Sometime between now and October next year, Tony Abbott will be driving off to Yarralumla to be commissioned as prime minister by the Governor-General, Quentin Bryce.
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Most likely, even now, that will be after an epic victory at an election which will have seen the Coalition win something in the order of 130 seats, with even the Nationals winning more seats than the Labor Party, down to about 20.
The fall of the Labor government could be earlier, indeed even over the next few weeks if Julia Gillard miscalculates the patience of those who prop up a minority Labor government. The odds are against any of these surviving an election, but a time may yet arrive when one or more of them calculate that their short-term interests are better served by bartering their votes to prop up a Liberal minority government. At least until there is an election, Tony Abbott will, after all, have to be as attentive to their whims as Gillard has been so far.
While the Coalition is busting to take power as soon as possible and would make many short-term compromises with independents to achieve it, it might ultimately think that it could be better doing it in regular time at a regular election. After that, they might think, they will not have to fuss themselves with the sensibilities of independents whom they despise. Nor will there be any nagging problems of legitimacy, of the sort which, rightly or wrongly, plagued Malcolm Fraser after he took power by constitutional coup in 1975.
A landslide victory to the Coalition will be mostly about the failures of a Labor government. But there will be no doubting that it will also be an endorsement, and blank cheque for the alternative. Even more than with the victory of John Howard in 1996, after voters tired of 13 years of Labor and Paul Keating, voters will have said emphatically that they want something else. On opinion poll evidence, it will be a victory much more like the recent landslides against Labor in NSW and Queensland than the somewhat grudging evictions of Labor administrations in Western Australian and Victoria.
From now on in, Labor will be lucky if it can tease out any more policy or budget detail from Abbott than it has already got, wrapped up to a degree with a quite competent general statement of approach in Abbott's budget reply speech on Thursday night.
Abbott has no need to seek any particular mandate, other than to be different from Gillard. No parsing, counting, measuring or weighing of specific policies or particular sums will be much able to resist his momentum. Unless, perhaps, his hubris is such that he throws caution to the winds and proclaims an intention to return to WorkChoices, and even then he might get away with it, although my guess is that he will be far too cautious even to have it as a secret agenda. Abbott, more than anyone, sees WorkChoices as the fatal overreach by Howard. Far from being cocky or reckless, or even inclined to be adventurous, he is nervous, anxious and ultra-cautious about testing his luck, and pushes back those who remind him he will never have a better chance to get unqualified permission to do anything the Coalition likes. This nerviness is but one of the things that is driving some of his senior colleagues, many of whom have never much trusted his reflexes, mad.
He is also becoming increasingly conscious that instant pronouncements now have meaning going well beyond the daily news cycle. Statements, for example, about what should happen to politicians accused, but not convicted of, corruption, fraud and conversion are of their nature likely to be trotted out against him when, as prime minister, he must respond to allegations of misconduct by people on his side. Such occasions will arise, they always do. It is one of the reasons he is leaving the dirty work of exploiting the Thomson and Slipper messes to others.
He will probably seem, over the next few months, more detached and more focused on general questions of approach and philosophy rather than matters of detailed policy. Why get bogged down in detail when the voters have gone beyond detail? All they seem to care about is getting rid of the Labor government as soon as, and with as much violence and prejudice, as possible.
That would be a mandate something like that achieved by Howard, which was,
essentially, to not be Paul Keating.
Howard was generally bland, vague and reassuring, but his real success was to keep the focus on Keating, and on his supposed arrogance, his being out of touch, and the sense that he was governing through preferred new classes of Labor luvvies. (And after voters overwhelmingly gave him a mandate to be different from Keating, he was able to renounce even vague promises because of a supposed duty to attend to supposed ''black holes''.)
The final death struggles of the Labor Party will be analysed to death. These are always interesting in a clinical sense, and will amuse anyway because there is probably still much spite, bitterness, rivalry and blame yet to distribute, if with little prospect of improving the general odour of the party. In most respects, however, what will be going on in the Labor Party, or the fate of individuals in it, will hardly matter, other than to historians. It seems unlikely that the party, even one reformed by defeat and introspection, will be back in government until the 2020s. That's unless the Coalition commits suicide.
The odds are that no one at present in Parliament will be the next Labor prime minister. Those who take up the task and duty of leading a shattered and demoralised party - a Greg Combet, perhaps, or a Bill Shorten - will probably be exhausted and abandoned long before Labor is again fit for government.
It is doubtful, moreover, whether these or any other potential leaders among the score or so of survivors will have the instincts that will propel the party back into popular favour. Labor shows no sign of having learnt anything much, other than a few meaningless ideas about branch democracy after the NSW state election last year. Combet and Shorten, for example, are closely tied to patterns of cosy union control of the party, and the deals, patronage and insiderness that regularly produce manifestations such as Craig Thomson. So are most Labor ''suits'' - men and women - with backgrounds as minders, union manipulators and branch stackers. Gillard's own such background, and factional dependence on some of its most unappealing players, helps explain her blindness and inaction over Thomson. Yet professional watchers of government and politics must still keep an eye on ministers going through the motions over a period which may well extend five months past another budget. The reasons why may well underline how unnecessary is the disaster Labor has brought upon itself.
First, it is primarily the politics, the vision and the leadership which has gone so drastically wrong. Not the execution, but the ideas. Most Abbott comments about Labor incompetence are merely rhetorical, or, if meant, are wrong. Routine administration is going on; it is still generally efficient, effective and accountable (except in areas such as indigenous affairs where it never is, in which case it has been getting worse under Labor.) Even if ministers are distracted and despondent, there is no evidence of paralysis of mind or will, or loss of control or discipline. Second, much of what Abbott wants is a continuation of what is anyway happening, if with some ideological flourishes and some symbolic slashing and burning. Abbott has a few obvious quarrels - say over carbon and mining taxes - but his approach to defence, foreign affairs, education, health and social security, and federalism, will not differ greatly from Gillard, or Rudd or Howard. And since it is not so long since Howard, Abbott has experienced people who can work with bureaucrats who have themselves worked easily with Coalition politicians. Those bureaucrats are paying very close attention to signals coming from Abbott. They will be ready, even at short notice, for a smooth transfer of power which maintains essential continuities even as it allows quick rebadging of some programs, the depoliticisation of others and politicisation of yet others. I have watched close-up all five of the transfers of political power that have occurred in Canberra in my lifetime. This one - the most inevitable but needless - should be the most trouble-free, because of the professionalism and experience of players political and administrative.
But by no means does that guarantee that all will be well after Labor is out the door. The Coalition is not in fact ready to take power; it will be getting it only because it has been forced upon it by Labor's inability to gain or hold the confidence of voters. There are unresolved cancerous contradictions of approach, philosophy and belief in the Abbott cabinet-in-waiting. If these are being suppressed, lest the Coalition snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the differences cannot be papered over once the Coalition is in power.
Many of the problems come down to sums, but they arise out of different ideas and ideals about what a conservative government can and should do to create a world in its image.
That Labor cannot seem to get the slightest traction in exploitation of these contradictions, except among the ever-declining circle of its own true believers, is a measure of the political incompetence that has it looking like a rabbit trapped in a spotlight, almost begging to be shot.