The Comment
Tony Abbott is right. National cabinet must become go

In a podcast for the Menzies Research Centre, released yesterday, former prime minister Tony Abbott reminded us why for all his faults, we love him still.

Abbott called out Scott Morrison’s National Cabinet of himself, premiers and chief ministers for what it is: an uncoordinated coordinating committee of cats that refuse to be herded.

The former PM made it clear that federal-state relations are still the same ‘dog’s breakfast of divided responsibilities’ they were when he was a Howard minister, let alone PM. And don’t forget, Abbott was on the verge of releasing a landmark White Paper on reforming the federation when he was rolled by Malcom Turnbull in 2015.

Abbott told the MRC’s Nick Cater, ‘With things like the national cabinet, we’re making it – in my judgment – worse not better. At the very least, we should stop calling this a national cabinet. Because frankly, a cabinet makes decisions that bind all its members. And the national cabinet is not a cabinet in that sense,” he said.

Indeed it isn’t.

As Double Shot pointed out last week, states and territories pay lip service to working together and then flounce off to do their own thing on Covid restrictions, lockdowns and border closures. They are not bound by cabinet solidarity. They are not committed to national consistency in how these draconian measures are implemented, and for the criteria on which liberty-depriving decisions are made.

As for the Prime Minister’s national leadership, today’s bad Newspoll highlights how punters are unimpressed with his current lack of leadership – be it vaccines and vaccinations, moving decisively on covid outbreaks, or simply his style of governing.

Morrison has let the states usurp his national leadership while handballing political responsibility back to the PM. For example, in National Cabinet’s halving incoming arrival quotas, premiers and not the Prime Minister decided how many people will come to Australia and the circumstances in which they come.

Unsurprisingly, more voters are seeing Morrison as a toothless tiger, powerless to stop premiers like Victoria’s Daniel Andrews and Western Australia’s Mark McGowan from playing, with impunity, silly buggers with our fundamental freedoms of movement and association, and even speech.

National Cabinet served a purpose in the early days of the pandemic, but it is now a Frankenstein’s monster of public policy. Abbott’s right: it needs blowing up, immediately.

Then, the PM must do what we advocated last week: grow some balls and reassert his authority by refusing any federal assistance to a state that shuts itself down or off without the Commonwealth’s prior approval.

For too long, premiers have been given carte blanche by the Morrison to do their own thing. If the PM thought voters would judge state governments on their own actions, he was wrong. As John Howard has observed, voters see the federal government as responsible for everything, and don’t give a tinker’s about section 51 of the Constitution.

If he doesn’t want the government’s current Newspoll slump to be terminal, Morrison had better pull himself together and be a true national leader. And if he doesn’t get that the states are taking the Commonwealth for a ride, he should consider handing over to Josh Frydenberg, who does.