AUSTRALIAN POLITICS IN THE LEAD UP TO THE FEDERAL ELECTION – TWO VIEWS  – PETER VAN ONSELEN

In 2024, Australians appeared deeply divided with the two-party system reflecting widespread discontent. Independents and minor parties were affecting the preferential system as never before. Issues, however, seemed to be hardening – immigration, energy, the housing crisis and inflation adding to the cost of living crisis. On Tuesday 2 July 2024, Peter van Onselen who is the political editor at Daily Mail Australia joined Gemma Tognini, consultant, social commentator and Sky News presenter, to offer their views on what sort of politics might influence voters in the lead up to the coming federal election.

AUSTRALIAN POLITICS IN THE LEAD UP TO THE FEDERAL ELECTION – TWO VIEWS 

PETER VAN ONSELEN

Thank you very much Gerard and Anne for having me here at The Sydney Institute, and thank you to everyone in attendance.

I’m always a little nervous when I speak in front of Gerard. I get particularly nervous when I start to provide historical comparisons, because Gerard seems to know everything that I don’t. So, I’ll see how I go. Hopefully he shows mercy when he finds fault in my memory of historical facts.

I will make a prediction for the next election – another risk when it comes to Gerard – as part of explaining where I think the election is likely to go. Both sides of politics would probably rather I didn’t predict that they’re going to win, based on my track record recently. So that’s bad news for Anthony Albanese because my prediction is that he wins the next election.

But it will be a very ugly win in my view, probably as a minority government. Unlike 2010, for example, where they cobbled it together with a number of Labor held seats in the 70s. This time I can see Labor winning but with potentially fewer than 70 seats. So, I’ll talk a little about how I think that complexion might look in the aftermath of that sort of election result.

I don’t think the next election is comparable to what happened in 2010. There are many more crossbenchers today, and that number may well increase at the next election.

While the 2010 result saw two independents lock their support in behind the Gillard government, I’m less certain crossbenchers will operate that way if the next parliament is hung. The lesson from 2010 is that independents supporting one major party over the other too categorically undermines their independence. I expect that lesson to be learned by the current crossbench, certainly those elected to represent seats traditionally held by the opposite side of politics to the one forming minority government.

Just to be clear, my prediction about Anthony Albanese being returned is not said with any confidence because the times that we live in are so uncertain and the domestic factors at play around the economy all seem to be working against the government. Uncertainty abounds. But I assume our first term government gets re-elected, as every first term government has since 1931.

That said, Anthony Albanese would have a better chance of being re-elected if had he called an early election this year, but every instinct in his body seems to be nervously pushing it back to next year because he’s worried that he won’t win well enough if he goes this year. To me, this is reminiscent of what Kevin Rudd did when he made the mistake of not calling a double dissolution after what happened with the ETS in the back half of 2009. He didn’t even make it to the subsequent election. His replacement as prime minister Julia Gillard went on to win only as a minority government the following year.

Anthony Albanese wants to go early, but only if he thinks he can win well. Perhaps by the time readers read this address in print after the fact there will have been an early election held in 2024. If so, I believe it only favours my prediction that Albo wins.

One of the problems for this Labor government which makes it so different to past changes of government elections, is their majority is wafer thin. Even after picking up the seat of Aston at a by-election shortly after the general election of 2022, they’ve still only hold 78 seats. And when you look at the redistributions ahead of the next election, Labor has lost the seat of Higgins and there’s only 150 seats that will be in the lower house at the next election, rather than 151.

The seat of North Sydney in New South Wales is also getting abolished – a seat that the Liberal Party thought they were well placed to take from the Teals, but perhaps that was wishful thinking. There’s an extra seat to be created in Western Australia, notionally a Labor seat, but that is based on the Mark McGowan results of 2022 rather than what is likely to happen federally at the next election. It is a seat the Liberals in the West believe they should pick up, all things being equal, and they believe they will win back others such as Tangney.

So, it seems to me that Labor can only win badly if they’re going to win at all. Now, history is on their side in terms of being able to scrape home because no first term opposition has managed to win its way back into government since 1931. At that time, the Labor Party had split and Australia was in the midst of the Great Depression. Today, things aren’t quite that bad, yet. But first term governments often struggle to secure their re-election, even if history tells us they invariably win.

At the 1998 federal election, Howard’s Coalition was returned to government with less than 50 per cent of the two-party vote. 48.9 per cent to be precise. But he had a very healthy majority to start with from the 1996 results.

When you look at Anthony Albanese’s majority, Labor starts from a very difficult position. In 2010, Labor scraped back after changing prime ministers with an ugly win and resulting in minority government. Even Malcolm Turnbull, in 2016, after just one term, scraped back. This came after the mistake of changing leaders, egged on by the media, including me I’m ashamed to say in hindsight.

In 2016, Turnbull’s Coalition won a wafer-thin majority which eventually ended Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership before it had properly started. The narrowness of the win ensured that his detractors dominated the following term, which eventually saw him lose the prime ministership.

So, to recap, it’s been a very long time, nearly 100 years, since a first term government has managed to lose its first attempt at re-election, although recent first term governments have come close. Will this be a history making election?

Anthony Albanese is not proving to be a very good Prime Minister. He’s a lot worse than I thought he would be, and he seems to be caught between what to do on all manner of issues and how to present himself. As a result, he lacks authenticity. For someone who, at different points in his career, had a deep authenticity to him, he seems to have lost that as prime minister.

Prime ministers can change, but Albanese seems to have lowered himself into the role rather than elevated himself. And he lacks support structures around him to help pull himself up. Jim Chalmers has not done a great job on the economy. He’s one of many ministers who are underperforming.

Anthony Albanese said that he wanted to run a Hawke-style cabinet, where he had consensus and where he liked the idea of letting ministers do their own thing. Granting them autonomy. But that only works when you have a Hawke-calibre cabinet. The problem with this cabinet is that it doesn’t measure up to the Hawke cabinet I’m terms of talent.

Because of that, when you have a Prime Minister who isn’t measuring up in his own job, not even overseeing his cabinet as closely as other prime ministers might have, that becomes another problem. Throw in an underwhelming Treasurer and you have the makings of a first term government doing its best to lose. But I maintain that the good graces of the Australian people will govern them a second chance.

So why is this government so underwhelming?

Ministers who were stuck in the quagmire of Labor’s leadership showdowns of the past, going back and forth between Rudd and Gillard, appeared at first glance to be very good ministers who were unlucky to be part of a dysfunctional government. I had long thought that had they been given a better chance, without all the leadership instability, they would have administered themselves admirably in their portfolio roles at the time. I’m less certain about that now. Now I feel we are seeing the leftovers, let’s call them the second XI from those Rudd-Gillard years.

Let me be clear. I’ve been very critical for years of the Coalition because, in a sense, I expected more of them. They always underwhelmed me around things like tax reform and many other reforms that built off tax reform.

Industrial relations is a theatre that they’ve largely deserted ever since the Work Choices election that John Howard lost in 2007. So, when I criticise the ranks of the Labor Party, I am also unconvinced about the front bench ranks Peter Dutton has at his disposal.

The interesting thing about Peter Dutton is, he is a conviction politician. The difficulty he has is connecting with voters. Peter Dutton is somebody that, if you meet him one on one, he is very personable, very likeable, very down to earth, very frank. But he has a public persona that is difficult for him to move past. The question mark for me is whether he can do what he’s so successfully done in his Queensland marginal seat of Dickson which he has held against the odds time and time again. There he can get around the electorate and get better known for who he really is. I don’t know if he can do that right around the country in the time that he has ahead of the next election to win over the wider populus, writ large across the nation.

But we shall see, because he could well present a really interesting contrast, for example in the election debates, when he’s fronting up against Anthony Albanese, who risks falling back on talking points and coming across as out of touch.

It is starting to become apparent that what was long regarded as Albanese’s strength within the Labor Party – his understanding of the party machine – is a weakness with the wider electorate. He’s the insider guy. For all the chaos of the Rudd and Gillard governments, as Leader of the House Albanese did well at holding the Labor ship together in the parliament. He’s all about the politics. He’s not that interested in policies. The policies he was once interested in – as a radical lefty in his past – are policy scripts he can’t now advocate as PM unless he wants to lose. He’s too pragmatic for that.

On the other hand, Peter Dutton is interested in policies, and he does it through a conviction lens. Sometimes, I would argue, he is a little too ideological, but he believes in what he does. In sharp contrast to the politician Albanese has become. Dutton’s nuclear policy is a very good example of that, and while it could be potentially catastrophic politically for him at the next election, I’ll be fascinated to see which way that goes. He has presented a big target when few thought any opposition would do that in the wake of Bill Shorten’s 2019 agenda.

I’m entirely energy agnostic, by the way. I wouldn’t claim to have the first clue about the viability or otherwise of nuclear power in this country. I find memes about three-eyed fish ridiculous. It seemed that as the Coalition was preparing to roll out its nuclear policy they would be deeply susceptible to a successful scare campaign. After all, we have examples, drawing on history, where big target opposition policies simply don’t work. Much less when you double them up with being a first term opposition.

We also know that big target policy agendas in opposition are very difficult because oppositions don’t have the access to the public service that the government obviously has. They don’t always have the media rooting for them either, especially the conservative side of politics; journalists are usually rooting against them. We saw what happened to Bill Shorten with his big target agenda in 2019, as mentioned. We saw what happened to John Hewson with his big target agenda in 1993.

So, is Peter Dutton going to fall into the same trap with his nuclear policy? I don’t know. Such a policy can only be half-baked until you get access to government. Do voters forgive that in a leader like Peter Dutton when they’re craving somebody who believes in something, or do old fashioned scare campaigns against big target opposition policies ultimately work, especially when they’re presented in a first term?

The only thing I’d add is that, almost counterintuitive, two negatives can make a positive. First term oppositions don’t tend to win and big target opposition agendas don’t tend to win. It is very unusual to bring them together. A first term opposition presenting a big target. That’s what Peter Dutton is doing.

Does that perhaps provide some sort of strong contrast to the current government such that voters reward the opposition? Are voters prepared to admit that they might have made a mistake when they kicked the last government out and brought the new government in? Returning to the previous regime? Does the fact that Scott Morrison is no longer there give t voters the excuse to believe that they didn’t make a mistake, but they got it right, getting rid of him before returning the rest of them to power?

Before I run out of time, a quick thought on the Senate. Notwithstanding Lydia Thorpe, the Greens are at the maximum number of seats that they can realistically win in the Senate. They can pick up one in every state at a half senate election, and they’ve now done that at two consecutive half Senate elections. So, they’ve got 12. I’m including Lidia Thorpe in that 12.

Interestingly, when you look at the Labor Party, they’re sitting on just 26 seats in the senate. So, a Labor Greens balance of power in the Senate is only going to happen if Labor find a way to increase their number of senators. More interesting is what may or may not happen in the Greens lower House seats. Do they hold their four current seats? Do they win others? What role do they potentially play if Labor seeks to form minority government? If I’m right, and if Labor does scrape home and have to form minority government, how does that work with the Greens? Those are all really interesting questions.

So, talking about what may or may not happen at the next election, if it is a minority Labor government, and the Coalition are starting on 57 seats, notwithstanding what’s happened with the redistribution, it is very hard for me to see the Coalition getting to a majority in their own right or even being a serious prospect of forming minority government.

But we do live in really unusual times, and all the distractions might, for Labor, end up looking like nothing but distractions to the economy, which is all voters are going to care about. We haven’t had that sort of election for a very long time in this country, and not since I became an adult, if that’s a fair description of me now. We haven’t had an election all about the economy for a very long time. This one will be.

What impact will that have on voters? What impact will it have on younger voters, who increasingly don’t support the Coalition over the Labor Party but are worried about their standard of living? How will jobs and unemployment, declining standards of living and housing accessibility impact on voters? Do they shift from what you might call post materialist voting decision making and decide that their material well being is under siege and they don’t trust Labor to be able to manage that?

These are interesting questions that will be material to what result the next election throws up.