The parliamentary budget session has ended with Prime Minister Tony Abbott having reason to feel a good deal more confident than Opposition leader Bill Shorten.
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After the budget itself going down relatively well for the government, some $14 billion of savings have been passed in the past fortnight. Mr Abbott has planted national security centre stage, and resolved the nasty ministerial dog fight over the citizenship legislation.
Mr Shorten’s personal ratings have slipped. His toes are on the sticky paper of the royal commission into union corruption. The Killing Season series forced him to apologise for a lie he told 3AW in 2013.
Labor’s lead in the polls is solid but not massive. By the spring session it may be clearer whether that lead is going to hold.
The six-week recess will throw up tests for both leaders. One can say confidently it will not, as Mr Shorten claimed this week was possible, see the calling of an election.
In particular, Mr Abbott will be trying to advance two issues on his agenda – reform of the federation and the indigenous referendum.
But Mr Shorten will have a tougher go of it in this period. He needs to get through his July 8 royal commission appearance with minimal damage, and he has to avoid the ALP national conference later that month turning into a negative.
Abbott has called a “retreat” with the premiers late in July to discuss federalism. While that will be only an early step in the federation debate – which is entwined with the tax debate – it should give some indication of whether serious change will be possible.
Earlier in the month, on July 6, Mr Abbott will face a quite different challenge in the pursuit of consensus, when he meets indigenous leaders to discuss the proposed referendum to recognise the first Australians in the constitution.
Abbott has invited Shorten to the meeting but has refused to have the Greens, which is short-sighted (given the government hopes for more co-operation with them under Richard Di Natale) and somewhat mean spirited.
While these issues are important for Mr Abbott, Mr Shorten has a lot more at stake in this recess.
There’s been much talk about whether the July national conference will preserve Labor’s conscience vote on gay marriage or “bind” its MPs. Support for binding would be a slap in the face for Mr Shorten, a strong backer of the conscience vote. But a more vital issue for him is to ensure the conference does not prohibit a future Labor government from turning around asylum seeker boats. If it did, that could be disastrous for the ALP in an election campaign. By the time he gets to the conference, Mr Shorten will have faced the royal commission’s questioning about his past as boss of the Australian Workers Union. It’s hard to over-estimate the significance of this appearance for him.
He’s well aware of that. So the reference in The Killing Season to a meeting he had with Kevin Rudd shortly before the 2013 coup couldn’t have come at a worse time. Radio presenter Neil Mitchell had to hand the audio of Mr Shorten two days after the meeting denying he had spoken to Mr Rudd about the leadership.
Mr Shorten on Thursday explained his lie by saying: “I was motivated by not wanting to cause even greater heartache and concern, which was then already going on in the Labor Party”. Unfortunately for Shorten, a lie is a lie.