Prime Minister Tony Abbott has delivered the most savage cost-cutting federal budget in living memory.
I take as an example the cuts to my old department, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), will be 500 positions and $7.6 billion cut over five years to foreign aid, one of the main levers of soft power for Australian diplomacy.
In 1996, the cut to DFAT by the Howard-Costello first budget was around 300 staff, at a time when new technology and the elimination of an entire class of communications staff did not overly affect the performance of DFAT. However, after 18 years of producing efficiency dividends to the governments of the day, DFAT is now a very efficient and lean operation that will surely be cut to the bone.
No doubt Abbott will suffer the consequences of his action as the young, aged, families, poor, sick and disabled voters will surely turn against his government at the next election. And let’s not forget the middle class is unhappy, too.
The Abbott vision is that the rich and powerful will do better at the expense of the rest. It is a vision that includes the restitution of symbols of the monarchy like Knighthoods and Dames. It’s forward to the past on forelock-tugging…
And it is alright to trade off your name and connections for advantage.
Abbott was most upset at press reports of perceived nepotism for two of his daughters, Frances and Louise, declaring the targeting of his family by the media as off limits.
However, I believe there is a case to answer for both that has not been pursued by the Australian press.
In 2011 Frances Abbott secured a $60,000 scholarship at the Whitehouse Institute of Design, whose chairman Les Taylor is a longtime friend and supporter of Tony Abbott. While I am not commenting on whether Frances was selected on the basis of merit (although many of her classmates have cast aspersions as reported by The Guardian), it is interesting to note that the chairman’s scholarship appears to have never been publicly advertised, thus denying others the opportunity to apply for this scholarship. The former head of interior design, Monique Rappell was quoted: ”Even when I worked there, it was extremely difficult to find out how the scholarship system worked…I attempted to get a scholarship for a very good student who had run out of funding and I couldn’t get it, even though she was the top student in her degree course.”
SMH:
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/abbott-daughters-60000-scholarship-based-on-merit-20140521-38p5b.html
http://www.smh.com.au/national/system-that-awarded-scholarship-to-frances-abbott-is-still-a-mystery-20140523-38ue3.html#ixzz32dJ9SvDG
In 2012 Louise Abbott began work as a locally-employed executive assistant to the Australian Ambassador to the UN Permanent Mission in Geneva, Peter Woolcott, who had once been a chief of staff to then Liberal Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. The Sydney Morning Herald reported DFAT internal disquiet among some staff on the lack of transparency in the hiring and – more importantly – how Louise was able to deliver a public statement on disarmament, something that would normally be the responsibility of one of the 14 Australia-based policy specialists working in the mission – but never the administrative assistant of the head of mission.
In my time as Australian delegate to five inter-governmental bodies during the 1990s, including the UN General Assembly, something unprofessional like this could not have happened.
SMH:
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/dfat-anger-over-louise-abbotts-foreign-affairs-job-20140523-zrloo.html#ixzz32h0Ml2rJ
Peter himself is the son of a former DFAT Secretary, and people like these, no matter how gifted, have to endure the perception of advantage and the surname they carry.
Nepotism is rife on both sides of politics but it looks like Abbott has taken it to a higher level.
Phil na Champassak owns The Madsen Boutique Hotel in Penguin and is a founding board member of the Cradle Coast Innovation Inc fostering enterprise facilitation. He is also a board member of the Cradle Coast Tourism Executive, the regional tourism organisation for NW Tasmania. Formerly a diplomat and DFAT policy analyst, Phil has worked on trade, aid, public diplomacy, consular, international security, and bilateral relations with PNG, the US, and NZ, and was most recently DFAT State Director for Tasmania. Prior to that Phil worked for the UN Development Programme in New York, West Africa and PNG. Phil also served as election monitor to the first elections in Cambodia (1992) and South Africa (1994) and was a peace monitor in Bougainville (2002). He has contributed to publications on human rights, election monitoring, and UN issues. Awarded in 2003 a Australian Service Medal. Phil was a guest of ABC Radio Richard Fidler’s ‘Conversations’ in November 2013.
