It’s time for a heart to heart with the poor beleaguered voters. Voters who are trying hard to sustain a positive position in the face of increasing electoral disillusionment.
With the greatest respect to you, you have got to start acting as the Prime Minister not the CEO of Company Australia. In February I penned a blog highlighting the perils of you traversing the same path as Tony Abbott. Sadly, Mr Turnbull from the outside looking in that's where you are heading. This one-man band leadership style is not working. It's not working for us, it's not working for your ministers and it's certainly starting to backfire on you. You have very capable ministers who are more than equipped to run their diverse portfolios. Let them. When you challenged Tony Abbott you accused him of not respecting cabinet intelligence. From where I’m sitting I question whether you do that yourself.
I know you rate yourself very highly on the subject of economics. So you should. But, you are not the Treasurer, Scott Morrison is. Let him do his job. Listen to him. When he says the problem is spending he is absolutely right. Scott Morrison has proven time and again he can sell a tough message and get the electorate to listen. I’m afraid, despite my first belief that communication is strong point for you, you aren’t doing as good a job. If you continue to insist on controlling everything yourself, what was the point of getting rid of Tony Abbott?
You are a strategic thinker, fantastic we need that in a leader. But I sense what is missing is the ‘pulse check’. As an example, let's take the income tax sharing debate from last week. I can see the merit of what you were endeavouring to achieve. Forcing the states to be more accountable makes sense. However, on the street voters have no trust in the states not to ‘jack-up’ taxes as they did with land tax. Then we have state approvals for large council rate increases and the forced amalgamation of councils in NSW and the alarm bells ring loudly. The debate was dead in the water before it even got off the ground. There were too many influencing factors you couldn’t control. Whilst I understand the bumbled announcement on the edge of a sporting field, few see beyond the event of the day. Add the absence of Scott Morrison coupled with the fact he was caught unawares (for the second time in almost as many weeks) and the rumours fly. Not a good look. I’m sure you are well aware perception is reality.
The next big hurdle is the budget. If you do a poor job of this I think you can kiss goodbye to winning the election. Whilst reform is essential and hard decisions will need to be made, skimping on health and education is a suicidal move. People will buy a deficit in these areas if you tell them why you are doing it.
As a true Liberal I’m for self-sufficiency and private education but super tax concessions and private school funding must stop. It's unfair, and it's bad economics. A study released in 2014 showed the rate of growth of super tax concessions is greater than that of the pension despite the ageing population, meaning the cost of the tax concession will soon overtake the pension to become ''the single largest area of government expenditure,'' by 2016-17. It also highlighted that the Commonwealth bill for the aged pension and super tax concession is projected to rise at a staggering 12% annually to be $50.7 billion in 2016-17.
''The overwhelming majority of this assistance flows to high-income earners,'' the report finds.
“Low income earners receive virtually no benefit,”
Ditching both of these delivers a win-win. It will soften the blow when you announce the tougher decisions and it will restore faith with the ‘middle of the road’ core.
I don’t want a Labor Government returned to power. Should we go to a DD, I don’t want a gaggle of ill equipped single cause radicals in the Senate. I’ve had enough of the chaos. You can fix it and get us back on the front foot. You can steer the debate back onto the folly of Labor and you can deliver a win in both houses. That's something Tony Abbott couldn’t do because the public did not trust him enough to give him control of the Senate. It’s up to you but you don’t have a lot of time and you have a huge credibility ravine to traverse.
As they say, “Do it NOW.” If you don’t you’ll go the same way as Dennis Jensen but this time we all go with you and Bill Shorten will be Prime Minister.
