Election 2010 and Beyond

In the aftermath of the 2010 election, George Megalogenis began to analyse what had happened to politics in Australia. Was it a new phase, with minority government and the rise of the Greens and independents? Had the bold reforms of the Hawke, Keating and Howard years given way to powerful lobbies and the media, a failure of leadership, or all of the above? On Wednesday 15 December 2010, George Megalogenis addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss the issues raised by the outcome of the federal election 2010.

ELECTION 2010 AND BEYOND

 

GEORGE MEGALOGENIS

The recent Victorian elections have offered us lessons we can apply to the national scene. And, before the next federal election there will be the NSW state election where some of the lessons of the Victorian election might come in handy. In Victoria, between the federal election in August 2010 and the state election on 27 November, votes amounting to eight percentage points, from Labor and Green combined, shifted.

Between the federal election in August and the state election in November, Labor lost six and a half per cent of its vote to the Liberal Party. The Greens lost another one and a half per cent to the Liberals. A big shift. And one not seen normally between state and federal elections. One of the big transactions in the 2010 Victorian state election was the Liberal Party decision to ignore Labor’s problem with its base. By putting the Greens last, the Liberals a sent message in the second last week of the campaign not just to traditional Liberal voters, but to disengaged voters and swinging voters, that the Liberals were serious about earning power in their own right. Now, this wasn’t the reason Tony Abbott had a poor showing in Victoria in the federal election. There were other reasons for that. The game that the federal Liberal Party played at the August federal election was an insiders’ game; a preference game, a poke-Labor-in-the-eye game. It wasn’t about standing up and saying: “This is what an alternate government will look like, and we have the confidence of our convictions to be able to stand alone and not care what happens to the Labor base vote.”

The reason the Liberals’ strategy in the Victorian state election worked was that the Liberals gave voters an alternative. While the people can be looking to change government, as we saw with New South Wales in 2007 and Queensland in 2009, it doesn’t necessarily happen if the other side isn’t presenting a confident alternative. That is what the Liberal Party did in the last weeks of the Victorian campaign. And it worked.

As a result, the Liberals picked up huge swings in seats that neither side anticipated – in the suburbs. A couple of the big transactions were across what we call the “Frankston line”, the south-east corridor in Melbourne, and also along the Mount Waverly line, into the eastern suburbs. Labor lost every seat along those two train lines. Labor now holds no seats across those two train lines. This says, also, that public transport was the number one vote switching concern at that election.

It was an election where public transport merged with the cost of living concern. In the last two weeks of the campaign, the Liberals offered pensioners further concessions on energy – electricity and gas charges – which seems to have shifted votes at the last minute as well.

Through the course of this year, (I am talking to you as a Melburnian now), I’ve had a few very Sydney experiences in Melbourne. Melbourne is no longer easy to get around. There are infrastructure problems both physical and with health and education. And it’s become a very popular state with rapid population growth in the last five years. There is a correction for each budget makes a correction for the number of people missed the previous year. Population is constantly underestimated. So, there are the normal problems of a boom where there has been no sufficient allowance for roads, schools, even maternity beds.

The Liberal Party was aware of this, and came at the Brumby government from the service delivery perspective, and were offering to problem-solve. At a state level, that thing tends to resonate. It is the same in NSW. In Victoria, the Liberal Party also had the sense to pitch a positive agenda. There weren’t a lot of policies, but there was a positive agenda. Meanwhile, the Greens did not have a good state election. They have lost the balance of power in the upper house and the Coalition, on the final count, have gained the balance of power in their own right. with a one-seat majority in the lower house. However, Victoria is now the first state in this cycle where the Greens, at a state election level, have managed over ten per cent at consecutive state elections in the lower house. There’s no precedent for that across third party outbreaks over the last 20 or 30 years. The Democrats did do well traditionally in South Australia.

But, what the Greens did in Victoria, notwithstanding their failure at the seat level, was still pull a pretty healthy vote. They are in a position now where they’ve got ten per cent plus guaranteed to them. And the Labor Party in Victoria knows that this is pulling from its traditional voters. The Labor Party has a much bigger problem, not just in Victoria but nationally. Its primary vote is in a situation that began in 1990, when Bob Hawke won the federal election with less than 40 percent of the primary vote and relied on Democrat preferences. Since 1990, the Labor Party has only had two decent federal election results above 40 per cent. That was Paul Keating’s victory over John Hewson in 1993 and Kevin Rudd’s victory in 2007.

Now, I want to talk a bit more about the Green vote and what’s been motivating it. There is certainly a protest to the left flank of the Labor Party. The other thing to bear in mind about the Green vote is that, not since Lang Labor in the 1930s, there never been a third party to the left of the Labor Party. More recent outbreaks, whether One Nation or the Australian Democrats – began from the Liberals.

Reform in Australia has been dead for a number of years. The Green vote is a manifestation of that. There is a good deal of the population now that’s piqued, in both major parties, a loss of belief. And they’re dumping their primary vote with the Greens as an “I don’t care” protest, or to send a message to the major parties. It’s Labor’s problem at the moment, but you need to bear in mind that it began as the Liberal Party’s problem. When John Howard was in government, the Greens began as a breakout to the left of the Liberal Party, and they began with professional women in their 20s and 30s who started to move off the Liberal pile at the 2001 and especially the 2004 elections. The pejorative for them is the cliched “doctor’s wives”.  When we come to the 2010 election, we can break down Tony Abbott’s vote, and see a loss on the Liberal side, from where their traditional numbers were, for women aged in their 20s and 30s, of roughly ten percentage points.

Labor has a similar problem. But Labor’s problem is bigger amongst younger voters with men than it is with women. At the 2010 federal election, the Green primary vote amongst men aged under 35 was 25 per cent. For women under 35 it was 20 per cent. That’s a Julia effect. Gillard had slightly stronger primary vote amongst young women than she has for young men. The Greens are very popular with the younger voter, and also the closer you get to the CBD, with people who have never known recession and who want the main parties to stand for something. Somewhere in Gen Y there is the next wave – whether it’s the next big reform idea or the next consensus. But the aspirations of this new wave has little to do with the standard Green agenda. This is an active, urban, and a young professional protest vote against both main parties. Because Labor is in power, it’s manifested itself in a collapse in the Labor primary vote.

When we look at the federal scene, where Kevin Rudd walked away from the ETS or “the greatest moral challenge of our time”, Labor paid with a substantially reduced majority. The Coalition primary vote did not move in the first three or four months until Rudd walked away from the ETS. Liberal voters prepared to give Labor a go on climate change had no reason to vote Labor. They went home to the Liberal Party.

 The younger vote was what threw John Howard out of power in 2007. Kevin Rudd rode this youth wave in 2007. And, in this first couple of polls, Julia Gillard retained that vote. But now it’s gone. So, if many voters in their 20s and 30s are turned off by both Labor or Liberal, what’s going to make them vote for a major party in their 40s and 50s?

There is a big demographic issue for both sides of politics when we look at the breakdown of those votes. Something very interesting has been happening since 1990. In the federal sphere we’ve had eight elections since 1990. In five of those eight elections, Labor hasn’t made 40 per cent primary. In every election, except 1993, the main parties have not even got close to 90 per cent of the combined primary vote. Over the course of the 1990s and in the last decade, between 15 and 20 per cent of all Australians are voting “none of the above”. The surprise to me is that it took so long to get a hung parliament.

Now some history. Between 1910 and 1987, 32 federal elections, on only two occasions did the Labor Party’s primary vote go below 40 per cent. In 1931, it was 37.67 per cent; at the 1977 election it was 39.65 per cent. That was the first election the Democrats stood. When Gough Whitlam was thrashed in 1975, Labor had a primary vote of 42.84 per cent. In those days, this was considered a catastrophe. Because each time Labor took office, beginning with Scullin in 1929, looking at the Curtain victory in his own right in 1943, at Gough in 1972 and even Hawke in 1983, when a Labor Party took power it was with a primary vote of around 49 per cent. Now, 49per cent is quite a big number.

 Roughly half the population would put one for them. They’d never win big, of course, but you were sure when you got a Labor government that you had half the population thinking that this was what they wanted.

Kevin Rudd’s 2007 election result was a landslide with only a 43.88 per cent primary vote. Kevin Rudd won 6 percentage points somewhere else. Traditionally, as I said, Labor would come to power, all the way through to the Hawke era, with a primary vote of around 49 per cent. Now they are down to 43.88 per cent. Of course, Labor has just been re-elected as a minority government with a primary vote of under 38 per cent. And that’s not that far off the 1931, the worst ever. So, they’re in trouble.

It’s the same problem for the Democrats have in the US. Since the end of the Cold War and since centre left parties embraced some free market principles, and since deregulation and the end of the blue collar economy, parties to the centre left have splintered. That’s a problem for the Labor side of politics. Election 2010 was not simply the misery of throwing a Prime Minister out in the first term and then that god-awful campaign that they had and the leaks and the like. This is part of a pattern that’s been in the system since 1990.

On the Coalition side, something very interesting is also happening. They have a similar problem. It’s not as pronounced as Labor’s, but it still is a similar problem. In 1975, Malcolm Fraser won with a primary vote of 54 per cent. John Howard in 1996 won with 46 per cent, and 46.7 per cent in 2004. These are good numbers. Tony Abbott got 43.62 percent in 2010. And, we know that was a terrific result because up until a couple of months out from that election, it looked like Labor would be returned comfortably. But, between 2010 and 2004, on the Liberal side younger women and younger men are turning away from the Coalition. They haven’t gone to the Labor Party; they’ve gone to the Greens.

Ted Baillieu had a very good win in Victoria with a primary vote of 44.78 per cent. It’s a good win, but it’s not strong. Labor’s Steve Bracks achieved minority government in 1999 with a 45.75 per cent primary vote. In 1992, however, Jeff Kennett won with 52 per cent. In 1982, John Cain won with 50 per cent. This is the pattern we see emerging at the federal level as well. The major parties have a smaller base vote. And, the problem with the smaller base vote is that a lot more people are either thinking of changing government or are not interested in politics at all. They will mark this new government as harshly as the Rudd Government when the Rudd Government didn’t deliver.

This change in voting seems to have started in NSW where Premier Bob Carr never won an election with better than 42 per cent. It’s a detribalisation of politics. Exit polling I have seen showed that the Green vote splits roughly 30/30/30 between, firstly, those committed to Green values, a human rights agenda and a very radical agenda on the environment, another 30 per cent who just want to send a message to the Labor Party and a final 30 per cent who do not care about politics at all. The problem both the main parties, have coming out of that last federal election, is that their voters are saying the same things about the people they’ve voted for, Labor or Liberal, that Green voters, the people that have already made the jump were saying about the reasons why they’ve changed, why they’ve voted Greens for the first time.

All this is not easily fixed. One of the problems I see in current media environments and current public discourse is that it’s very easy to stop a government from doing things; it’s very easy to run the noise of media and opposition interference. I don’t think journalists do this deliberately, but there’s something in the air at the moment. And we’re all making very, very quick judgements. We want Julia Gillard to change the world tomorrow, but she hesitated and lost voter attention. We wanted Kevin Rudd to show leadership, well, he blinked; ok, I’ll never look at him again. We wanted Tony Abbott to give us a positive reason for voting for him, he didn’t; well, many may not look at him again, or they might not. Politicians recognise this problem, so much so that they now are living day to day. They want to win the day; they want to win the media for that day.

The difficulty with trying to win the media for each day is that none of these messages get out there. You can’t problem solve if you don’t progress long term reforms by winning each day. You certainly don’t do it the way Kevin Rudd did it, which is to turn up every day and not care what question gets asked of you because you think your job is to turn up every day and answer every question that gets thrown at you.

 This is not just life after John Howard. There were some questions that John Howard would never take, and no one would think to ask him. Kevin Rudd became a sort of a pop culture commentator. But, if you put yourself in a position where you go on FM Radio, or AM talkback radio, and pretty much every question that comes to you is demanding an answer of the Prime Minister, at what point can the Prime Minister talk to you as the Prime Minister?

It is possible for the media, without meaning to, to shout a government down. And a big part of the problem is that we’ve got a generation of politicians who think their job is to fill the hole every day. Julia Gillard is trying to change the way the government handles it’s messaging, but her best intentions are up against stiff opposition.  And the reform era ended many years ago, around early 2001, when John Howard threw away the fuel excise to bed down the GST. Between 2001 and 2010 we’ve seen a couple of big reforms attempted – WorkChoices being the most obvious one and the mining tax and the ETS. Leave to one side your attitudes on any of those and remember that in the 1980s and the 1990s a lot was achieved from both sides of politics. So, why couldn’t John Howard get WorkChoices to work? Why couldn’t Kevin Rudd hold a conversation long enough to convince people to go with the mining tax? And why did he walk away from the ETS?

Lobby groups have a lot more power than they did ten years ago and the media has a shorter attention span. In John Howard’s final term, the Senate rammed through the WorkChoices legislation and then the government tried to change the conversation. For the next two years, the ACTU played Howard off a break because he wasn’t plugging WorkChoices in the public space. Something similar happened to Kevin Rudd with the ETS; he stopped talking about it, and Tony Abbott played him off a break with “no”. As the ACTU did with WorkChoices.

A hung parliament in Canberra has been a long time coming. But the problem I see now is that no one has worked out a solution to the fix that we’re in. We know the internet is a good campaign mechanism for an opposition. Barack Obama found this in the US. He used the new media to market his genius. But, as soon as he had the burdens of office, the Republicans saw they could use the same tool. And Obama couldn’t hold a conversation long enough to get anything through. He may have succeeded in getting his health reforms through Congress, but now they’re under challenge while the US unemployment rate is around ten percent, in a recession not seen in more than fifty years.

At the moment, people in power are surrounded by, disciplined oppositions, disinterested media, and disengaged electorates. One of the big problems the Labor Party discovered it had was that at recent elections, for all the polling they did, they could not read the national mood. Tony Abbott, meanwhile, had a pretty good fix on the national mood – it wanted to punish Labor.  But Tony Abbott’s story only resonated, in terms of seats, in Queensland and Western Australia, in the mining states. A couple of seats swung in NSW, but Labor got a swing to them in Victoria. It was a strange election; as if the top half of the nation went one way, and the southern states another. In fact, with each border, from Queensland to Tasmania, you get a five percentage point increase in Labor’s primary. And, in Labor’s two party preferred vote – 45 per cent in Queensland, 49 per cent in New South Wales, 59 per cent in Victoria and then over Bass Strait to 60 per cent in Tasmania.

In addition, some people wanted to be inspired. But neither party could do it. But, having missed the opportunity to inspire in 2010, that doesn’t mean it will happen like that in 2013. open to some questions. It’s a pretty tricky time we’re in at the moment, and it’s not something that you and I can do much about. At the end of the day, we need some grown-ups in the political sphere to think our  way out of this present impasse.