FEDERAL ELECTION 2022 – DIFFERENT VIEWS

On Tuesday 10 May 2022, Aaron Patrick, Special Correspondent for The Australian financial Review, and Gemma Tognini, Executive Director, GT Communications and a contributor to The Australian spoke for The Sydney Institute in a discussion on the federal election campaign 2022 and how it seemed to be going for the political parties. The two speakers reflected different experiences in their campaign watching and neither felt confident to predict the outcome due to conflicting messages coming from both individual seats and general polling. The papers which follow are taken from edited transcripts of each speaker’s comments on the night.

FEDERAL ELECTION 2022 – DIFFERENT VIEWS

GEMMA TOGNINI

Thanks so much for having me this evening, everyone. I made it. As Gerard said, I’m a recent resident of Sydney and still negotiating the sizeable difference in geography between Perth and Sydney.

I’ll start by flagging what I want to bring to the table tonight; it’s very different from Aaron’s forensic approach. Day-to-day, I live in the real economy. I run a small business that’s 20 years old. I also write for The West Australian once a fortnight, do a bit on the wireless, and I contribute to Sharri Markson’s program and Chris Kenny’s program on Sky News. So, that’s my day-to-day life.

I wanted to remark on a few things – I took some notes as you were talking, Aaron. This is definitely not a debate, but some I have some observations where, perhaps, my views are different but also based on a very different experience. Aaron is obviously a lot closer to the day-to-day mechanics of the political world than I am.

The first comments I’d like to make are about the Premier of Western Australian, Mark McGowan, and whether or not he’ll actually be a net positive or a net negative in the next two weeks. The reason I say that is, yes, the isolationist policy during Covid was undoubtedly wildly popular early in the pandemic. But, today, in the last 24 hours, you had the major ambulance service in Western Australia asking Western Australians not to ring 000 because the hospitals can’t cope. Ambulance ramping is at something like 6000 hours in one week.

The former Labor health minister of Western Australia, Roger Cook, when he was in opposition, called 3000 hours of ramping a state emergency. There is a $5 billion budget surplus in Western Australia, and the health system is on its knees. Why is that relevant? Because timing is so important. In another two weeks, who knows? I’m not necessarily saying there’s a swing against the McGowan government, but it’s not the lovefest that it was 12-18 months ago when Mr McGowan did not open the border on 5 February 2022 as he planned to.

McGowan made the announcement on the 20 January 2022 that he would not open the border. You would have all seen the heads of Australia’s largest employer, Wesfarmers, responding, “We can’t do business here anymore. We’re leaving.” And they all took off to Melbourne. A couple of other companies did the same. Seven West Media, the company I write for, changed its backing of the government overnight, and began to run a very negative campaign, or negative narrative, around the government.

On top of all that, there’s a tremendous staff shortage, a skill shortage, everywhere in Australia but, until last week, you had to get police permission to arrive in Western Australia. You couldn’t arrive in Western Australia without a third vaccination, you couldn’t go to a restaurant in Western Australia without showing your vaccination certificate. So, yes, Mr McGowan has been popular. But, is he still the knight in shining armour? I don’t think he is.

The electorate of Swan, in Perth, will be an interesting one to watch, with my friend Christy McSweeney hopefully going to hold that seat. And, there are a few interesting seats there, but my observation about the West is that it’s not necessarily a whitewash for the Libs.

I also wanted to talk about the comment that Aaron made about his experience in North Sydney and the blue ribbon seats of eastern Melbourne. That’s so interesting, because all of us, by virtue of the fact that we’re in this room, are the greatest litmus tests for where this is election is going to fall. For me, I don’t have anything other than a gut instinct, the same that I had in 2019, where I said on air, about a week before the election: “I just don’t think Australians want a socialist left agenda”. I just don’t think they do. I have no data to base that on, I have nothing empirical to base that on. For all that, I don’t think it’s a case of what people want the most; I think it’s what they want the least.

To touch on Aaron’s comments about Katherine Deves; it’s so fascinating. I can’t comment on how that issue was brought into the political narrative, whether it was deliberate – everyone seems to think it was and I’ve got no evidence to contradict that view. We know statistically that the further to the woke left the Labor Party goes, in terms of policy and positioning, the lower is its primary vote. That’s just a statistical fact. The most recent high primary vote for Labor was with Kevin Rudd in 2007. In my parents’ generation, the Labor Party stood for families in the suburbs like mine. They stood for working families. But the Labor Party no longer stands for that. And I don’t believe Australians are, with respect to the Labor Party, as stupid as they are being taken for.

In the polls right now, there is such a huge percentage of undecided voters. I don’t blame them. I am as disengaged in this process as I’ve been ever. It’s my job to be engaged, and this campaign is almost like taking my medicine. I have not watched a single leaders’ debate. Shame on me perhaps, but I don’t think those leaders’ debates offer anything insightful or instructive. I don’t think that they change a single vote. That’s my view. I could be wrong.

I run a corporate affairs business which is 20 years old with its head office in Perth; there are six staff over there, and myself and my colleague Emily here in Sydney. Our Sydney office is two years old, and clients are in a range of spaces from listed through to not-for-profit. The consistent conversations we are having around the election are around the things that don’t change. In my view, the things that both major parties have lost sight of is cost of living and doing business in Australia. Emily and I were in a meeting today where one of the things that was discussed was the prohibitive cost, alongside the overregulated environment of doing business in Australia.

How can Australia be competitive, whether you’re an SME (Small and Medium Sized Enterprise) or whether you’re in a well-developed industry, or you’re listed? My view is that both major parties are suffering an existential crisis that’s several years in the making. You could argue a decade or more in the making. They don’t know who they are. This creates a vacuum – hence the rise of the Independents.

Let me talk about the Liberal Party, my party. When I say my party, I’m not a member but someone said to me today, “Your flag’s pretty much pinned to the wall.” That’s totally fine. The Liberal Party is skating close to missing the opportunity to engage with the next generation of voters. I’ll use my niece and nephew as an example. They’re in their early 20s, and they’re interested in politics, they want to engage in politics. But they look at the conservative parties and they don’t see a reason to engage. That is a dark horse for conservatives in the world over, but in Australia especially. Again, from my observation, you’ve got a language which is “Sit down and do as you’re told, young person. You don’t know.”

We talk about housing affordability; and you can talk about my parents, for example. My mum was a stay-at-home mum; she got married to my dad in 1969 in Brisbane. She had to quit her job when she got married to keep house, even though her children were not born. It was just the socially accepted middle Australian approach. She was one of four children, the only girl. She didn’t go to university because she was a girl, all those sorts of things. For all that, a young person today, who looks at the cost of buying a house and finds it frighteningly prohibitive does not respond well to phrases such as, “When I was young…” as if they have an easier time.

I don’t believe conservatives are offering a pathway to young people, to give them a reason, or an understanding, of what conservative politics looks like. I also firmly believe is that there’s a cohort in the Liberal Party, and in conservatives more broadly, that doesn’t accept that being conservative in 2022 no longer looks like it did five years ago, or ten years ago, or 20 years ago.

It is said that being a conservative doesn’t change. Well, it does change. If it didn’t change, I wouldn’t be allowed to have a job, because I’m a woman. When I got married, I would have had to have quit my job if conservative values didn’t change. Rather than not changing, conservative values are simply are applied in a different paradigm or to a different set of values. The Liberal Party needs to get its head out of its own behind, and start reading the times. They’re not wise enough to sense the change of the seasons.

As for the Left, they have become a party that is representative of such a niche part of our community. There is nothing wrong with that necessarily, except they have abandoned the people who traditionally looked to them as a party that represented their values. My father arrived in Australia on a boat when he was ten, and I should, by all rights, be a Labor voter. I’m not sure how I ended up being a conservative voter, but I am. My dad’s sister and her husband, both retired academics, have been staunch Labor voters all their lives. Yet, I remember, in 2019, my aunt saying to me, “I can’t vote for Bill Shorten.” It was a particular view of what modern Labor had become.

You could argue that maybe Labor is adapting with the times, perhaps they are. But when you have a party that used to represent everyday workers, which today is more in tune with better off professionals maybe there is something amiss. Malcolm Turnbull once said to Bill Shorten, in a put down, that Shorten had folded his legs under more millionaires’ tables than Turnbull had. This is a dual existential crisis where neither party knows what it is anymore.

Enter stage left, the Teal Independents. There’s a vacuum of leadership, a vacuum of meaningful policy. And the media has a responsibility to test this more than it is. The Teal Independents are allowed to flourish in the absence of anything else. I genuinely question whether any of those candidates would be running if not for the backing of Climate 2003 I doubt they would. Why has not anyone pressured Climate 200 to be more forthcoming with their disclosure around potential conflicts of interest? Only very recently did The Australian ask the question.

So, wrapping up, what do I think will happen on the 21 May? I’ll probably do what I did in 2019. Which is stay away from the telly, until it’s a done deal, because I can’t stand the stress. Again, it’s just my gut feeling. If I look at what’s on offer, it’s clearly not that people particularly look at Morrison and go, “What a guy” or “What a leader”. But they look at the left and the way that the Greens and Labor are in bed with the left, and they think, “I don’t really want that.” That’s my view.