It probably should be no surprise that last night’s royal wedding became part of the political debate this week. But the criticism by government members highlighted yet again the Liberal party’s policy of pretending to care about something while simultaneously doing everything to work against it.

Peter Dutton and Tasmanian senator Eric Abetz bought into the issue of the ABC’s coverage of the royal wedding off the back of erroneous reporting in News Corp papers suggesting the ABC had flown hosts Annabel Crabb and Jeremy Fernandez to London in business class. Abetz, who is never one to miss an opportunity to slight the ABC, echoed Dutton’s thoughts when he suggested he would “would like to see the justification for flying those two over when there is a crew permanently in London”.

It is the standard operating procedure of the Liberal party: cut funding to the ABC that in effect is designed to ensure it struggles to do a professional job, then either criticise it for not being up to scratch or, when it does something professionally, criticise it for wasting money.

It’s the cannot-win argument. Had the ABC taken the cheaper option, Abetz and his ilk would have screamed about how the ABC disrespected the monarchy and Australians by not treating the event with the appropriate level of attention.

But really, all this talk about the ABC from Abetz and Dutton is just a continuation of the long run of the Liberal party being disingenuously concerned about things it is actively against.

Take the gender ​gap in parliament. There are a lot of furrowed brows within the Liberal party at the moment after the ​ dumping of frontbencher Jane Prentice as a candidate at the next election, and challenges to Victorian senator Jane Hume and NSW MP Ann Sudmalis, have made it rather all too clear just how few women they have in the parliament.

Only 13 of the 76 Liberal party MPs are women – rather a long way from its target of having 50% of women contesting “winnable seats” by 2025.

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And yet, rather than introducing a quota to achieve this target, which has been proven to work (as the ALP has done and which now has women accounting for 47% of its MPs), it has instead chosen to throw money at the problem.

Kelly O’Dwyer has established a fund to help financially support ​female candidates. And while no doubt the aim is good, even this very market-based option has been attacked by those within the Liberal party.

Demonstrating the strong inherent bias against doing anything to improve the gender gap, ​ Eric Abetz (yes, once again) suggested the fund was not “necessarily consistent with the Liberal philosophy”.

Actually the fund is very much in keeping with that philosophy – it will do nothing to overcome the systemic bias against women but it looks like they’re trying to do something about it.

We get a policy that barely looks like they’re trying to achieve something and which is designed not to achieve its aim

It’s much like their position on climate change.

Many in the Liberal party wish to do nothing about it, and those who do are mostly content to do something that looks like something while studiously avoiding the one solution that has been shown to work.

The latest greenhouse gas emissions data released by the Department of Environment last week showed that during the carbon price period emissions continually fell, and since its end they have continually risen.

And yet Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg – in the spirit of the Liberal party philosophy – have to come up with a policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that avoids not just putting a price on carbon but even looking like doing so. Thus we get a policy that barely even looks like they’re trying to achieve something and which is clearly designed not to achieve its aim.

And of course, economic policy is not excused from the pretence of care or accompanying lack of policy.

The latest wage growth figures showed yet again that wages have not risen in real terms in the past year. This is a problem for the government because, while the Liberal party has long been a champion of keeping wages growth down in the name of “competitiveness”, its budget is very much in favour of it.

The budget’s predictions for strong income tax growth in 2020-21 and 2021-22 are based on wages growth returning to 3.5%. Were that to occur, the budget predicts real wages would grow by 1% in those years.

And yet how is this to be achieved? Right now the only wages policy is company tax cuts in the hope that increased investment will improve productivity, which will then (eventually) flow through into stronger wage growth.

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But in the meantime, the Liberal party has actively sought to reduce workers’ collective bargaining power through increased intervention in union activity, cheered the removal of penalty rates, and strenuously argued against any government intervention that might see a greater increase in the minimum wage.

And add to that their long history of criticism whenever a union either seeks or achieves a decent pay raise.

Back in January 2014, the then minister for employment, Eric Abetz (yes, again), warned that unless businesses stood up to unions’ pay demands, we risked seeing a “wages explosion”. At the time, overall wages were growing at just 2.7% and not one industry had annual wages growth above 3.5%, which is now the target for all wages for three years’ time.

Should wages growth ever actually reach the optimistic levels predicted in the budget, you can bet Liberal party MPs will decry the unions destroying our competitiveness and seek to implement ever more interventionist policy to reduce what power they have left.

And no doubt, in the tradition of the cannot-win argument, they will then criticise unions for failing to deliver for their members.