AUSTRALIA VOTES – AN EVENING AFTER THE ELECTION

On Saturday 18 May 2019, Australia voted and the opinion polls were wrong. Prime Minister Scott Morrison pulled off what had been predicted to be an impossible win. In March 2019, at The Sydney Institute, Caroline Overington and Paul Kelly could not see the Coalition winning. On Monday 20 May 2019, author and Associate Editor of The Australian, Caroline Overington, and Paul Kelly, Editor-at-Large at The Australian, author and commentator, returned to the Institute, just two days after the big vote, to assess what happened.

AUSTRALIA VOTES – AN EVENING AFTER THE ELECTION

PAUL KELLY

It is a great pleasure once again to be back at The Sydney Institute. I’m sorry that Gerard Henderson is not going to be here tonight because he would have enjoyed this evening immensely. I acknowledge my colleague across the campaign Caroline Overington.

Scott Morrison said he believed in miracles and, perhaps, it was a Morrison made miracle.

 In many ways this is the most astonishing election in the post-war period. I’m not aware of any opposition being in front for so long, so consistently, with such a strong margin – 53 to 47 on average and then losing the election. I’m also not aware of any government suffering such internal strife and division over policy, beliefs and tactics, culminating in a leadership crisis and transition, and then sufficiently overcoming all this to be re-elected. In this case, disunity over the preceding term did not result in political death.

This election reminds us all that conventional wisdoms endure only until they are repudiated. There were two further reasons for pessimism about the Coalition’s position. Malcolm Turnbull’s 14 seat loss in 2016 left Morrison with no leeway and the redistribution put Morrison in negative territory. He needed a swing to the government to stay in office. The odds were always stacked very much against him. Morrison’s victories went against the trend – he defied the polls, the betting market, the expectations and the experts.

When I addressed The Sydney Institute before the campaign, I expected a Labor victory, a widely held view at the time. This was also the strictly private assessment of a number of senior Liberal ministers whom I spoke. But not the prime minister.

So, how do I see this election result? What drove it and what are the revised assessments that are demanded from us? They are substantial. There are three themes that I want to focus on tonight – Morrison, Shorten and the Australian people.

First, this is a deeply personal victory for Scott Morrison. No other Liberal could have won this election and the entire Liberal party knows it. Morrison’s achievement from last August to last Saturday has been astonishing. I believed he was the best person to lead the Liberals after the 2018 crisis. I believed he was a competent Treasurer and underrated as a politician. I frequently said, in recent months, that Morrison as PM was doing an impressive job but facing an uphill road towards any improbable victory.

Morrison, however, had a vision and a strategy for the Liberal Party that he followed with energy and conviction. He is a down-to-earth everyman Prime Minister, a community-based pragmatist with values and a natural rapport with people.

Morrison had critical insights: he believed most Australians didn’t want radical change as proposed by the Labor Party.

 He felt that Australians would respond to a campaign based on the economy and opposition to Labor’s tax rises. He made this the message and stuck by it with a singular intensity. And Morrison identified the voters that would be decisive. He called them the quiet hard working Australians – the retirees, the family people, the voiceless who didn’t have institutional power. They were once the Howard battlers, they were once Menzies’ forgotten people. Morrison spoke to them and, in the end, enough listened.

This represented a deep understanding of the core strength of the Liberal Party from its inception. Morrison’s theme, the economy is the people and the people are the economy, worked. So did his family-orientated genuine persona. But that conceals a politician of immense ability and cunning. Morrison could become the most significant liberal leader since John Howard. His insights into the Australian character far exceeded those of Labor and Bill Shorten.

When Morrison became leader in August last year, I certainly did not believe at that point in time he could win an election. But let me highlight two interesting features of Morrison. First he is firmly wedded to the NDIS initiatives surrounding mental health and youth suicide and he’s got the ability to project as a genuine compassionate Prime Minister.

Secondly, right from the start he had a conceptual reply to Shorten’s fair go. Morrison’s reply was, “We believe in fairness but we don’t want to advantage one section of the Australian community by punishing another section of the Australian community.” That is, Morrison’s conception of fairness isn’t about advancing one group by punishing another. So, the first factor in the reassessment of the election is the superior performance of Morrison as Prime Minister – better than his own supporters or most people expected.

My second theme relates to Labor. This is the election that Labor threw away. It faced a government whose divisions made it virtually unelectable for much of the term. But Labor deliberately chose to make itself the issue. Duplicating John Hewson’s decision before the 1993 election, Labor decided to spurn caution and pragmatism. This was a critical decision.

Labor decided that, in an age of disruption and uncertainty, it had to show what it believed. It had to expose its heart. Labor believed that if it went bold, nailed its colours to the mast, it would be rewarded. It would outshine the Coalition for courage and fidelity. The only trouble is, in answering this challenge, Labor moved very significantly to the left. It guaranteed Australia a fork-in-the-road election.

I said, at this platform, two and a half months ago before the campaign, that Australians faced the most substantial differences between a government and an opposition since the 1993 Keating-Hewson poll. Labor offered an old-fashioned big spending agenda, to be financed by an overall increase in the tax burden. This included risky changes to negative gearing and franking credits, higher taxes on higher income earners and a serious crackdown on superannuation, capital gains and trusts.

It was an aggressive agenda of redistribution. It was not an agenda for aspirational Australia. It was about bigger government and redistribution. The Australian public was not demanding this. But the progressive movement was. Labor listened to its own. It listened to the true believers, those who said that the nation had succumbed to inequality and that the problem of fairness had to be addressed.

Shorten did pick many of the trends correctly, notably same sex marriage, the Banking Royal Commission, resentment about the big end of town and poor wage levels. But Shorten became infatuated by Labor’s success, by his own success and by the government’s woes. Shorten misjudged and over reached. He believed there was a new wave of progressive opinion changing the country, and that the nation wanted significant change. And there was a lot of evidence that it did want change.

I believe we now see more accurately that the majority of people were not hankering after major change. But the broader progressive coalition was demanding it. That coalition constituted the Labor rank and file, the Greens, the trade union movement, GetUp!, the environmental and other progressive lobby groups. This was a formidable coalition and it was the coalition on which Labor hoped to ride to success. It’s not surprising that Shorten listened to it and responded to it.

Shorten tried to win on this sentiment. For two years he engaged in class warfare rhetoric, offered major concessions to the trade unions and ran on a radical climate change agenda. During the campaign he doubled down. He presented himself as a climate change champion. His head kicker, Kristina Keneally, said climate change was the issue of the election. Shorten refused to offer any costings. Apparently assessing that Australia had crossed a threshold to a post-material utopianism where what mattered was climate change action, not climate change cost.

In all these endeavours, Labor changed as a party. It moved to the left. It became progressive, it attacked business, it said little about economic growth or productivity or aspiration. Traditional family values were never mentioned. That a right-winger like Shorten presided over this change, highlighted the extent of change in the Labor Party.

Labor knew it was taking a risk. It’s critical assumption, however, was that the Turnbull Liberal Party lacked the clout and the skill and the nous to beat it. Labor became intoxicated by winning 14 seats from Turnbull at the 2016 election. Then it saw Labor victories in Queensland, Western Australia and Victoria at the state level.

Labor judged it could manage the risks. It judged the Liberals could not recover from their chaos, and that the Liberals were an inferior fighting machine. It was easy to play “big end of town” politics against Turnbull. But that hardly worked against everyman Morrison. Shorten was lulled into a false confidence by two years of Liberal chaos. When the campaign began he was shocked to be put under pressure. He wasn’t ready, he wasn’t prepared.

In my pre-election piece last Saturday, I judged, based on the polls, that Shorten would probably win. But I doubted that the people actually wanted Shorten’s agenda – which I called vast, improbable and divisive. The core point is that Shorten’s program was flawed in both policy and political terms.

From the inception, Labor believed the progressive tide would carry the day. From fairness to climate change, and this would be underwritten by a superior Labor campaign effort. And Labor was right. Labor would surely have beaten Turnbull. Labor would have beaten Morrison in late 2018. Labor would have beaten Morrison when we spoke here at The Sydney Institute two and a half months ago.

Morrison won the campaign. But he was behind when the campaign began five weeks ago. So, in summary, Labor blundered with its major agenda of progressive change for the nation. It gave Morrison a big target and Morrison hit it.

In conclusion, let me offer a few observations about the Australian public. A point to make about elections is, they’re not just about parties or leaders. They’re also about the people. Elections don’t just tell us about politics. They tell us about countries and political culture.

More analysis is needed of this election but let me make the following points. The Australian public are suspicious of radical sweeping change agendas. If you want to punish them with high taxes or sacrifices, as a result of radical environmental policies, you need a good and convincing explanation for them. The country is becoming more diverse. It is much harder than before for leaders of either side to have a one-size-fits-all agenda.

 The difference between regional Queensland and leafy Melbourne only grows and it will grow further.

Australians can’t be easily typecast. They are an interesting mix and blend of conservative, liberal and progressive. The great mistake politicians make is trying to put an ideological straightjacket on the entire country, or even a majority of the country, as Shorten tried to do at this election and as Liberal conservatives have tried to do over the last few years.

Attempting to put the Australian public in an ideological straightjacket doesn’t work. Australians have a lot of common sense. They value fairness, they value justice, but they also value a growing economy with decent income and jobs. Australians value respect.

There are certain campaign tactics they don’t like. We saw some of them on display in this election campaign, particularly from GetUp!. But the quintessential example is the green convoy organised by Bob Brown to travel to Queensland against the Adani mine. Sending a bunch of southerners in a political convoy to tell Queenslanders how they ought to live their lives and how they ought to organise their industries was a catastrophic mistake.

We need to put a greater focus, on both sides of politics, on respect. That means less ideological indulgence and less political hysteria in terms of the way debates are conducted. Localism is more important than ever before. The local campaign, the performance of the local member, the energy of a grassroots campaign. Pressure groups and single-issue causes are here to stay and they will become more important. In summary, the Australian people showed a fresh sense of independence in this election, defying conventional norms and defying the polls. And, finally, it’s a mistake to think Scott Morrison will find governing easy. He won’t, our politics and our governance will remain more difficult than ever.