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. Patrick Aaron’s paper which follows is taken from an edited transcript of comments on the night.

AUSTRALIAN POLITICS 2022: AN UPDATE

AARON PATRICK

Thank you, Gerard. And thank you everyone for coming along tonight. Some old faces and some new faces and welcome everyone out there watching over the internet. Sorry, you can’t be here with us tonight in central Sydney. I’m the warm-up act for Parnell. So, I’m going to keep it reasonably brief so she can dazzle you with her amazing language. I’m more of a writer than a speaker, so please forgive me for being inarticulate at various times which no doubt I will be.

I want to make some introductory remarks about the current political situation. And then I want to give you a little bit of a preview. I’ve almost finished a book about Malcolm Turnbull, which will be out in a few months editors, the god of editing, notwithstanding. After I’ve discussed what I see as the current political situation, I’ll talk a little bit about what I’m going to write in my book.

The key question at the moment is, why is the Coalition government losing? Now, clearly, it’s behind on Newspoll; there’s been some other seat by seat polls in the inner-city areas which are showing reasonably big shifts to Independents, including in North Sydney and Wentworth, which is not too far away from here. Now, the answer is not as obvious as it seems. Objectively, Australians are in a pretty good spot. House prices are high. Unemployment is the lowest it’s been since the 1970s. We’ve had a pretty good pandemic. I know we like to complain a lot here in Australia, but very few people have died. Hospital numbers are tracking well below the worst forecasts. In fact, they’re travelling below the best forecasts. We have spent a lot of money. But, apart from a massive budget blow-out, we’ve had a really good pandemic.

Despite what you read in the headlines, there hasn’t been any massive governance failures of this federal government. There hasn’t been any cabinet level corruption or massive examples of incompetence. Nonetheless, we are in a situation where the government is well behind. And if things don’t turn around for them, they will probably lose power.

What’s going on here? There’s a few elements. The most obvious one, the most interesting one, is the prime minister, Scott Morrison. The man who emblemises the entire government. I think there is a real sense of growing scepticism about Mr Morrison out in the community.

I was speaking to a senator in Canberra today, a conservative Senator, and I asked if conservatives were disappointed with him. He said, “Listen, I’m still a believer, but it’s really hard. I get out there in the electorate and people say to me, why should I vote for the Coalition? They say you’ve racked up a lot of debt, you’re supporting lockdowns in Western Australia, you’re rolling back what we thought were going to be religious protections. You haven’t done anything on section 18C, you’re providing more money to the ABC. So why should we be voting for you?” And the Senator tells them they are not as bad as the other blokes. Now, that’s not a compelling reason to vote for a political party. So, the danger with the Coalition is that they are losing their base.

Now, the extent of this is obviously very hard to tell, impossible to tell, from anecdotal evidence. But it’s so widespread. You can also detect a current of scepticism, or hedging, creeping into the Murdoch press as well. And on Sky News. You see people like Andrew Bolt getting stuck into the Prime Minister. Obviously, Janet Albrechtsen has been a long-term sceptic. These people from the right, particularly people with a libertarian bent, but also some more traditional social conservatives, are a bit sceptical about the prime minister. This is elite opinion. But I’d be surprised if that wasn’t reflective of a broader disillusionment with the Prime Minister amongst conservative voters.

Clearly, we all know the Prime Minister is a great campaigner. And what he and the Liberal Party is focused on is not the right or far left, it’s the centre. That’s where he’s skilled at. And that’s why he is announcing more money for the ABC, because he’s trying to cauterise the swing voters. This is to cauterise disenchantment in the middle against him.

Morrison’s problem is that he won and cemented his reputation as the election winner in 2019. But that’s when we didn’t know him. The country was starting to get to know him, the country didn’t really know who he was. It didn’t know what he stood for. That day where he stood in the Horizon church in the Sutherland Shire, and prayed with his arms in the air, was a pivotal moment in the definition of who Scott Morrison is. Because at that point, none of us who are alive today have ever lived under an evangelical Christian prime minister. And that was a moment where Australians wondered, “Wow, this is a new kind of politician for us, this a new kind of top political leader.” That helped him, I think, get across the line. Even though the number of Pentecostals in Australia is very small, it’s probably only less than 2 per cent.

Now, Scott, Morrison’s religious beliefs aren’t really of great import. We’re used to them, they aren’t a particularly significant part of his government or the way he has governed. What we have is a man who is pragmatic, who governs for the centre. But while it can be great at winning votes, it creates an impression that you don’t stand for anything, or you’re not a particularly strong believer in certain values. Which is something you could not say of Tony Abbott, of John Howard, of Paul Keating, perhaps Malcolm Fraser. Even Julia Gillard. All these leaders had this great skill of triggering intense support and loyalty among certain groups in society. To me Morrison’s weakness, which is the flip side of his strength, is his inoffensiveness. Morrison is so much of a suburban, easy-going, middle of the road guy, that he doesn’t electrify any elements of his base. And that I think, is his real problem.

In New South Wales, you’ve also got a dysfunctional Liberal Party. There is in NSW a bizarre situation where, four months before a federal election, there’s no Liberal Party Senate ticket. There’s no endorsed Liberal Party candidate for North Sydney, for Farrer, for Mitchell. Trent Zimmerman has not been endorsed in North Sydney, so Trent Zimmerman cannot campaign in North Sydney, where I live. In Hughes, which was held by Craig Kelly, we have a potential candidate – in the room here – which is Alex Dore.

Alex is a prominent member of the Liberal Party in Hughes which has some 100 members. It’s a really important seat for the Liberal Party to win back. Under the Liberal Party constitution, there should be a vote of local members for Alex and his contenders, and the other contenders. But, at the moment, you have an arrangement where the faction leaders want to impose Alex Dore who lives in Manly, to represent the Western suburbs. Now, I don’t want to besmirch Alex Dore. But how can a political party look its members in the face and ask for their money, their time, blood, sweat and tears, but not have a say on who their local representative is. This is such a strong internal contradiction and the current dispute is very damaging to the morale of the Liberal Party.

The irony is that it does seem to come back to the prime minister. Morrison himself was the state director of the Liberal Party. He should know better than anyone the importance of internal party democracy. Scott Morrison’s lieutenant is Alex Hawke, the member for Mitchell. Hawke leads the centre-right faction, which is Scott Morrison’s faction. If you believe all the accounts from books written at the last election, including mine, it was the centre-right which were the flipping voting bloc. The bloc which very cleverly seduced Turnbull into thinking he had a chance of winning against Dutton. It gave Dutton enough votes to destroy Turnbull’s credibility, which then flipped to Morrison to make him Prime Minister.

Alex Hawke is able to cleverly hold up pre-selections in New South Wales. To be a candidate, you have to be vetted. It takes 15 minutes. They ask questions like: Ddo you have a criminal record?”; “Has anyone taken an AVO out against you?”; “Do you owe money?”; “Are you a problem gambler?” This takes 15 minutes, apparently, but it’s an important job.

There are four people on the committee who do this. One of them is the president of the Liberal Party New South Wales, Philip Ruddock. Another one is Alex Hawke. So far, Alex Hawke has not turned up to any of the vetting, so they haven’t been able to hold them. And what is one of the seats covered by this? So, Alex Hawke is meant to be vetting Michael Abrahams, the person who’s standing against him since Abrahams is seeking a vote of members in the seat of Mitchell. But a political party needs to set a good example. If you want the community to come and vote for you and allow you the privilege of running the country, then it’s pretty important that you demonstrate to them that you are prepared to abide by democratic decisions of your own membership. It’s matters like that which are undermining Morrison’s record, contributing to the disillusionment in the community with him.

Now, if you want the Coalition to win, there is good news. Whenever we talk about these things, whenever we make political observations, they’re generally static. They refer to a particular point in time. That’s why political punditry can be so incredibly out of date within two to three months, as I’ve discovered. Such as when I went back and read some of the, even the conservative pundits predicting a Shorten victory before the 2019 election.

Next month, we have a federal budget. And this budget is the time when the government can reframe the whole political debate; they can change the whole perception of what this election is about. At the moment, there are no great differences between the two major political parties. There’s no huge difference on IR, there are no huge differences on climate as they both want net zero by 2050. There’s no huge difference on foreign policy. There are no huge differences on health or pandemic response. There’s some around the margins but, in general, the division between the two parties at the moment is one of perceptions of management capability.

The budget will change that, because Josh Frydenberg and Scott Morrison are going to throw every cent they can at winning this election. Josh Frydenberg was out there today saying that you can’t trust Labor on the economy. This to me is preparing the ground for a scare campaign, a massive scare campaign to worry the middle ground, the self-funded retirees, people who are vulnerable to this kind of concern about Labor economic management. And presumably he’s going to argue that you can’t trust taxes not to go up under Labor.

Now, one of the ironies is that taxes are going to go up at some point, because we have a trillion dollars in debt and someone’s going to have to pay for it. So maybe we won’t have to pay higher taxes, but eventually, some Australians are going to have to pay. So, in that sense, an intellectual sense, the argument that one side of politics is going to raise taxes actually stands up. Unfortunately, it’ll have to be both sides.

But there is some weight behind that scare campaign which I think’s coming. We will have a March budget and then we will have two months flat out right to the election, maybe six weeks. And it’s going to be a fascinating race. I’m not going to predict who will win because I’ve got absolutely no idea, but it’s going to be fascinating nonetheless.