By Michael Gordon
TONY Abbott spent Australia Day doing what he does very well - mixing easily with people at a flood-relief sausage sizzle, taking part in a 2.5-kilometre swim in Sydney Harbour, and producing a pithy line bagging Julia Gillard and her flood levy before it was even announced.
''It seems the Prime Minister is going to call this a 'mateship tax', but mates help each other. They don't tax each other,'' he told reporters. It was such a good line he reprised it the next day, telling George Negus: ''Mates choose to do things for each other. They aren't made to do things for each other.''
The line would have been more potent if his attitude had not been so predictable, just as his opposition to the new tax would have carried more weight if it was not so utterly consistent with his modus operandi since becoming Liberal leader.
Here was an opportunity for Abbott to break the negative stereotype of the one-trick pony - the leader who always opposes and reduces every issue to a slogan - and he passed it up on instinct.
It didn't have to be this way. He could have expressed all the doubts about the government's ability to manage big programs and argued that the money should have been found solely from spending cuts, but declared the disaster was of such an unprecedented scale that the response should be above politics.
He could have expressed his misgivings, but not signalled outright opposition and, as a consequence, elevated the response to make-or-break status for Gillard's leadership authority - and, just perhaps, his own.
There are some senior Liberals who believe Abbott pulled the right rein. Their view is that Gillard is a worse prime minister than Kevin Rudd, even if she lacks her predecessor's superiority streak and fierce temper. Their expectation is that she won't last until the next election, and that Abbott's dogged negativity is the right response to the situation he faces.
I don't buy it. Yes, Gillard is under pressure. She has failed so far to win the confidence of the electorate and faces challenges in the year ahead. There are doubts about her breadth, her political instincts and her ability to deliver. But the same critique applies to Abbott.
My view is that the jury is still out on Gillard's prime ministership, but that many voters are fed up with the Liberal leader and are distinctly uncomfortable with his combative style.
Of course, critics will assert that the Gillard flood response is more about shoring up her own leadership credentials, being seen to act decisively, and winning support in the marginal Queensland seats that deserted Labor at the August election than putting the national interest first.
But the real test of the Gillard response is not what motivated it, but whether it works. This is a test that goes beyond whether the rebuilding is completed in the most cost-efficient and timely manner, to how the skills shortage is managed and how inflation and interest rate pressures are contained.
After scrapping and slashing so many green programs (some of them dubious, some of real value), it also goes to the fundamental question of whether Gillard can steer legislation through the Parliament this year to establish a price on carbon.
The most immediate test, however, is whether taxpayers accept Gillard's argument for imposing the levy, rather than announcing deeper cuts in government spending or returning the budget to surplus later than the promised 2012-13.
Talkback response here initially suggested Abbott is on a winner, with around three out of four callers opposing the levy according to an early Media Monitors survey. ''They hate it!'' is how 3AW's Neil Mitchell summed up the mood of his audience before a particularly combative interview with Gillard yesterday. ''It's massively unpopular,'' he told the PM.
This judgment could prove premature. My sense is that hostility to the tax is intensely felt but narrowly based - and largely confined to those on higher incomes who have already given generously to flood appeals and resent being forced to give again. Much of this opposition could have been neutralised if people had been given the option of having the tax reduced by the amount they have already donated.
Interestingly, the longer the debate raged on talkback, the more balanced the opinions became, with many callers accepting the distinction between donations to help those in need and a levy to pay for devastated infrastructure. The final ledger of positive and negative calls was close to evenly split.
Most people, I suspect, will ultimately conclude that the levy is not a huge impost (it will cost 60 per cent of taxpayers less than $1 a week) and that it is for a good cause - and certainly a better one than several of the levies imposed when Abbott was a member of the Howard government.
Two of those levies (on sugar and milk) were introduced and a third (to fund the sending of troops to East Timor) was proposed when Peter Costello had the budget in surplus, while the Ansett levy was introduced while the coalition was forecasting a surplus - all of which undercuts Abbott's and Joe Hockey's arguments about finding savings to fund unforeseen spending.
The rest came in when the budget was in deficit and, in Hockey's words, ''we were desperately trying to get back into surplus'' - which sounds like a justification for the path Gillard and Wayne Swan have taken.
For now, though, the heat is on Gillard. She has to persuade the electorate by answering the hard questions, such as those posed by Mitchell yesterday. She has to persuade the independents and the Greens to support the path she has taken in the Parliament. She has made a solid start.
In time, however, the focus will turn to the alternative government and its leader.
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