The Liberal Party has spent 66 years developing its brand as the party of enterprise and low taxes. It took Tony Abbott just 98 days to inflict serious damage to the brand.

That is the central problem of Abbott's policy to pay for maternity leave by putting a new tax of 1.7 per cent on companies making $5 million in taxable profits.

If Abbott takes this policy to the election, he will have made the Liberals the party of first recourse to taxing the wealth-generators and job creators of Australia. By proposing a $2.7 billion impost on business, Abbott has betrayed the Liberals' core identity.

One measure of the depth of the betrayal is in the reactions - business has rejected the plan but the Greens love it: ''Go Tony!'' Bob Brown said yesterday.

Yesterday Abbott apologised to a meeting of his parliamentary colleagues for failing to consult the party in announcing the policy, something he justified as a ''leader's call''.

He should have gone further and apologised to his party for discarding its fundamental charter and core philosophy. He should have apologised to the spirit of the party's founder, Robert Menzies. When Menzies produced the party's constitution in 1944, it set out to create a nation ''looking primarily to the encouragement of individual initiative and enterprise''.

Abbott himself acknowledged the party's identity as the party of low taxes in addressing supporters at a Millennium Forum breakfast in Sydney two weeks after he was elected leader.

He thanked the party faithful who had risen up against the government's proposed emissions trading scheme for ''recalling Liberal MPs, including me, to our shared values and principles''.

And they are? ''You have reminded us that we are the party of low tax, small government and economic freedom. You have forced us to consider more intelligent ways of protecting the environment than slapping a new tax on the essentials of modern life.''

The problem is not that Abbott wants to provide paid maternity leave. It's how he intends to pay for it. Is he incapable of finding ''more intelligent ways'' of providing maternity leave than ''slapping a new tax'' on the nation's wealth generators and job creators?

This year the government has budgeted to spend $338 billion. Is Abbott really telling us that the Liberals are incapable of finding $2.7 billion in offsetting savings out of Labor spending of over one-third of a trillion dollars?

If so, is the opposition too lazy to find savings? Lacking resolve? Or just careless of what the Liberal Party stands for?

The motive force in Abbott's unilateral announcement was a burning urge to change the political debate away from Rudd's chosen ground of health. He succeeded, but at tremendous cost. Abbott was so preoccupied with the ''message wars'' that he forgot the paramount point - the message itself.