LOOKING AHEAD – AUSTRALIAN POLITICS 2021

At The Sydney Institute, on Wednesday 27 January 2021, as a second year of pandemic restrictions complicated Australian politics, Parnell McGuinness, columnist with The Australian Financial Review and communications strategist, joined Aaron Patrick, senior correspondent with The Australian Financial Review, to discuss where they saw the Australian political landscape heading as the nation and the world emerged from the effects of COVID-19. Their talks were followed by a board table discussion with The Sydney Institute’s executive director.

LOOKING AHEAD – AUSTRALIAN POLITICS 2021

AARON PATRICK

Hello everyone, and thanks for tuning in.

And thank you very much to The Sydney Institute for inviting me to speak today on the topic of 2021 politics. It’s a pleasure to be here with my good friend Pernell McGuiness at one of Australia’s pre-eminent political discussion forums.

It’s great to catch up with Anne and Gerard Henderson too. I don’t see Gerard as much as I would like these days. He used to bring a different perspective to my Sunday mornings, and is sadly missed.

I have good news though. 2021 is going to be an exciting year in politics. We could have a leadership challenge on one side of politics, and preparations on the other for an election. Even if there isn’t an election, the ground will be prepared for one.

A moment could come when Australians realise COVID isn’t going away, and the pandemic is going to become endemic. It will be fascinating to see how that goes down, especially if Victorians are told that they are going to effectively welcome the virus back in because there is no way to keep it out forever.

Most vaccines reduce symptoms. A few, like the polio vaccine, sterilise the recipient. There is a strong chance the vaccines will not stop COVID from spreading. Even if they do to a certain extent, more 80 percent of the adult population may have to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity.

There’s a phrase we haven’t been talking about for a long time: herd immunity. Nine months ago, anyone who proposed herd immunity was practically marched into the town square, put in stocks, and pelted with rotten tomatoes. Now, as vaccines are rolled out, herd immunity is the global solution. The kicker is that the vaccines may not be good enough to deliver herd immunity against the new virulent strains that have emerged in the UK.

Because they are so virulent, these strains will require an extra 10 to 20 per cent of the population to be innoculated, according to the McKinsey consulting company. That would translate into at least 85 per cent of people above the age of 12 requiring vaccines. Some sociologists reckon only two thirds of Australians are likely to sign up for the jab.

This will present a fascinating challenge for Australian governments. For the past year, the states and federal government have done a great job at convincing voters they are doing a great job at suppressing the virus. They’ve done such a good job that we have almost eliminated COVID-19. Yesterday was the ninth day of no cases of community transmission.

This should be a cause for celebration. The paradox is it has made herd immunity more difficult to achieve. There are credible estimates that the number of people infected in America is around 100 million, compared with the official Australian estimate of less than 30,000.

But we can’t keep the borders shut forever, and I’m not convinced 14 days quarantine is a sustainable long-term solution. At some point Australians will have to accept that COVID-19 is going to be an ongoing part of life. It is going to be endemic.

For those millions of Melburnians who persevered through one of the longest lockdowns in the world, and many others, are going to ask: was it worth it? Why did we deprive so many people of their liberty, and send so many businesses broke? Do we need to rack up $1 trillion in government debt?

The explanations are going to require acute political messaging skills. I don’t know how Morrison and Greg Hunt are going to pull it off. But in his two-and-a-half years in office, the prime minister has done something remarkable that suggests he can: he is the first Liberal leader since John Howard to crack the code of governing from the centre right.

Morrison has emerged as the dominant political figure of his generation. His folksy charm has won over Australians. He seeks to be a unifying force. He revels in the image of the middle-class patriot, and has rejected the partisanship of Abbott, the elitism of Turnbull and the class of Downer.

Whether real or not, it works. One of the ironies of the contest is his opponent, Anthony Albanese, should have a natural advantage in authenticity in that he rose from a single-parent housing commission flat to briefly become deputy prime minister. But for reasons that have as much to do with circumstance and Morrison’s persona as Albanese’s performance, the Labor leader has been unable to convince the commentariat he is a credible alternative prime minister.

There seems to be room for only one earthy bloke at the top of politics. Unless he gets a lucky break, one of the perennial themes of politics this year will be whether the Labor Party will replace its leader. The story is in danger of becoming a media-created vampire, which will not die until a pretender drives a stake through its heart by mounting a leadership challenge. Personally, I think Bob Hawke would struggle to be a popular opposition leader against Morrison in these circumstances.

To its detriment, it seems the Labor Party hasn’t accepted the lessons of the 2019 election, which made it clear the electorate doesn’t want higher taxes or bigger government. The party refuses to answer fundamental questions about what it believes in, including whether corporate and personal income taxes should be lower and the economic cost of Greenhouse gas abatement.

Perhaps Labor would be better off deciding what it believes in and giving its leader a chance to sell the vision. No doubt a new leadership team would receive a short-term publicity boost.

Consider the options though. Tanya Plibersek is an inner-city MP whose whole career has been spent pursuing social causes advanced by the left. How is she going to win over Queensland and Hunter Valley coal miners? Or northern Tasmanian farmers? Or Melbourne outer-suburban tradesmen?

Jim Chalmers is from the right and Queensland. While Chalmers has a lot of experience as a political adviser, he has never been a minister or run a large organisation. Plibersek was in cabinet less than two years. While both are talented and decent individuals, I don’t see that they have, at this stage, the gravitas, experience or profiles needed to defeat someone as undetested as Scott Morrison.

As a proud pragmatist, the prime minister is a dangerous opponent.

Morrison’s decision to end decades of Liberal Party commitment to budget discipline demonstrates he will not let principle stand in the way of winning. His masterful rhetorical position on climate change shows he knows how to frame a debate to his own advantage.

I read on the front page of The Australian on the weekend that the “political debate about reaching a carbon-neutral future” was over. “It is now about the how, not the if,” Morrison said. “It is not about the politics anymore. It is about the technology.”

There was a catch. Morrison said he wouldn’t set a 2050 target for net zero emissions. So, we’ve got an objective, but no target. Morrison has offered something to both sides of the debate, while giving away nothing. That’s brilliant politics.

The Coalition government has shown it is great at politics. Maybe 2021 should be the year it demonstrates that it can execute difficult policy too? Unfortunately, by dismissing the introduction of the GST as “just putting up a tax,” this seems unlikely.

For all our luck and wealth, Australia faces major problems. Wages are stagnant, unemployment is higher than it should be, the retirement system perpetuates income inequality, workplaces are over-regulated, Indigenous advancement has stalled and we are struggling to manage the relationship with our top trading partner.

I would like to end with a personal anecdote. Last week I found out that my best friend from high school took his own life three days before Christmas. Michael lived in a shared flat in inner-city Melbourne. Last year, thanks to the COVID lockdown, he lost his job and was unable to see his mother and brother for six months. They were his only family in Australia.

No doubt there were other factors that contributed to Michael’s tragic decision. For me, though, his death is a reminder of why the protection of individual liberties is so important. Sometimes they are a matter of life or death.