The Federal Election Campaign: What Happened?

Claire Harvey is a columnist with The Daily Telegraph. Her coverage of the 2010 federal election campaign marked her out as one of Australia’s most talented and up and coming young political reporters – with an eye for the ridiculous and a seasoned antennae for the mood of voters. In a discussion at The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 24 August 2010, a few days after voting day, Claire Harvey gave an amusing but observant review of the campaign and what happened.

THE FEDERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN: WHAT HAPPENED?

CLAIRE HARVEY

Thank you very much to the Sydney Institute for inviting me to speak at tonight’s election post-mortem.

I’d like to pass on apologies from Senator Mark Arbib, who would have loved to be here tonight, but has been ordered by the Prime Minister to go back to his focus groups and ask if, given we’ll likely be having another election soon, the next Labor leader should be Julia Gillard, Mark Latham, Wilson Tuckey, Wyatt Roy or back to Kevin Rudd.

Like you, I’m thrilled the election is over – and delighted the ride doesn’t seem to be slowing down at all. I spent much of the past five weeks on the road with Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. I suspect that makes me less qualified than most of you to conduct this autopsy, but the corpse is on the slab and along with Drs Kelly and Hartcher, I’ll scrub in and start up my bone-saw. I’ll venture a few thoughts and then offer up some of the more baffling moments from life on the campaign buses – and I’d love to know if you can make sense of them.

So what just happened? I think it was an election that showed us our nation at a time of massive technological and social change, where the principal mood was not left or right, anger or hope, but irritated confusion. Julia Gillard said on Saturday night the electorate had spoken, but we don’t yet know what they said. I don’t know about that.

I think they said a few things loud and clear. They said two-party preferred is now a contradiction in terms. They said that Tony guy seems pretty crazy, but at least he’s crazy-brave. They said we really like Julia, but will she really be Prime Minister if we vote for her? And then will she be the real Julia PM? Will she wear those pearls every day for the rest of her term? Are they real pearls?

The voters also said, “You know, this Mark Latham seems to make a lot of sense – politicians really are duplicitous backstabbing attention-grabbers who never saw a microphone they didn’t like.”

And most loudly of all, I think they said, “Kevin Rudd might have been a pain in the backside, but he was our pain in the backside, and we wanted to kick it ourselves.”

But then, we did many things differently in Election 2010.

Normally, Australians vote not in winter but in summer, when the politicians think we are more likely to be in a good mood. Normally, we do not consult our telephones for voting advice. Women are strictly for ornamental purposes. Ex-prime ministers retreat to their farms in dignified silence.

Faceless men are anonymous, and do not blog – or tweet, or Facebook one another with strategy updates. Leaders remain fully clothed at all times. Viewers might shout at their televisions, but they don’t try to send messages to them. And we all wait for the evening news, and the morning paper, to find out what happened. Until now.

Hair and exercise and jewellery and boyfriends, emoticons and earlobes and swimsuits, meat pies and wrinkles, ducks and bulldozers and toads; these are the images of strange, strained Election 2010. We learnt freshly negative connotations for some words: “Great” and “big” and “new” were all suddenly bad things. There were some new positive terms, too: “Ranga”, “lame”, “churchy”, “loser” and “dead, buried, cremated.” The past was more important than the future. God stayed out of the way. Marriage was a dark and dangerous topic.

A year ago, nobody expected Election 2010 to be interesting. No first-term government had been ditched since the Great Depression, everyone seemed to like Kevin Rudd, and the Opposition was playing quietly in its bedroom, tearing the wings off leaders, one after another.

Then suddenly, we had a death-match.

We knew them both pretty well already. We knew their skill, their likeability, and their vicious flirtation. Both were British-born, and both as Australian as rising inflections and budgie-smugglers. He called her Fake Julia. She called him Mr Rabbit. It was, I think, the bonsai campaign – where, for most of the time, the parties tried to keep their leaders as small as possible, clipped and confined, warm and well-watered, out of the way of anything unexpected – or undecided. There was an extraordinary amount of posturing about budgets, debt and deficit in this election, when fiscal rectitude seemed to become the new family values.

But neither party seemed able to read its own human balance sheet.

Labor had an enormous asset in Julia Gillard, who is warm and fun and clever, but just as they failed to capitalise on the rest of their assets, Labor managed to turn Ms Gillard into just another liability – quite a feat.  The Liberals had a massive liability in Tony Abbott, the unpredictable streetfighter who talked too much, too loudly, about too many things. They turned him into their greatest asset – again, quite a feat.

Here’s one of the big contradictions of this election. We started the campaign assuming it was Tony Abbott who had a “woman problem”. In fact, I think it was Julia Gillard. Early in the campaign, the prime minister was on the cover of the Australian Women’s Weekly, in glamorous pant-suits (and pearls). She looked stunning and impeccably groomed – and I think that turned out to be a bad thing for Labor. From the first day of the campaign, the party failed to notice a huge potential problem on Ms Gillard’s radar – the fact that many women were not so much overcome by feminist pride in her achievements, but instead filled with a particularly female form of savagery. Call it jealousy, call it spite; anyone who’s worked in an all-female environment – or been to a girls’ school – knows women can be brutal with each other. Hair, body, intellect, face, voice, accent – they are all open to scrutiny and criticism – and from Ms Gillard’s first day as PM, the feminine whispers began. “Backstabber”, “bitch”, “liar” – in this campaign they were words I heard mainly from women – at polling booths, malls, cafes.

On Friday night I was at Penrith Panthers leagues club, waiting for Ms Gillard near a group of curious local women. They didn’t smile or wave when the PM came in – they muttered “moll” and turned away. The campaign’s most savage media commentary came, indeed, from women. And I think it was no accident that the Liberal Party’s advertisements used a female voice-artist to read the lines “If Kevin Rudd can’t trust Julia Gillard, how on earth can we?”

It is a depressing truth of modern Australia that many women are very quick to knock one another down. It’s the same sentiment that fuels the sales of nasty gossip-magazines. Many Australian women simply don’t trust one another. In this case, I think pearls and lip-gloss in the Women’s Weekly studio did not help soften or placate the women who suspected Ms Gillard had tickets to her own show.

A better strategic look might have been Julia at home, minus the jewellery, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, chatting with her niece or having coffee in Altona with Tim – and might have given the female public a better view of the real Julia, who as Paul and Peter might agree, is a down-to-earth person. Those women at Penrith Panthers might have thought so too, if Gillard had chatted with them, for she is charming and genuine in person – indeed, she relishes the chance to win over a sceptic, as she showed on the occasions when she really shone during the campaign – such as the Q&A program in Week three. Even after the shift to Real Julia at the end of week two, I was surprised by Labor’s failure to get Gillard out amongst ordinary people.

On the Saturday one week before election day, the PM, followed by a plane load of media, awoke before dawn in Melbourne, flew to Ballina, drove halfway to Lismore, spent 45 minutes on a farm owned by the NSW Department of Agriculture, where a climate-change announcement of little note was made, and then drove back to Ballina and flew back to Melbourne. She did not meet any voters, apart from the departmental staff and journalists, if we count.

That was a typical day, throughout a campaign where Labor staged events far from the people, as if they feared Julia Gillard needed to be shielded from them. On election day itself, with just 10 hours to grab as many last wavering voters as possible, Julia Gillard awoke in her Penrith hotel room, drove to the Nepean river for a live cross to the Sunrise program, had coffee with local candidate David Bradbury, then few to Melbourne, voted at a primary school and retired to another hotel – the Hilton. She didn’t hand out a single how-to-vote card. She visited no marginal polling booths. She made no stump speech. She shook a maximum of 20 hands.

It was just hours after Tony Abbott had completed his 36-hour insomnia attack, when he was startling cops and radio hosts on the graveyard shift by appearing in their midst to talk about stopping the boats, paying back the debt, cutting the great big new taxes and ending the waste – the mantra we can all now say in our sleep. But even with the doomsday clock ticking, Labor didn’t display any sense of urgency – or any confidence that their leader was an asset worth showing off.

So what about Tony Abbott? A clever friend of mine, Chris Niesche of the Australian Financial Review, came up with the great observation that the Liberals’ own faceless men had told Mr Abbott to wear a suit and tie all day, every day, on the assumption that if he was in a suit and tie he couldn’t do anything undignified like, say, playing tennis or wielding Tasers or filleting fish. Turns out Mr Abbott can do just about anything in a suit. He tried very hard to stay in his box, however.

In week three of the campaign, Mr Abbott was campaigning at a south-east Queensland garden centre and petting zoo. Suddenly, in a perfect addition to the campaign’s air of Tony-in-Wonderland, a miniature horse came trotting in from stage left. The horse, whose name was Slushie and who was about as high as your hip, swished his pink-dyed mane joyfully, ready to pose for pictures with the Leader of the Opposition. You can imagine how excited the photographers and cameramen were – but the Liberal campaign team weren’t having it for a second. The federal police at the gate murmured with the media advisers and advance team – and Slushie was led away. When a pet duck appeared at a nursing home visit the previous week, Mr Abbott regarded it like a hand-grenade; deadly at close range, and backed away.

The message from Liberal campaign headquarters was clear: you are the alternative prime minister – act like it. And Mr Abbott, whose gangly air added a sense of overhanging doom to every moment, did manage, with a few exceptions, to maintain an air of gravitas. At a Chinese community dinner in Chatswood one evening, John Howard introduced Mr Abbott to a rapturous crowd as our next PM. He strode to the stage, all cockiness and power – the Real Tony the party had been trying to hide. He was enthusiastic and vital. He was shouting too loudly. As he began to speak, a banner fell from the wall behind him and Abbott became even more excited. He shouted that the falling poster was “an auspicious sign in the Chinese calendar . . . It means that this is no longer a Liberal Chinese community dinner – this is a dinner which is going to storm the country and transform our country”.

Phrases like “storm the country” are enough to make campaign advisers like Tony O’Leary choke on their dim-sums – and you might have noticed that Abbott never said it again, and never again allowed his excitement to carry him away quite so loudly.

With my colleague Simon Kearney, I interviewed Abbott at the end of week four. It was the first campaign interview featuring his wife and daughters, who sat at a café table with us, drinking coffee and talking about their charming, embarrassing, verbose dad. “Bridgie Baby,” he kept calling youngest daughter Bridget. “Margie, darling angel sweetheart,” he welcomed his wife when she walked in. His 21-year-old daughter Louise – or “Lou Lou, angel”, as Mr Abbott calls her – told us Dad was the soft-touch in the family, who left all the discipline to Mrs Abbott and just wanted to be liked.

The women in Abbott’s life said they were baffled that this affectionate, exuberant man could have a “woman problem” – and by campaign’s end, I think it had gone – precisely because he wasn’t allowed to say anything like that in public. The Liberals’ carefully calibrated parental leave policy, the suit-and-tie small-target trick and perhaps a muzzle on all talk of virginity helped Mr Abbott neutralise the gender risk, and helped voters see that underneath the quirks and beyond the more outlandish policy positions, he is at a human level as genuine and decent as Julia Gillard.

On Saturday night, I was in the Labor “celebration” at Melbourne’s Convention Centre, where the balloons were deflating before the champagne was served, and the word “party” was not even to be whispered. The big signs welcoming supporters to the room simply declared “Australian Labor”, as if the p-word would bring on karmic collapse.

That might have been part of the problem – Labor didn’t seem to know how to celebrate itself, its achievements, or its leader, which I think was a shame. While we waited for Julia Gillard to come on stage about 11pm, three female Labor supporters standing behind me saw ABC journalist Leigh Sales flash up on the big-screen, as part of the ABC broadcast. “Tory witch,” one of them said. “Terrible suit,” said another.”  It was the “woman problem” in extreme close-up – and it wasn’t very encouraging. To be fair, those words were spoken at the end of a long, tearful night filled with salty snacks and warm chardonnay. It was a very bad night for Labor, and I suspect there are many more bad nights and unfair attacks to come. And I don’t know if Julia Gillard could ever have defeated that particular sentiment, or how much it harmed her vote. I’d love to know what you think.