Coalition marooned in a sea of troubles Boat load of barnacles What is a Captain to do with a ship full of barnacles? By Rocco Fazzari and Denis Carnahan with apologies to drunken sailors everywhere. Maybe leaders should just stop doing outdoor television interviews on the eve of an election. Remember Julia Gillard's "no carbon tax" declaration, standing in front of the Brisbane skyline? Sorry, of course you do. It's astonishing how much it resembles Tony Abbott's albatross. Abbott is standing in a stadium, as befits his relative sportiness, but this aside it's just about a perfect match. Each has given the most perfectly destructive grab: a crisp, unequivocal statement that promises in less than 10 seconds exactly the opposite of what they would come to do once the election was over. This week's focus has been on cuts to public broadcasting, but it's the sheer breadth of Abbott's promises - almost all of which are now violated - that makes it so compelling. You'd think you could at least stumble or ramble a bit to draw out the clip and make it a little less usable. By election eve you've learned your lines. It's only afterwards, apparently, that you forget them. This stuff can really hurt, as Gillard so brutally discovered. Abbott's case is perhaps a little less dire. His broken promises don't directly raise the cost of living, and so don't quite lend themselves to a carbon-tax-sized scare campaign. He doesn't lead a party desperate to tear itself apart to the point of being unelectable. He faces an Opposition Leader not remotely as effective as Abbott was himself. But Abbott has other problems that mean his broken promises operate more as a garnish. They don't need to be the whole catastrophe because they sit atop something more substantial. You see, the Abbott government is now in trouble. Really quite serious trouble. Trouble from which it will take a special effort to emerge. The hyperventilating about Abbott being a one-term Prime Minister has always struck me as the wishful thinking of those already implacably opposed to him, oblivious to the lessons of political history. Changes of government are rare and one-term governments almost mythical. But as I write this on the eve of an election that looks set to terminate a one-term government in Victoria, in which Victorian Liberals are describing Abbott's influence as poison, it is clear that political history is changing. Illustration: Simon Letch Governments run their course quickly these days. Even the previous Labor era felt like two one-term governments, each of which ran aground at the first available poll. Last year we had three Prime Ministers, the Northern Territory had two Chief Ministers and Victoria had two Premiers. This year, New South Wales has done the same. Not one of these discarded leaders had been in the job for a complete electoral term. It's now possible Abbott might be the same. There's no singular issue responsible for this. That's actually the problem. The government is struggling not for anything particular it has done, but for who the electorate thinks it is. This isn't simply the government that cut ABC funding - far more modestly, as it happens, than Howard did before waltzing his way to electoral success. This isn't the government that wants to increase student debts, or raise the cost of petrol, or charge poor people to visit the doctor, or take the dole away from young unemployed people. It's the government that wants to do all of these things. This isn't about policy. It's about values. Abbott's problem is that he's allowed a this image to solidify as his government's character. In a word, it's about fairness. And here - still - stands the government's budget which has become the lens through which all else is seen. Abbott can plausibly claim a mandate for taking action to improve the budget. In all likelihood he can even inflict some pain to get there. But - as John Howard so frequently warned - you can only convince the electorate to hurt if they believe they're hurting fairly. And it is on precisely this score that Abbott has so dramatically lost the argument. Illustration: Andrew Dyson There has been no compelling rebuttal to the claim that it is the poorest and the most vulnerable - low-income earners, pensioners, unemployed kids - who are being hit. This is how Abbott's parental leave policy - which was meant to be about empowering women - has instead become about class: about empowering rich people who happen to be women. It's how the government's perfectly sensible decision to unfreeze the excise on petrol suddenly became a war on poor motorists. And it's undoubtedly how any attempt by this government to advocate a raised GST, maturely or otherwise, will come to be seen. That's what happens when the narrative against you is clear, damaging and well set. The great predicament for Abbott is that by falling foul of the fairness test, he has wandered into one of Labor's very few remaining sweet spots. For decades now, Labor has struggled to explain its identity, which is why on, say, immigration or national security it finds itself hopelessly trapped, tiptoeing inauthentically along a line largely determined by the Coalition. Labor's most authentic moment arrived in 2007, when Howard served up a fight on WorkChoices. This was Labor in its element. Fairness isn't quite as sharp, but it at least feels like a Labor theme. And now Abbott's compelled to fight on that turf. Abbott somehow needs to break the thematic stranglehold. Perhaps that's why he has reportedly decided to dump his GP co-payment. It's why he'll probably, under great sufferance, dump his paid parental leave scheme. And maybe this will be enough to save him once he passes a more generous budget or two before the next election. But it's getting to the point where he needs a grand gesture that impacts the wealthy. A temporary debt levy on high-income earners is all it has right now, and it's already been forgotten. He needs something truly big; something like a crackdown on superannuation tax concessions for high-income earners which could raise billions. But ask a Coalition MP why they have studiously avoided this and you'll get a simple answer: we promised before the election we wouldn't touch super. And you can't break your promises, can you?