The blame game: when will it stop being Labor’s fault?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/14/the-blame-game-when-will-it-stop-being-labors-fault

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Like a Christmas cracker, or a New Year party popper, to use similes pertinent to the season, the trick used by new governments of blaming former governments for bad stuff they need to do only works once.

Bang! Shock! It’s all their fault, and regretfully we have to implement these nasty measures to clean up the mess we’ve inherited.

Peter Costello used the tactic quite effectively after the 1996 election campaign when everyone knew the budget was in deficit but pretended to believe it was in surplus. Howard and Costello then ''uncovered'', with suitable gasps of feigned surprise, the $8bn ''Beazley black hole'' and used it as cover to do some serious, and necessary, cost-cutting in the 1996 budget.

Rudd started to use the same ploy in 2007 when he declared a “war” on inflation, which he said was a “genie” the Howard government had released from its bottle. But then the global economy started to melt down and Labor shoved many of its planned spending cuts back into the bottom drawer for fear they would exacerbate the domestic downturn.

Now Hockey is lining up to use the same strategy with next Tuesday’s mid-year economic statement, into which he clearly intends to load every bit of economic bad news to create a big bang “scary” deficit figure, all the fault of Labor’s chaos and mismanagement, which will, of course, require the new government to make very big budget savings and allow it to deflect criticism if it takes quite a while to return the budget to surplus.

But too many bangs, too many thundering denunciations of the heinous incompetence of the other side, and voters get wise to the jig.

That’s why Hockey’s pitch is in danger of being cruelled by colleagues – clearly in a mood of ideological celebration – using the blame game to justify all kinds of things.

Education minister Christopher Pyne, for example, tried briefly to blame Labor for the government’s cuts to schools funding because the ALP had returned money to general revenue when it failed to do deals before the election with some of the states. That cracker backfired so badly Pyne now has to find the money in savings from his own portfolio.

Assistant employment minister Luke Hartsuyker said the government was disallowing a $1.2bn wage supplement for poorly paid aged care workers because Labor had been using it to impose “unionism by stealth” (a requirement that recipients be part of an enterprise bargain), thus justifying as all Labor’s fault a decision that means workers lose a pay rise of between $29 and $45 a week.

Assistant education minister Sussan Ley redirected at least $235m in pay rises for child care workers for similar reasons.

In a tit-for-tat blame war, several ministers claimed Labor was also to blame for Holden’s decision to close its operations, due variously to the carbon tax (which the company said was not “irrelevant” but also not raised by Detroit as part of the decision to close), the pre-election FBT changes (which the government did not proceed with and which the company said were irrelevant), or due to the general Labor-inflicted parlous state of the economy.

The Coalition has also announced a royal commission into the first Rudd government’s home insulation program, which was a terrible failure and which did lead to an explosion of business in a poorly regulated area, contributing to four young mens’ deaths, but has already been reported on by federal, state and coronial inquiries.

In between all of this the Coalition has been struggling to maintain voter outrage where they need it most – to recast the economic debate and over the carbon tax.

Valiantly they bowled up Dorothy Dixer questions about businesses struggling with higher power bills, the kind that worked so well when they were in opposition, but it was hard to hear the answers over the general disinterested chatter.

Any incoming government takes over policies it doesn’t like or intends to change or repeal. In many respects it may be justified in pointing out that what it has inherited is not, from its point of view, ideal.

But voters have a pretty firm view that when they elect a government they want it to get on with governing. They have limited patience for endless tirades about the mess the last lot left behind. It doesn’t take long for the blame game to run out of pop.

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