Broken election promises hurting Abbott

Sydney

TONY Abbott, whose relentless taunts of Julia Gillard for breaking an election promise helped make him Australia's 28th prime minister, is suffering the biggest fall in public approval for a new government in 30 years as he faces a similar attack on his integrity. Ms Gillard, Australia's first female prime minister, had backtracked on a 2010 pre-election pledge not to introduce a carbon tax.

On the eve of the September 2013 election, Mr Abbott vowed he wouldn't cut funding to popular programmes. Now, in an effort to rein in a A$48.5 billion (S$53.9 billion) budget deficit, his government plans to reduce spending on schools and hospitals by A$80 billion over the next decade and trim funding for the Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC).

The reversal has enabled the Labor opposition to question Mr Abbott's honesty with voters, undermining confidence in the Liberal-National coalition, which trails in opinion polls by three percentage points, having made the worst start for a party returning to office in almost 30 years. He's failed to pass key savings measures through the Senate, eroding confidence in his ability to manage an economy where commodity prices are plunging and unemployment is at an 11-year high.

"Abbott has already burnt up an enormous amount of political capital and it's hard to get that back," said John Hewson, an economics professor and former shadow treasurer who led the Liberals for four years in the early 1990s. Mr Abbott "ran a very negative campaign to win government and he's now getting that back in spades", he said.

Labor says the government has broken voters' trust at a time when the economy is slowing. The economy grew 0.5 per cent in the second quarter, less than half the pace of the prior three months, while the Australian dollar has dropped 8 per cent against its US counterpart since the end of July, making it the third-worst performer among the Group of 10 major currencies.

The opposition's attacks on Mr Abbott's credibility escalated this week after the coalition announced that it was cutting A$207 million from the ABC on top of A$120 million announced in the May budget. The 82-year-old broadcaster, Australia's most trusted media institution according to an Essential Research poll, said that it would be forced to make more than 400 people redundant, close studios and scale back regional programming.

Labor leader Bill Shorten seized on the ABC job losses to attack Mr Abbott's integrity, accusing him on Nov 25 of "lying" and saying he was "setting a world record for breaking his election promises". Mr Shorten told a rally outside Parliament House against the ABC cuts: "Never has a politician in modern history pinned so much of his own character to the issue of not telling lies in politics."

Mr Abbott has sought to fend off the attack, saying government policy is being driven by the need to address the deteriorating budget position. "This is a government which has fundamentally kept faith with the Australian people," he told parliament. Bloomberg