In the final sitting weeks of the winter session, Tony Abbott held an unusual meeting of his full ministry during which he was asked by a junior minister how the government was intending to deal with the widespread view that it had broken election promises. The prime minister’s response was forceful and absolute. The government had not broken a single promise, he insisted. There was nothing to deal with, no case to answer.



The meeting was obviously before this week’s broken promise about changes to racial discrimination laws, but well and truly after the government had, in the view of most people outside the cabinet room and at least some in it, broken a raft of other election promises on tax, health, education and pensions.

The story is being told as evidence the prime minister isn’t listening, or at least that he isn’t listening to enough people. The Racial Discrimination Act backflip might be a sign of change, an indication that eventually, under extreme political duress, he can change course. No one is quite sure.

It’s easy to give governments gratuitous advice from the sidelines. Every time politicians purse their lips and say something terse about “commentators” you can almost see the thought bubble saying “I’d like to see a bloody journalist do this job”.

But after almost a year it does not seem gratuitous to observe that the Abbott government has indeed broken several promises, has failed to deliver other policies and is battling unnecessary ideological diversions and internal dysfunction.

It has axed the carbon tax, but has as yet no alternative policy to reduce greenhouse emissions. It has (almost) stopped the boats, but has paid an enormous price in the form of strained diplomatic relations and human misery for those asylum seekers who have become collateral damage in the crackdown. It has a better record on foreign affairs and trade, but much of its domestic agenda remains mired in the same bog of poor explanation and parliamentary dissent that sunk much of the former Labor government’s agenda. And that’s before you get to the bits that are, at least in the view of this sidelines commentator, ideologically-driven poor policy.

The most immediate problem is the utterly friendless budget – but its political failure leads straight back to the deeper problems.

From the outset there has been enormous disquiet within the Coalition about the iron grip of Abbott’s office, and particularly his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. The initial anger was about the centralised process for staff appointments. Multiple ministers were angry that their choices for senior staff were overruled by a central committee. But since the most frequent sticking point was whether a proposed appointee had sufficient experience, it seemed there could have been two sides to those stories, particularly given the likely pushback against a woman exercising a chief of staff’s considerable powers.

Since then, however, the complaints about the Abbott office have become broader and louder.

Ministers, advisers and bureaucrats complain about backlogs of documents and briefings requiring approval or decision. I made an FOI request to try to substantiate these complaints one way or the other, asking for workload reports from the prime minister’s office detailing the number of outstanding documents for decision. After three months, the request was rejected for reasons including that releasing the figures “would not significantly contribute to any debate on a matter of public importance” but would have “a substantial adverse effect on the management of workflow in the prime minister’s office.”

Officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade complain that public servants have not been taken into many important prime ministerial meetings, sometimes not even note-takers, leaving DFAT to try to piece together what happened by asking political advisers, who have not taken detailed notes. The secretary of the foreign affairs department, Peter Varghese, reportedly flew home early from Abbott’s trip to China. And eyebrows were raised when, before Abbott’s crucial meeting with US president Barack Obama, numerous newspapers reported an observation from “within the prime minister’s travelling delegation” that Obama was “the lamest of lame duck” presidents.

Most critically, a chorus of senior sources claim the prime minister’s office does not seek, take, or listen to, political advice.

Some of the country’s best-known conservative commentators are giving theirs anyway, echoing what members of the government are saying privately about the budget dilemma.

Nikki Savva has concluded that “as a result of its own poor planning and execution, the government has pretty much lost every argument on the budget” and advises that unless it ditches the paid parental leave scheme, the policy will become the “loaded answer” every time opposition parties are challenged to say where they would find alternative budget savings.”

Dennis Shanahan blames the treasurer, saying “the leitmotiv of Joe Hockey’s first months as Treasurer has ­become that of an aloof plutocrat puffing on a cigar, well-off, politic­ally distant from everyday life, ­indulgent and indulged.”

Chris Kenny reckons the government is “stuck in a fairness argument they invited upon themselves but can never win”, arguing it is unreasonable to make “dollar for dollar comparisons” because transfer payments to low and middle income earners come from taxes paid by the rich.

The government’s own budget strategy to date has involved endlessly repeating the same argument, only loudly and much more slowly, kind of like a gormless traveller trying to make themselves understood by someone who doesn’t speak their language.

The argument – that there is a serious need to take action now to rein in government spending in the medium term – has serious merit. But it does not mean that savings have to be made in exactly this way.

Treasury data released last week under freedom of information confirmed economic modelling by the national centre for social and economic modelling and separate modelling by the Australian National University, and they all showed that low-income earners were hit hardest by budget measures and high-income earners would feel very little pain, which you could also work out pretty quickly just by reading the main points document.

Hockey took up the Kenny argument in response – arguing that the budget should not actually be judged by the incremental difference it made to people’s lives but rather by the whole pre-existing tax and transfer system, including the fact that our tax system remains progressive and elderly people still get the pension.

But voters do not judge budgets in this way. They see a progressive tax system and the pension as integral parts of our system and they have already decided, quite decisively, that this budget is unfair. (That judgement is now also tainting their view of Hockey. This week’s Essential poll showed 35% approved of the job he was doing, and 44% disapproved, a change in his net rating from +17 to -9 since the question was asked last November).

The government does seem to have realised its only option is to salvage what it can. Hockey is travelling the country to speak to Senate crossbenchers and both the education minister, Christopher Pyne, and the health minister, Peter Dutton, have signalled the start of real negotiations.

But having ditched some ideologically-driven unpopular ideas (like the changes to the Racial Discrimination Act) it grimly clings to other very bad ones that are tainting perceptions of its budget and hampering its passage, particularly paid parental leave and the plan for young unemployed only to get unemployment benefits for six months of the year.

And while Abbott won respect in many quarters for his handling of the MH17 disaster, the government’s attempted segue into a continued national security debate around anti-terror laws came badly unstuck when the attorney general, George Brandis, got himself into a terrible muddle over metadata.

It proves that even when politics is centred on a traditional Coalition strength like national security, it can still self harm with poor policy detail, explanations and political process.

With the first year anniversary in less than a month, Abbott would dearly like to add some successes to his political scorecard. But to do so the government needs to deal with its underlying problems. And that’s a view shared within its own ranks, not just advice from the sidelines.