According to conventional political wisdom, a new government should break a promise it doesn't intend to keep early in its term of office because by the time the next election arrives most voters will have forgotten about it. This assumption is usually paired with another: that voters shrug off politicians' deceitful conduct anyway, because they don't expect any better from them.
Is that what was happening last week, when Education Minister Christopher Pyne announced that the Abbott Government was reneging on its campaign 'unity ticket' support for Labor's Better Schools plan, aka the Gonski reforms to school funding? And was this week's reversal of last week's reversal prompted by a panicked reassessment of the conventional wisdom?
Did the chorus of commentators chanting that abandoning the campaign pledge was the Coalition's 'carbon tax moment' spur Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his Education Minister into reinstating the pledge, lest they have to endure three years of the 'liar, liar' accusations that buffeted Julia Gillard after she implemented a carbon price she had not promised not to introduce?
An implied 'yes' to this last question has become the established narrative on the nation's front pages: Gonski is back, but the series of backflips has undermined the Government's credibility and possibly Pyne's prospects, too. Expect him to be demoted in the first cabinet reshuffle, some pundits are already venturing to say.
Well, maybe. The decision to reinstate a plan that Pyne had publicly denounced as a shambles only a week earlier certainly suggests that he, Abbott or both of them realised that they had badly miscalculated the likely public reaction to ditching the reforms. And the series of policy reversals has fuelled perceptions of a wider ineptitude in this Government, whose ministers have been slow to grasp that they cannot speak and act with the freedom available to Opposition frontbenchers. When a minister utters what sounds like policy, there are consequences.
The established narrative ignores, however, that the reversals — or 'backflips', to use the term favoured by headline writers — weren't really reversals at all. An acrobat who performs a backflip ends up standing where she did in the first place. But the Abbott Government is not back where it started on education funding.
It has had four quite distinct positions: initial rejection of Gonski and adherence to the Howard Government's funding model; then the so-called 'unity ticket' declared during the campaign; last week's junking of the unity ticket; and now, apparent restoration of the Gonski funding, which is not where the Coalition wanted to be when Pyne, as Opposition education spokesman, was denouncing Gonski as 'Conski'.
To this must be add further qualifications. First, what has been 'restored' resembles Gonski only in that it involves handing a lot of money to the states. The Government has mysteriously discovered $1.2 billion that apparently wasn't available last week, and with this has enticed Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory, all of which had refused to sign up to Labor's plan, into the scheme.
Pyne has spun this as saving Gonski and achieving what Labor could not, but it is an achievement derived from surrendering oversight of how the money will be spent. Labor's plan provided increased funding in return for the states making their own contributions, specified in bilateral agreements. There is no longer such a requirement. The states can spend as they wish. In any case the money is offered over four years, not six as in Labor's scheme. That was also the case under the campaign 'unity ticket', of course, which was thus never a real unity ticket at all.
It should always have been obvious that the Coalition was not happy about Gonski, even in the diluted form of the review's original recommendations that Labor had packaged as the Better Schools plan. The 'unity ticket' promise was a ploy to shut education funding down as an election issue and it worked, because media coverage of the promise either ignored or glossed over the continuing differences between the Coalition's policy and Labor's.
Pyne's mistake was not to see that the kind of naivete — among journalists as well as the wider electorate — that allows election ploys to succeed can quickly turn to outrage. No one likes being conned, even if — perhaps especially if — they bear a measure of responsibility for their own state of deception.
So has the latest, big-spending non-backflip shut the issue down, avoiding a 'carbon tax moment' for the government? Gillard was never allowed to forget her broken pledge, but there are enough examples of politicians surviving and even prospering after blatantly breaking promises to suggest that the conventional wisdom still has something going for it. The real question is, what kind of breach of trust might voters forgive, or at least overlook?
The chief inequity in school funding that Gonski — the original review, that is — sought to redress was the decreasing proportion of public funds being spent on the public system. For a decade now, most of the increase in government education funding has gone to private schools.
Pyne might surmise that since increasing numbers of parents are sending their children to private schools they don't have a problem with the slicing of the pie, and that it will be safe to continue dismantling what remains of Gonski. And the fact that most media reporting of this week's announcement has portrayed it as a restoration of Gonski, despite the lack of oversight of how money will be spent, suggests that for the present he is getting away with it — however silly the 'backflips' make him look.
If public schools continue to be the losers in the battle for funds, however, the reversals of the past fortnight will be remembered as the start of a slow burn for the Abbott Government.
Ray Cassin is a contributing editor.
Backflip image from Shutterstock