AUSTRALIAN POLITICS 2022 – AN UPDATE

On Tuesday 8 February 2022, The Sydney Institute invited Aaron Patrick – senior correspondent at The Australian Financial Review, and Parnell McGuinness, Strategy & Policy at Agenda C & columnist The Sydney Morning Herald & The Age to return to the Institute to assess the state of politics at the start of an election year. After two years of disruption from the Covid pandemic, the Morrison government appeared to have lost much of its gloss and the assessments of these commentators reflected a difficult year ahead for the incumbent.

AUSTRALIAN POLITICS 2022 – AN UPDATE

PARNELL McGUINNESS

Last year I started with an allusion to my favourite book on forecasting which makes fun of pundits who think they can do it. This year I’d like to compare the effort of reading the political future as an exercise in science fiction. We can follow the trends as they evolve and imagine where they could head, but we should never forget that the story we end up with – regardless OF whether I accidentally hit a bullseye – is essentially fiction.

So much for the preamble. Here are the things I predicted last year and how they turned out. I’ve resisted the temptation to cherry pick the ones I got right – there is as much to learn from the possible futures that did not eventuate as from the ones that did.

Prediction 1: I predicted that it is dangerous to make political predictions and we should stick to observations on prevailing currents. Status: Confirmed. I give myself full marks on this one. Forecasting is for mugs.

Prediction 2: Australians would not be champing at the bit to see international borders reopen and that Morrison would therefore move cautiously, erring on the side of keeping things closed until after the election to stay in alignment with the opinion polls.  Status: Confirmed. The international border is now finally scheduled to open to tourists on 21 February 2022. The polls suggest that the majority of Australians were in no hurry. Domestically, Morrison has “met the moment” on WA (if you’ll allow me to use the uberwoke language of celebrity Sussexes Harry and Meghan) and lent his support to Premier Mark McGowan’s indefinite border closures. There was a brief moment pre-Omicron when public opinion seemed to be shifting in favour of opening up sooner and Morrison started moving in that direction. But here we are in February 2022 and the borders are still not open to visitors, skilled workers or students (except in very limited numbers).

Prediction 3: The energetic reform agenda being led by the NSW state government, especially treasury, would make the reform-weary federal government look weak and unimaginative. Status: This one is very subjective and depends on whether you think reform is necessary or good. Of course, it isn’t always either, but it is also a fact that many existing settings are only the way they are because the original plan could not be fully implemented. Or was misguided to begin with. So, we don’t believe in some utopia achieved by finally implementing a set of perfect policies to think that the knob can be twiddled a bit to make improvements.

Last year I pointed out that the Prime Minister’s 2020 zeal to “shift the dial” as the Productivity Commission proposed in 2015 had faded away and the Commission’s reform manifesto had been kicked back into obscurity. To my mind, Canberra was left looking feeble as Sydney marched determinedly forward. But then the NSW Premier resigned pending the outcome of a salacious ICAC trial and the reformist treasurer became Premier. As Premier, his priorities have been more exalted – he has to pretend to be able to keep a virus at bay and his days are thus filled with shamanistic press conferences designed to bore COVID into submission. So, the competition has evaporated, or at least been weakened, leaving the prime minister without any awkward comparisons to his minimalist policy approach. The replacement NSW Treasurer is no fan of Morrison’s but has a different set of priorities and shows no interest in challenging him on economic reform.

Which brings us to my next prediction.

Prediction 4: That Morrison’s lack of reform achievements would leave him looking like he lacks vision. Status: This is of course subjective, but if it is untrue, then it is at least an hallucination common to people who preoccupy themselves with policy. It might depend on what qualifies as a vision. Maintaining a glorious status quo could be said to be a vision.

A week out from the 2019 election, Morrison tweeted, “It is my vision for this country as your Prime Minister to keep the Promise of Australia to all Australians.”  What is the promise of Australia? That was never made clear. But Morrison never faltered; the promise is the vibe of the thing. His election campaign focused on how good Australia was just as he found it – and as Australia’s favourite saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. It could be argued that this is a perfectly adequate vision for a conservative – or it could be argued that it is the slippery slope to complacency, stagnation and the sclerosis that economist Mancur Olson warned of, which entrenches rent-seeking behaviour and hobbles innovation in the wider economy. As Olson wrote, “stable societies with unchanged boundaries tend to accumulate more collusions and organisations for collective action over time”. These organisations generally represent a narrow section of society and have no interest in the greater good of society. They will therefore champion regulations which secure them a larger slice of a smaller pie rather than make sacrifices that would grow the pie for all. He meant unions as well as private sector groups. Olson visited Australia in 1984 and identified a tendency towards this type of sclerosis then. Almost 40 years on, it’s hard to argue he was wrong. One thing that reform does is change the rules so that settled interests are briefly dislodged and have to recalibrate.

Then there’s also the issue of the way political capital works. Political capital is essentially an accumulation of trust and goodwill in the government by the public and in the leader by the public and the party room. Former treasurer and prime minister Paul Keating thought about political capital as something to be accumulated and spent on important reforms. John Howard realised a deeper truth: political capital isn’t so much spent as invested. An important reform requires an accumulation of trust and good will, or political capital, but demonstrating that you care enough about a matter to sink political capital into it sends a message to the electorate that you stand for something and creates a platform to campaign on at the next election.

One of the difficulties Morrison now faces as this election approaches is that he doesn’t have this type of demonstration of vision and belief. Fairly or unfairly, the low death rate in Australia from the COVID-19 pandemic has become table stakes and he is instead blamed for what has gone wrong instead of celebrated for what went right. I think this was predictable. Governments are elected to manage tricky situations and still chart a course based on conviction. Morrison’s conviction is that Australia should be as it always was, but it now isn’t, because of the pandemic. If he had at least one signature reform – let’s say renovating the tax system – which he had championed at a time when he was riding high in the polls, his personal popularity might never have fallen to the current low ebb. He would have something to point to that was undeniably an achievement above and beyond shutting the gates of an island nation to keep out a virus.

He would have done something that at least earned him respect, which is more valuable than popularity. And that goes to the second half of the prediction I made last year.

Prediction 5: That the government would burn up all its good news stories patting itself on the back and leave itself without the type of good news stories a government needs in the lead up to the election. Status: Confirmed. This has always been a bad habit of this government. Back in 2020 it was celebrating the success of the COVIDSafe app which was downloaded by over 6 million people, but identified only a very few cases. Other good news stories to run in 2020 included “why Greg Hunt gave up running for a while”, which celebrated the Health Minister’s heroics in saving Australia from the pandemic. There were two problems with running these stories so early on in the pandemic and so far away from the election: the first is that they reeked of complacency and back patting, which probably did more harm than good. When people were anxious, the last thing they wanted was a smug government congratulating itself. The second problem is that, now that the election is approaching, those stories can’t be published again. They’re old news. So, the government has nothing up its sleeve to push the stories it doesn’t like off the front page and remind voters that they were really rather pleased with the government at the time. Almost as pleased as the government was with itself.

Prediction 6: That Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese would be relishing the prospect of a “Workchoices 2.0” fight ahead of this election. Status: Wrong. An eviscerated industrial relations bill passed the Senate in May last year, removing “work choices” as an election issue, but also putting to death Morrison’s last claim of having made a policy change during his time in government. Instead, Albanese is benefiting from the late push on cultural issues which the government had hoped would shore up politically disengaged conservatives ahead of polling day. More on those cultural issues shortly.

Prediction 7: That the publication of the Intergenerational Report would cause strife between the generations.  Status: I was SO wrong on this one. I don’t know why. The IGR which usually causes such a stir passed with barely a murmur against selfish baby boomers this time around. It seems the idea of putting the interests of the elderly above those of every other age group has been ratified by the pandemic. Nice work on the effective snow job, Baby Boomers!

Prediction 8: That there would be pressure to raise the Newstart payment after recipients had been on the higher Jobseeker rate during the pandemic. Status: I am quite frankly surprised that this disappeared off the agenda as quickly as it did. The government raised the rate by $50 a fortnight and effectively negated the issue. It’s a mark of Albanese’s discipline in opposition that this, among other issues, has become tacitly bipartisan as Labor makes itself the smallest target possible.

I made a couple of observations I also think it’s worth revisiting.

One was that it would be an historic missed opportunity if the government were to have the first Indigenous Minister for Indigenous Australians and not empower that minister to deliver something important. Now, a couple of months out from an election and in the second last week of parliament, we can definitively say that nothing historic will be delivered in this area. That is a shame.

I also suggested that Tony Abbott, who has shown genuine long-term interest in the Indigenous space, could be given a role in facilitating this, by helping to develop a conservative-led solution to reconciliation. Abbott has written and said some interesting things this year, but it doesn’t seem like anyone thought to ask him for assistance or considered how he might be leveraged in that space.

And I proposed that Morrison might find a way to use Abbott to champion culture wars causes, which his government could then step in to solve. Instead, they appear to have chosen to go it alone on the religious discrimination bill, the school curriculum and freedom of speech in universities. (Remember that last one? No, neither will the electorate.) Because they chose to go it alone, they are now caught in the worst of all culture wars to have right before an election, the very tricky question of how to not discriminate against homosexual or transgender children while allowing religious schools to discourage the kind of environment that has led to one Sydney school reportedly having as many as a quarter of its students identifying as gender fluid. Many issues don’t cut through to the public but this is one that does.

All of this puts the government into a very tricky position in an election year.

Election years are always tricky of course, for many reasons. Among other things, because the media becomes obsessed with campaign tactics which are infinitely more entertaining to write about than issues of substance. As one disenchanted Liberal once said to me, every journo fancies themselves a campaign director but very few look enviously at the slog of policy development. I think that’s a bit unfair – but there is definitely a beltway echo chamber between the readers and the writers of twitter and traditional media which favours stories about text messages over stories about highly complex matters like foreign policy in a changing world.

So much for how we got here. In my last few minutes, I’ll sketch out what I think this all means for politics this year.

Most dangerously for the government, the notion that it has no courage and no conviction has taken hold with its politically engaged traditional supporters. Ahead of the 2013 election, Labor voters who were disgusted with the games and self-absorbed politicking of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years told me that they’d had it and were planning to vote Liberal. This year, Liberal voters are telling me they feel taken for granted and disappointed with Morrison. Most are not talking about voting Labor – many are talking about voting strategically to send the Liberal Party a message – but a few have accepted that the only way to send a message loudly enough to be heard is to vote the party out.

This is not of course the sort of discussion that is happening around the barbeque in the burbs. But the burbs are not happy with Morrison either. They might not know who Albanese is, but they know they think Morrison is a bit of a dick. The idea that Morrison is all about the photo opportunity and is not working tirelessly to improve the nation has cut through. People who aren’t interested in politics vote once every three years so they don’t have to think about politics in the between time, so they don’t want to have to micromanage the person they put in the job. The performance review this year is not glowing.

Priorities have also shifted during the pandemic and health is a much bigger issue than it has been in the past, along with cost of living which is showing up in polling as a growing concern. The RBA has indicated that there won’t be an interest rate rise before the election, but people can feel one coming and might just price it into their judgement on the government. Health traditionally gives Labor an advantage and interest rate rises generally give whoever is in power a disadvantage. That could also favour Labor come election time.

Nonetheless, I don’t believe the election is yet in the bag for Labor.

There is one interesting phenomenon that we might call the Scomo effect: Morrison turns off voters when he’s front and centre in the public eye, but when he’s criticised, many people’s response is that he’s not THAT bad. This will be a peculiar dynamic for an election. At the last one, Morrison was essentially a one-man band. Now he’d be best off keeping as low a profile as possible so Labor’s criticisms can have the effect of raising his popularity. What an interesting campaign that would be to watch!

Anyway, enough speculation. I think my predictions fared reasonably well last year and the forces I identified have shaped this year in politics. But let’s not forget, it’s all science fiction until it’s proven to be historical fact.