Australian Politics In 2013

Budget deficit, national debt, spending, employment, unemployment and under employment, promises, promises, promises and the Gonski Report on education, the National Broadband Network, the Mining tax and Carbon tax, a National Disability Insurance Scheme and Labor’s unpopularity among its traditional voters, industrial relations reform and the problem of “boat people”… these issues began an election year with a difference as Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced the election date as 14 September 2013 – more than six months out. Niki Savva, a columnist with The Australian and the author of So Greek joined Troy Bramston, also a columnist for The Australian and the author of Looking for The Light on The Hill and For the True Believers: Great Labor Speeches at The Sydney Institute on Thursday 7 March 2013 to discuss some of what voters can expect before election day.

                                                AUSTRALIAN POLITICS IN 2013

 NIKI SAVVA

 Thank you Gerard and Anne for inviting me back to speak at The Sydney Institute, and as luck would have it – or not – under roughly similar conditions. Last year, I began by saying I was going to speak really quickly because I was worried I would get overtaken by events. I was, and here we go again. The Victorian Baillieu Government’s disintegration in a matter of hours, proves again just how volatile and unpredictable the political world is.

Almost exactly 24 hours after Troy and I spoke here last year, in an incredibly dumb move, Kevin Rudd resigned as foreign minister and launched his challenge against Julia Gillard. If he had exercised some discipline and waited until after the Queensland election, as I and many others, including his supporters in caucus thought he should, he might have been back living in the place he calls Boganville and which the rest of us know as The Lodge.

Federally, so much has happened since then and yet so little has changed. Labor is still trying to solve the insolvable, still tearing itself to pieces over the leadership, trying to choose – as one source said – between the mad and the bad, or the hopeless and the horrible.

Greens leader Bob Brown’s departure has left the Greens in roughly the same poll position they were when he retired. New leader Senator Christine Milne has shown she is as clever, if not as charismatic, as Brown was by getting in first to separate from its links with Labor. As in every fraught relationship, far better to be dumper than dumpee. Milne’s goal is to run a blockade in the Senate to ensure the Greens exert as much influence over the next government as they have over this one.

As of tonight the Liberals are bunkered down behind Tony Abbott trying desperately, with varying degrees of success, not to interfere in any way with the government’s rolling crises. The Liberals think things are perfect as they are. Or they were till Premier Baillieu quit. They have the threat of Rudd, as opposed to the reality of it, acting like a human wrecking ball, protesting with all the sincerity he can muster that he is trying to help Gillard win the election.

And Wayne Swan survives as the government’s chief economic salesman. Rudd’s recycling would be a game changer. Ultimately the result might be the same, with losing, but perhaps not on such a grand scale.

As it is, Liberal Party Federal Director Brian Loughnane is planning two campaigns – one against Rudd and one against Gillard. If he’s smart, Labor’s National Secretary George Wright should also work on two. If Rudd does regain the leadership, he should immediately call an election to seek a mandate for whatever it is he wants to do, apart from bury Gillard. Any delay and it will give people time to remember why they went off him in the first place.

Some of Rudd’s supporters are urging him to settle in for a period of governing, figuring that people are sick of the endless campaigning. This assumes Gillard and her supporters will do what he didn’t and quietly disappear so he can get on with it.

It also assumes Rudd has changed and will govern differently second time around. Supposing he does and a series of polls predict his ascension will give a comfortable victory. The Liberals would confront the same dilemma faced now. Do they stick with Abbott and risk losing three elections in a row?

Or do they do they want to install Malcolm Turnbull, the man the polls say most people want, even though they feel about him much the same as the ALP feels about Rudd? Actually that is not quite true. There is not the visceral hatred of Malcolm Turnbull inside the Liberal Party as there is inside Labor towards Rudd although, to be fair, Malcolm Turnbull hasn’t been prime minister yet.

Malcolm Turnbull promises to be a team player. I believe him. I also believe him when he says he is the most popular figure in the Coalition, although I still think much of that is voters hoping he will rescue them from Rudd and Gillard. I also believe his leadership hopes still burn brightly. If the right circumstances arise he will be in there counting and courting. Many of his colleagues will be prepared to listen, at least this side of the election.

Abbott is not loved by his party in the same way as Howard was. People are staggered by Abbott’s success, but it does not mean they will stick by him no matter what and especially if the polls go sour.

It is rare for politicians threatened with annihilation to assume the lotus position and sit while the house burns down around them. However this is exactly what some MPs are insisting they will do. The good news is they know what needs to be done after. The bad news is they might not be around to ensure it happens – former members advising from the sidelines are about as welcome as former staffers advising from the sidelines.

Around the middle of 2012, when the Labor polls were at a particularly low ebb, one senior MP tried to describe for me the dimensions of the disaster faced. ”Between the Hunter Valley and all the way up to Cape York, and potentially from Perth to Adelaide, there will be no Labor MPs,” he said. “Quite possibly there will be none south of Melbourne. We shall be reduced to a rump in Melbourne and Sydney.”

This extremely pessimistic scenario was not supported at the time by even the most optimistic Liberal strategist. Until yesterday, the Liberals were hoping to pick up three seats in Victoria – Deakin, Latrobe and Corangamite – a couple in Tasmania and Western Australia, possibly six in New South Wales.

If they get lucky, the LNP could pick up more in Queensland but much depends on how Campbell Newman is travelling.

The senior government member I spoke to is on a margin below five per cent, and back then his internal polling showed a swing of double digits against him. We spoke again a few weeks ago, after the prime minister had announced the election date, a move he supported, and after Chris Evans and Nicola Roxon had resigned.

In his opinion, those resignations were not simply a sign the government was unravelling; in his view it actually was unravelling. He had slightly revised his assessment. His own situation had improved, and despite the evening up in the public polling from December to mid January, nothing had shaken his belief Abbott would win. “We have around 200 days left,” he said. “The question is whether we will lose 20, 25 or 30 seats. We will certainly not lose less than 15 seats.”

And still he will vote for Gillard because, as bad as the situation is, he believes the alternative would be worse. As another Labor man told me, he is not afraid of what would happen if Rudd lost, but what would happen if he won.

So there are three factions now – those prepared to vote for Rudd if it means saving the furniture; those who despise him and will never vote for him; and those who can’t bring themselves to kill another leader. Gillard supporters who complain bitterly of Rudd’s treachery, and who can’t bear the thought of more bloodshed, forget it is their treachery which is being repaid, and which is now protecting her.

It is this faction – the Doc Martin haemophobes – that the Ruddites are hoping to convince to commit one more little murder, especially when they realise that if they don’t, the blood spilled could be their own.

There is also a subset, the whistlers in the dark who think Gillard can still come good, but they are too few to matter. In fact, there is probably only one person in this grouping, and she is definitely not for moving.

The pope resigned for the good of his church, because he realised he could no longer fulfil his duties. Ted Baillieu accepted he no longer had the numbers, knew deep down the premier’s job was beyond him and that the government would probably do better without him, so he graciously ceded the job to a former leader.

Gillard will never do that. Because of that and Rudd’s promise not to challenge, the mechanics of any removal are difficult. For starters it needs to be obvious that Rudd has an emphatic majority in caucus. One Ruddite told me that if Rudd got to 60 votes, then a delegation including Bill Shorten would have to visit Gillard and tell her to go. He put it this way: ”Shorten doesn’t want to lead it, but he wouldn’t want to miss it either.” If Gillard refused to go, then a no confidence motion or a spill motion would be moved against her.

We know Gillard doesn’t believe in God, but I wonder if, after all this, she believes in karma. She will not find refuge in the pantheon of leaders cast as heroes in defeat like Gough Whitlam was, and as even Paul Keating is. She has failed to reform the party’s structures, she is regarded as unprincipled, untrustworthy and incompetent, an unholy trifecta of a legacy for a leader to bear.

It’s no use saying Kevin Rudd’s leaking and stalking is responsible, especially as the doubts about her honesty had their roots in his execution. It’s no use blaming minority government, because then you have to consider how and why minority government came about in the first place. Even more offensive is the argument that she is unpopular because Australians are uncomfortable with a woman as prime minister, as if it’s our fault.

Other countries – Britain, Germany, India, Sri Lanka, Israel, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Malta – have had female leaders and coped. South Korea recently elected its first female president. You can’t say their societies were more egalitarian than ours, or more progressive than ours.

None of those women complained they were the victims of sexism and misogyny, even if they might have been justified in doing so given the nature of some of the societies over which they presided. The case unravels too when you consider that, like Gillard, they surmounted all obstacles to make it to the top. I doubt any of them gave speeches accusing their opponents of being sexist and misogynist while defending another man who faced charges of it.

It is true social media can be vulgar and defamatory, but politicians and public figures of both sexes and from all sides cop it. Julia Gillard is not the victim of her gender. She is the victim of her own poor judgment.

If Labor is defeated, the best thing members can do – after they have finished telling us how terrible it all was, how hellishly stubborn Gillard was, and how hopeless all those around her were – is to concentrate on getting it right for the next generation by undertaking serious structural reform and expanding the gene pool.

This does not mean excluding unionists, given some first class politicians have come through the industrial movement – although I think Paul Howes needs a couple of decades to grow up before Labor even thinks about giving him a seat.

Until the shrill sound of duelling dog whistles over migrant workers and asylum seekers, pierced the air, we had been witnessing one significant and welcome change, and that was the emergence of the other Abbott. For far too long we only saw one side of Abbott. That was terminator Tony helping destroy Rudd, bring a first term government to its knees and cripple Gillard.

It wasn’t pretty, it was brutal and painful to watch and he paid a price for it in terms of his popularity. It also earned him an extraordinary accolade from the legendary Liberal federal director Tony Eggleton, who told me Abbott was probably the best opposition leader he had ever seen. And Eggleton has seen a few up close, including Malcolm Fraser and Margaret Thatcher.

What makes a great opposition leader doesn’t necessarily make a great prime minister. However, I believe Prime Minister Abbott, if there is one, will be a very different beast from opposition leader Abbott. He could end up surprising us all. At least I hope so.

It puzzles me when people say the prospect of Abbott as prime minister scares them.

What is it they fear he will do? Process refugees overseas or force them to live in squalor here? Do they worry he will impose a tax which inhibits investment, costs almost as much to administer as it collects, ties billions of dollars in funding to it in advance, and blows out the deficit. Or maybe the fear is he will run up three of the biggest deficits in history, promise repeatedly to return the budget to surplus then on Christmas Eve reveal there is no surplus and probably never will be. Or maybe they think he means it when he says he will abolish the carbon tax and worry the country will be engulfed by bushfires or floods.

Maybe they fear he will wind back fertility or abortion rights for women. Even if he wanted to, and he insists he doesn’t, Peta Credlin and his daughters won’t let him.

So you have to wonder whether and some journalists too are not so worried about what Abbott might do when he gets there, but that if he does get there he could prove difficult to dislodge. We will never get a republic under him but the way things are going we won’t get one anyway, and certainly not with Swan leading the campaign.

We might never get a bill to allow same sex marriage, but if one does come along, it is possible Abbott will have reversed his previous position and allows his MPs a conscience vote. Let’s hope so.

What I hope we get is demonstrable and sustained improvements in the health and education of remote Aborigines, because Abbott knows something about the causes of the disadvantage and how best to tackle it. I hope he does stop the boats, because that will not only stop the drowning, it will stop that conversation. I hope he does stop wasting taxpayers’ money and restores prudent economic management.

Which brings me to one pledge Tony Abbott has made which I hope he breaks – that is keep the same frontbench team he has now if he wins. His first obligation is not to abolish the carbon tax or the mining tax, although if he fails to do that, he will poison his prime ministership as surely as Gillard has poisoned hers.

His first obligation is to provide the best possible administration. He has said he will restore cabinet rule which is laudable, but if he keeps the same line-up, and fails to promote talented people, people more capable of making the right calls, he and his new government will get into trouble. Count on it.

Abbott’s first loyalty is to the people, not his old mates from the Howard years. Some of them were not all that good. I would now like to revisit something else I said last time, when I said I had never known politics to be so rough, tough and volatile…1975 aside. That was an important proviso, which I would like to expand on now. 

My remarks are directed to those who relentlessly complain about the relentless negativity and toxic nature of politics today. They are either too young or too old. Their memories are either failing them or they haven’t been around long enough to know what it was like.

As terrible as it is today, it is nothing compared to 1975 when Malcolm Fraser, spurred on by too many crises to mention, aided and abetted by Reg Withers, aka the Toe Cutter, engineered the dismissal of a prime minister by the governor general. Back then Laborites were organising lynch mobs against Fraser, not Love-Ins.

So rancid was it that, in late October 1975, when Whitlam was asked in parliament about restrictions on travel and services for members, he said this: “In this context I want to assure honourable gentlemen that the bodyguards they see accompanying the leader of the opposition are not to prevent other people from shooting him but to prevent him from shooting himself.”

The galleries burst out laughing. I was sitting next to Peter Bowers who was stomping his feet in unabashed delight. Imagine the outrage today if Abbott said that about Gillard. Or if in frustration during discussions with Tony Windsor, Abbott told him to go copulate with himself. That is what the Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, told the Democrats Senate majority leader Harry Reid, at the height of negotiations to stop the us going over the fiscal cliff. And he said it twice, in a much more direct way. If you have seen that great movie Argo, you will know exactly what he said. In Boehner’s defence, Reid had called him a dictator.

So, while it’s easy to convince ourselves, given everything we have seen in the past three years, that things are really bad, it has been a lot worse, and compared to some other places, we are not so bad after all.