FEDERAL ELECTION 2022 – DIFFERENT VIEWS

On Tuesday 10 May 2022, Aaron Patrick, Special Correspondent for The Australian financial Review, and Gemma Tognini, Executive Director, GT Communications and a contributor to The Australian spoke for The Sydney Institute in a discussion on the federal election campaign 2022 and how it seemed to be going for the political parties. The two speakers reflected different experiences in their campaign watching and neither felt confident to predict the outcome due to conflicting messages coming from both individual seats and general polling. The papers which follow are taken from edited transcripts of each speaker’s comments on the night.

 FEDERAL ELECTION 2022 – DIFFERENT VIEWS

AARON PATRICK

Thanks, Gerard, for that introduction. Before I start, I’d like to acknowledge Gerard and Anne Henderson.

We’re here to talk about the election, and tonight I’m going to tell you why the Coalition is losing. My tale of it starts a week ago at a dinner with a group of parents at a private North Sydney school. People who are very conservative, and mostly people that live in the seats of North Sydney and Warringah. We went around the table and talked a little bit about the political environment.

What struck me was that in a naturally conservative audience, or group, who would have grown up around Liberal Party values, particularly ones which promote and protect wealth and business, there was no enthusiasm for this government, in particular Scott Morrison. I put the argument to them, that if they voted Independent, they would be taking out a very – let’s call it centrist – left-wing member of the Liberal Party party room. And are likely to contribute to pushing the Liberal Party to the right, the populist right. They didn’t care.

There was so much resentment towards Scott Morrison, that that was not an argument that was particularly persuasive. On Saturday night, I was in Melbourne for a friend’s birthday party, with a group of people who are mostly of Liberal background, from the seats of Kooyong and Higgins. Kooyong is the Treasurer’s seat, and Higgins is Katie Allen’s seat. These are two that are traditionally regarded as the iconic type of Liberal Melbourne seats.

The response I got was very similar. There was a strong sense of resentment towards Scott Morrison, a sense that he wasn’t “one of us”. There was no enthusiasm whatsoever, in fact, for Anthony Albanese. This perhaps reflected a sense that he isn’t very interesting, or this group wasn’t particularly interested in him or didn’t particularly care. So, this was the sort of anecdotal experience and conversations I was having. I’ve been trying to work out how that fits into what we’re seeing in the polls, and what this data is telling us.

The poll data is telling us that the Coalition is particularly in trouble in the inner-city, so-called Teal, seats and particularly with women. Polls are indicating to us that what was Morrison’s greatest political advantage in 2019, is now working against him. Which is a persona that he is a regular person of the Australian suburbs; what Malcolm Turnbull calls the semi confected daggy dad persona. Why I think this attribute has changed in terms of the effect it’s having on voting, is because of some of the events of the last three years.

On their own, or in isolation, many of these events weren’t particularly significant to the nation. We’re talking about Barnaby Joyce leaving his wife for his press secretary. We’re talking about the allegations of a rape in a minister’s office. We’re talking about the prime minister’s response that his wife told him, “Imagine if something like that had happened to your daughter.” All that, along with the allegations against the Education Minister, Alan Tudge.

I followed these events as they happened and I thought, they’re all very interesting in an individual way, but I was sure that they were going to have, at the end of the day, a big effect on the election. And they may not. But the polling, and Morrison’s weak polling numbers with women, suggest that they have.

Take the Barnaby Joyce example, which is quite important in the inner-city seats, because Joyce’s position as the Deputy Prime Minister is one of the primary arguments used by the Teal Independents against Dave Sharma, Trent Zimmermann and Josh Frydenberg. When Joyce left his wife, some women across middle Australia thought, “That could happen to me. That is an example of failure of moral behaviour which, in my personal life, could have devastating implications for me and my family.” So, you could argue that the morality of politicians is irrelevant to how they do their job, but I think it isn’t. In an electoral sense, it has an impact.

Then we go to Kooyong, where Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is standing against a female doctor who saved children’s lives. She is a very strong opponent, and on the weekend, all everyone talked about was how many posters there are across the electorate. No one I spoke to had ever seen anything like it in their life. It was a huge topic of conversation.

The reported figures are that Frydenberg has spent $3 million in the seat, which is a figure I’ve never ever heard spent on a single seat in an Australian election. While you could argue that it comes to a point where the posters don’t matter anymore, what matters are the actions and the arguments – what they have done is have allow his opponent, Monique Ryan, to have the standing of almost equivalent to the Treasurer. This has happened to someone who isn’t even in parliament, who’s never been known before. Because there are so many visible signs of her political campaign, she is, in the minds of people of Kooyong, a valid contender. In the way you saw Zali Steggall in 2019, in part because she’d been such a successful Olympic athlete.

Liberals whom I speak to are seriously worried about losing Kooyong and North Sydney. I have no idea if either will fall but if Kooyong, in particular, falls it will have huge ramifications for the Liberal Party. It will remove the prime centrist contender for the leadership, and it will open the door for conservatives to take over the party in a leadership sense and for the conservatives to enact what I think has been one of their long-term ambitions. This is to focus the Liberal Party not so much on the inner suburbs, but the outer suburbs, the regions. To go after the blue-collar vote and bring it across from the Labor Party. In that sense, this election is as much a contest for control of the country, as one that may determine the whole future of the Liberal Party.

It’s a bit hard to judge – in fact, it’s almost impossible to judge sitting here in our privileged inner-city locations – how Morrison is going down in the suburbs and the regional seats. I presume that there are regional differences.

In Western Australia, you just can’t ignore the popularity of the Labor government, and the isolationist approach it took to Covid. To pretend that there isn’t a hangover in that, would be denying reality. With only two Liberal seats, and I think two National seats, in the Western Australian parliament, clearly there is a reservoir of pro-Labor feeling in that state which the Liberal Party and the Coalition has to run into.

Queensland is also heavily LNP, in terms of the House of Representatives. Liberals tell me that Peter Dutton is concerned about the LNP losing Brisbane, which is on 5 per cent, and Ryan which is on 6 per cent. In South Australia, Boothby, in Adelaide, is a Liberal seat on 1.4 per cent. It would seem to me to share some of the characteristics of the Teal seats in Sydney and Melbourne; it’s mainly white, middle to upper class, and sort of post-materialist in one sense, although in another sense, it isn’t. At the last election, the dividend imputation issue helped Nicolle Flint retain the seat. But it would strike me that if a Teal candidate can do well in North Sydney, she can probably do well in Boothby too.

I don’t know what the mood is like in Bass, in Launceston; the margin there is very thin, less than 1 per cent. But if the incumbent member, Bridget Archer’s vocal disagreements with Scott Morrison have penetrated the local consciousness, you’d have to imagine that maybe she’s got a chance of holding the line if there’s a big national swing.

Victoria’s incredibly interesting, because the Liberal Party hopes that the disenchantment with Daniel Andrews’ management of the Covid pandemic could help them win seats. Maybe Corangamite on the surf coast, which is on 1 per cent, might go and McEwen – in the northern Melbourne suburbs – which is on 5 per cent.

Today, Daniel Andrews and Anthony Albanese stood up, and Albanese promised to put $2.2 billion dollars into a suburban, underground rail line going around Melbourne, which will go through Chisholm. Chisholm is held by Gladys Liu for the Liberals on by .6 per cent. She has struggled, perhaps more than any other Liberal politician, to find her voice and her way of communicating. She is in this acutely difficult position of having to straddle Chinese communities, some of whom will have sympathy for the Chinese Communist Party, and a general national mood which is obviously very hostile to the Chinese regime. She has not been able to finesse that, which is quite understandable, because she’s almost a political neophyte.

So, Albanese and Andrews stood up today for this project, that was hatched in secrecy. It’s unclear if Melbourne needs it. There are incredible estimates that it will cost $100 billion. You could run buses on the outskirts. Andrew stood up and he just slammed Morrison. He called the Coalition the “miserly Morrison government” which “hasn’t given us a cent – this shows that when you want to get things done, you’ve got to work them”. The Andrews government refuses to put the project to infrastructure Australia for an assessment as to whether it should go ahead; whether it’s absolutely necessary.

At the same time, one of Albanese’s biggest promises is to strengthen Infrastructure Australia. He says he created it, and this has to be a non-political national body, which is going to ensure we don’t waste billions in infrastructure spending. But he is allowing Andrews to completely circumnavigate the infrastructure process, and saying to him, for political gain, “Here’s $2 billion.” For that $2 billion, he got his press conference with Andrews today. I’m not convinced that Andrews is the huge drag on the vote in Victoria that the Liberal Party thinks it might be. Vctorian  society is pretty traumatised and split, after what they went through with the longest lockdowns in the world. They would hate to think to themselves that it was the wrong course of action. The consequences of that are just too painful; that all the sacrifices they went through were unnecessary.

Whether the Liberals can win back Corangamite or not is going to be absolutely fascinating. But it is, in part, a test, because of the limited differences between the two major parties, on how Victorians feel about the Victorian Labor government. In NSW, the Liberals here are trying to hold Reid, which is in the inner west, which is on 3 per cent, and win back Gilmore, which is on the South Coast, with 2.6 per cent.

The fascinating element here, in NSW, is the Katherine Deves effect. Katherine is a bombshell from Manly Vale, who’s signature issue is sex conversions. Two weeks ago, she was the  fourth most quoted politician in the country; she was only 1000 stories behind Josh Frydenberg. Which is absolutely incredible for a person who doesn’t hold office and was unknown publicly before this election. Her old tweets, which are just the normal conversational and social media of a person highly engaged in a particular issue, caused a lot of negative publicity for the government.

Ms Deves was put away from national media for about a week. Then, yesterday, Sky News got a camera crew and went up to her and interviewed her on the footpath. They asked her about her views, and her views were interpreted as pulling back from an apology she had issued for her language, particularly in relation to sex changes. Then, Morrison was asked about it today – he was here in Sydney, Epping and in Bennelong for a press conference – and instead of avoiding the issue, he opened it up. He started talking about sex changes in teenagers. Then, a journalist said, “They’re not allowed in Australia. The Federal Health Department said they’re not accessible to anyone under 18.” But he kept on talking and said, “This is a very important issue. People who are thinking about doing this have to think about the long-term consequences.”

Now, who could disagree with that? Who could disagree that changing your sex is probably not the most profound decision any individual can ever make? Who would think that adolescents have the foresight to be able to make this decision? I would suggest probably most would agree with the Prime Minister. So, I had this interesting experience, reading the Sydney Morning Herald website, which was discussing the legality of sex changes. It said that even though it’s true you have to be 18 and above, you can, as a woman, as teenage girl, have your breasts removed if you’re 18 or younger, which the industry refers to as top surgery.

So, the very fact that we’re talking about this, that I was reading about this, was the point. The Morrison response was to inject it into public debate, because common sense and focus groups are telling the Liberal Party that any discussion of sex changes amongst teenagers upsets, or agitates, parents. You saw when Albanese was asked about it, he did not want to talk about it; his answer was very short. So, whenever you hear “sex changes”, “kids” and “the Labor Party”, your brain is doing subconscious linkage; that’s what the Coalition strategists are hoping. The risk for them is that in the Teal seats, voters hear or read transphobia.

The challenge here, for what Morrison is trying to do, is to separate this issue about sex changes in adolescents with transphobic attitudes, which is what Deves was smeared with. The fact that Morrison was explicitly doing this today, is a sign of concern, because this is a pretty forthright and sensitive issue to inject into the election.

I read all this as being a sign of concern about where the Coalition is at. The current polls have a difference of 8 points, which is equivalent to a 5.5 per cent swing to the Labor Party, which would be an extra 17 seats for them. But 5.5 per cent to win an historical term seems to be pretty unlikely. History shows us that the polls usually narrow close to election day, and can be entirely wrong, as they were last time.

I suspect Morrison’s got a lot of support with Christians, particularly from immigrant countries, such as Indians, who could determine close races like that in Reid. The hardest thing for the Coalition is the small size of their parliamentary majority, which is essentially one. They have a nominal 76 seats. So, they may be only able to lose two seats and retain power. So, Morrison has to keep the loss to net two. A 3.2 per cent swing against the Coalition amounts to a loss of six seats. If Scott Morrison can get the swing down to 2 or less, he might be able to hold on.