Tony Abbott’s press club speech had little to do with charting a path forward and everything to do with circling the wagons around his prime ministership.



But a path forward – a way out of its political mess – is the only thing that can save the prime minister and his government. Circling the wagons might hold his critics off for a while, but it doesn’t address the cause of their concern.



Abbott’s political message was obvious – he isn’t going anywhere.



His policy message was that he was the guy with the resolve and the guts to tackle the budget deficit and this was crucial because not addressing it would be “ripping off future generations” and risking contracting the European “disease”.



But the 2014 budget didn’t actually do all that much to reduce deficits. Deficits will, over the next two years, total almost $72bn, compared with the $28.7bn calculated by treasury and finance during last year’s election campaign. A forecast surplus is now six, rather than two, years away. And many of those cuts are stalled in the Senate.



Despite this, and despite the dire consequences he said would flow from ignoring the deficit, the prime minister also argued that the 2014 budget had apparently done enough and the 2015 budget won’t contain the same pain. “Because we have done much of the hard work already, we won’t need to protect the commonwealth budget at the expense of the household budget,” he maintained.



The spending cuts in last year’s budget were rejected by the electorate because they were perceived to be unfair. Economic modelling by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (Natsem) and separate modelling by the Australian National University showed they actually were unfair – even after the abolition of the carbon tax was taken into account. Low-income earners were hit hardest and high-income earners felt little pain.



That was the exact moment the Abbott government appeared to lose the voters’ trust. And yet it has never explained why it chose that particular combination of spending cuts to reduce the deficit and not other, fairer ones. Instead it has been pretending that the cuts it chose were the only ones available.



Despite conceding that the lesson of the Queensland election rout was that governments had to “take the voters with them”, the prime minister again refused to address this question, resorting again to the “ripping off future generations” lines. How do you “take voters with you” if you don’t address their main concern?



And he effectively said Victorian voters who threw out the first-term Liberal government last year, in an election dominated by a part federally funded road, had made the wrong decision. The new Labor government does not want to proceed with the road and could face a sizeable fee for breaking a contract, which was what happened, the prime minister quipped, when voters “in a fit of absent-mindedness” elected Labor governments.



He confirmed he was ditching his “signature” paid parental leave scheme – as evidence he was listening to his party’s concerns about it. But the prime minister must be a slow listener because almost everyone in his party has been against the scheme ever since he imposed it upon them almost five years ago. It would be replaced by a families and childcare package – which is indeed a better way to improve productivity, but would earn the ire of business if the levy they were paying to fund the paid parental leave plan is simply going to be redirected.



He reminded us of the big changes over which the Coalition wants to conduct a “constructive debate”. One is tax reform. But then he said he would not consider a central element – changing the goods and services tax – unless there was “political consensus” and all states and territories agreed. Which isn’t going to happen.



And the big mea culpa on the Sir Duke Prince Philip disaster? One backbencher declared straight away it wasn’t adequate and vowed to introduce a private member’s bill to do away with knights and dames altogether. And several others supported him.



The point of the speech was to tell agitating backbenchers that he would stare them down and that they were doing the country a disservice by the very act of leadership agitation.



But it didn’t do anything to answer the underlying causes of the government’s malaise – why the government made the specific decisions that brought it to this point, and what it intended to do to restore voters’ confidence.



It was full of resolve, but it didn’t answer the real questions at the heart of the government’s problems.

