan it would be a
    startling 21 per cent.

    When the same calculations were done for Australia, the finding was
    GDP could be boosted by 11 per cent. Most of the report is devoted
    to discussing the policy measures needed to achieve this outcome.

    Not surprisingly, equal pay, increased childcare subsidies, flexible
    working hours, paid parental leave and other measure to make working
    attractive - or even feasible - for women are recommended.

    "Governments could do much more to close the male-female employment
    gap" is one of the report's conclusions. Equally, the report cautions
    that "increases in family support payments this decade have vastly
    exceeded the funds dedicated to increasing female participation and
    may be acting as a strong disincentive to seek employment".

    It is remarkable that Abbott, formerly the champion of traditional
    family values, is now advocating policies encouraging mothers into
    employment. He changed his mind on maternity leave, he says, under
    the influence of "female colleagues who often felt torn between the
    demands of parliamentary life and the duties of motherhood". Jackie
    Kelly, especially, was an influence, persuading him that childcare
    in Parliament House was necessary "if conservative, motherhood-minded
    women were to enter Parliament before their children had grown up".

    A maternity leave scheme, Abbott argued, "would send the very
    traditional message that motherhood is important for all women". As
    would universal payments for all children. He proposes to remove
    the means test on both the Baby Bonus and Family Tax Benefit A -
    at a cost of about $2 billion a year.

    In Battlelines, Abbott approvingly quotes Harold Holt in 1941 quoting
    John Maynard Keynes's How to Pay for the War in justifying the Menzies
    government's legislation for a universal child endowment. Yet
    in Tuesday's speech Abbott attacked Kevin Rudd for being a
    "borrow-and-spend-Keynesian".

    Abbott is nothing if not inconsistent.

    "The Liberal Party certainly has to maintain its credibility as the
    best party to manage the economy, but it also has to be clear about
    the society it wants," he wrote in Battlelines.

    Churchill never worried about how to pay for the war, nor what the
    economic face of the peace would look like. He left that to Keynes,
    his unofficial chancellor.

    Perhaps Abbott hankers for a similar freedom so he can devote all
    his energies to transforming Australian society. It's not quite the
    Battle of Britain but we can be sure that Tony Abbott will be just
    as dedicated - and just as driven in his own way - as Churchill was.

    Churchill dealt with his demons with a daily bottle of finest Dvin
    Armenian brandy, along with a good number of glasses of champagne,
    claret and scotch, and eight to 10 good Cuban cigars.

    Abbott prefers a gruelling physical regimen. His triathlon last weekend
    garnered headlines, as his Pollie Pedal bike ride from Melbourne to
    Sydney next week undoubtedly will as well, but it is the obsessive
    daily exercise that tells us a lot about Tony Abbott.

    This is a man who needs to constantly test, and even punish, his
    body; who gives vent to his psychic battlelines through well over
    an hour a day of physical exertion. Who took up board-surfing to
    bond with the boy who turned out not to be his son. Who has to purge
    himself after question time with a run or a swim. Who has never quite
    reconciled himself to his failure to become a priest but who is now
    doing whatever it takes (including acting lessons to appear less
    pugilistic) to become prime minister.

    He would of course disavow those critics who say, as did his mentor in
    his first speech as prime minister to the House of Commons, on May 13,
    1940: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

    Instead Tony Abbott will be looking to make this, for which his whole
    life has been a preparation, his finest hour.

    The question is: will the voting public give it to him? So far,
    the answer is a resounding no.
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