Peter Hartcher: ‘He has given himself a fighting chance’

Peter Hartcher: ‘He has given himself a fighting chance’

Sydney, 17 May : The federal budget has put Tony Abbott back in the game. The Steve Jobs of the political world, he was responsible for his fall and has now engineered his comeback.The Abbott government is now back at parity with the opposition for the first time since last year’s budget. On the election-deciding measure, the two-party share of the vote, they stand at 50:50.”After a whole year in the doldrums, Tony Abbott is now back to where he was in the autumn of 2014,” observes the Fairfax pollster, Ipsos’s Jess Elgood. “This will be depressing reading for the Labor party.”Indeed, the standing of Labor’s leader, Bill Shorten, seems to be once again merely a residual of Abbott’s.With last year’s unpopular budget, Abbott handed Shorten the title of preferred prime minister. Now, with a popular budget, Abbott has taken it back again, with a lead of 44 per cent to 39.Neither is popular. But while Shorten’s approval rating is pretty much static at minus 4 per cent, Abbott’s has surged. A month ago he was deeply unpopular with an approval rate of negative 26 points; today he is only mildly so at negative 8.On the evidence of the poll, Shorten isn’t left with any lasting advantage from the Prime Minister’s year in Coventry. This is one of four lessons we can draw from this poll: the Prime Minister is the actor, the Opposition Leader the bystander.The reason is clear. The budget has had a decisive effect. The primary vote for the Coalition is up by 4 percentage points since the previous poll, implying that about 600,000 Australians have shifted to support the government in the course of a month.The government spent about $10 billion on its two big initiatives, its $5.5 billion small business stimulus and its $4.4 billion childcare boost, the measures described in the budget papers as “the core of the budget”.At that rate, the Coalition has won an extra vote for every $16,700 in spending on these “core” items. And even though Shorten adopted these measures in his budget reply and went further to offer yet more tax cuts to small business, he has not shared in the public acclaim.This is the second lesson. Contrary to political folklore that a government can’t generate a significant boost in its standing through a budget, this budget has transformed the Coalition’s standing.

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