Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, last week demonstrated what a strategic political thinker and dangerous exponent of the political art he really is.

By Gary Scarrabelotti*

On Thursday May 12, Tony Abbott, delivered his Budget speech in reply – and a very untypical speech it was for an Opposition response to a Government’s Budget.

Since then, many of the more respectable opinion makers have lamented Abbott’s refusal to engage the Gillard Government on the Budget and instead to have slipped, so they claim, into a tub thumping election campaign speech.

Actually, what Abbott did on May 12 was much needed and the merits of the position he took last week had been represented to him for some time.

Back prior to the 2010 Budget, Abbott believed that, when he came to give his speech in reply, he needed to demonstrate credibility on pruning government expenditure. This meant identifying items to be cut and the amounts by which they might be cut. There was plenty of advice to be had on that score, and Abbott prudently cast about for it. And why wouldn’t he? Budget time, after all, is the occasion when both sides of politics are called upon to display their economic literacy and their capacity for managing the finances of the nation.

Right?

Well, no – at least, not necessarily.

During Abbott’s 2010 consultations, an alternative thread of advice emerged, one which he appeared to reject at the time, but which he has now taken up in spades.

The alternative view was that an Opposition leader should not feel obliged to deliver an alternative Budget, or even to spell out explicitly what different amounts he would spend here or cut there in order to reshape the Budget after his own fashion. When one commands the Treasury benches will be time enough for that.

In the interim, Opposition parties that lack – as Australian political parties do – a purpose built “Budget Office” within their national secretariats, should be cautious about competing with Governments in Budget design, even at the margins. Governments can deploy all the resources of The Treasury. Oppositions cannot. Better, then, to stick to a statement of principles and define how, in broad terms, an Opposition would manage the nation’s finances differently. Meanwhile, critique the principles underlying the Budget and pick off, where opportunity presents, the odd egregious blunder. But whatever one does, do not specify new expenditure, or new cuts, or put a figure on them.

Back in 2010, Abbott resisted this advice and his decision had its wisdom. On the occasion of his first Budget speech in reply as Leader of the Opposition, he knew that all eyes would be fixed hypercritically upon him and that he had, therefore, to pass the credibility test on the usual terms. But leap forward to his 2011 Budget response and all Abbott’s former preoccupations with Budget time conventionality have disappeared.

Behind the change of approach is this: having campaigned back and forth across the country, delivering what Graham Richardson reckons are “unrelentingly negative” messages to average voting coves, Abbott proved to himself that the problems confronting Australia today are neither budgetary nor, more basically, economic. They are political: a minority federal government that struggles to govern and a Labor Party stricken by a crisis of identity. They compromise our national security: loss of border control. They are ideological: the insistence upon defining illegal immigration as the flight of refugees. They are, in a sense, “religious” — a non-falsifiable conviction of an impending climate catastrophe: and this feeds a carbon tax policy that will burn household budgets and Australia’s position in international markets.

In these circumstances, there is simply no way that a mere mildly responsible Budget, like that brought down by Treasurer, Wayne Swan, is going to offer a countervailing reply to the “correlation of forces” now martialed against the Gillard Government.

In short, in 2011 Abbott was able to take on board the 2010 “minority” advice about how to respond to a Budget because, in a very real sense, right at this moment, the Budget does not matter. One does not have to play Budget time games when Budget time is irrelevant. The issues are far greater, far more strategic, and pretty much beyond the mind-set of most important people in the Gillard Ministry to comprehend in the round.

This time of the year, Governments are compelled to stand their ground and to defend their Budget. And, traditionally, Oppositions have felt, generally speaking, that they must reply to the Government’s challenge by giving battle on, or about, the Government’s chosen position. But this year, when politics, ideology and “religion” had swamped the Budget, Abbott was freed to outflank the Government and attack it precisely where the Government was most vulnerable: on everything else but the Budget. And he did.

Dangerous man, that Abbott.