The 2010 Federal Election Campaign: What Happened?

Peter Hartcher is the Political and International Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Chair Editor of The Diplomat and a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute. A prominent journalist, he has written widely on Australian politics and foreign affairs and authored a number of books, the most recent being To The Bitter End: The Dramatic Story of the Fall of John Howard and the Rise of Kevin Rudd.  Peter Hartcher addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 24 August 2010, reviewing the 2010 Federal Election campaign.

THE 2010 FEDERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN: WHAT HAPPENED?

PETER HARTCHER

In following Claire Harvey, I am reminded of how actually this was a pretty funny campaign, the funniest I can remember. A campaign where the bloke promising to bring us grown up government finished the campaign by pulling an all-nighter in the pubs of Sydney. A campaign where you didn’t know who was going to bob up next for Labor – the ghost of Kevin Rudd, angry and bitter, or the ghost of Mark Latham, angry and bitter.

We are tonight to conduct a post-mortem but it turns out the thing is still alive and we have to conduct a vivisection. If we take the whole contest on face value, a visitor from another country or from Mars might have turned up, looked at the two leaders on offer and said, “My goodness, this is going to be an electrifying contest. A great clash of world views.” On the one hand we have one party led by a man who is a conservative, right-wing Catholic who used to be Australia’s chief monarchist, an avowed anti-abortionist and family man. And the other party is led by a woman with her roots in the Victorian socialist left, who worked as a lawyer for the Union movement, who is a declared atheist living childless in a de facto relationship. What two clashing worldviews these people represent.

But of course the visitor from Mars or a foreign country would have been completely wrong wouldn’t they. Because once you take the leaders and process them through the systems of machine politics and the great sort of winnowing effect of parliamentary clash, you end up with a great homogenisation of the offerings. For example, was Julia Gillard the atheist planning to take any funding from religious schools and distribute it to public schools? No, of course not. Was Tony Abbott the anti-abortionist planning any change to access to abortion in Australia? No, of course not. So, as with the leaders, we also saw a great homogenisation of the parties and their politics and, I believe, a great retreat from reform ambition with Australian politicians.

Just a few years ago, you had high points of reform ambition under John Howard on the one side and Kevin Rudd on the other. But the trauma that both parties received – for the Liberals Work Choices was a dismal failure politically and Labor suffered when they retreated, cowered, beaten and uncomprehending, from their attempt to deal with climate change – left them suffering a Reform Underachievement Trauma or RUT. Stuck in a rut indeed. As a consequence, we saw both parties abandoning policy agendas central to their DNA. The Liberals, the party of deregulating labour markets, vowed not to touch labour laws. Labor, which just three years earlier had been elected primarily to deal with the problem of climate change, ran away from climate change as fast as it possibly could. We saw a contest not between two political lions in this election but between two political mice.

Even some of the outstanding issues that we thought might have been dealt with in this campaign were actually settled by political osmosis. There was bipartisan consensus to take them off the table before the election. Specifically, I mean Big Australia and immigration. Before the election campaign even started, both parties had agreed that what we did effectively as a country was dump half a century of bipartisan consensus in favour of Big Australia and in favour of a large immigration intake. By the time Julia Gillard called the election, this was a subject that dare not speak its name. Both parties were signaling frantically that they would cut population growth, cut immigration and do whatever it took to kill off the concept of Big Australia.

Both parties had vowed to sign up for paid parental leave – two different systems, two different proposals but both concurring that the social reform which all industrialised countries except the US and Australia had enshrined now had to be enshrined here as well.. Another consensus item was, with an extraordinary amount of self-restraint and fiscal discipline and for the first time in our Federated history, that there would be no net new spending during the election campaign, along with bipartisan consensus to pay off the deficit as quickly as possible.

So what did that leave for the campaign to settle? There wasn’t a lot in the way of outstanding difference for the campaign but a couple of things stand out. The fairly stark difference was on the National Broadband Network and how to deal with wiring the country for the internet. The second was the mining tax. These were the two stand out issues that were left. The parties had run away from everything else or come up with a bipartisan consensus instead. So what we were left with, instead of an incumbent government and an opposition, was two oppositions. Tony Abbott had been planning to campaign for a protest vote against Kevin Rudd but of course Julia Gillard got there first. She was the one marshalling the protest vote against Kevin Rudd and doing it suddenly from the position of the Prime Ministership.

The voters rejected Labor, as you’ve just seen. There was a swing against Labor in the primary vote of 4.9 per cent on the 75 per cent of votes so far counted. That’s fairly clear, one of the biggest swings since 1949 and a pretty clear repudiation of Labor. But the voters didn’t embrace the Coalition either. The Coalition’s primary vote, at the moment, has gained only 1.6 of a percentage point. So Labor loses 5, the Coalition picks up 1.6 on the primary vote. Now my interpretation of that is that we’ve certainly rejected Labor but we haven’t embraced the Coalition either. So perhaps we were looking for a government and rejected both of the oppositions on offer.

The voters have refused to settle the question and left it to the Independents instead. They are meeting, as we are meeting, at this particular moment. The three Independents, the three so-called former National independents, also known as the regional Independents or as the London Telegraph called them last night, the Haystack Amigos, are meeting in Canberra as we speak to decide their on-block approach to the negotiations. You’ll note they’re not entering into it with any great haste. They’re waiting to see how the final seat count falls to decide the alignment of power on both sides. At the moment the best guess would be 72 seats to 72 seats, maybe 73. It’s a very tight finish.

Now we’ve heard a lot that this is a terrible outcome. We’ve heard that this is the death of strong and stable government. Yet when the financial markets opened yesterday, we saw there a reasonably apolitical arbiter decide that there wasn’t really much damage at all. In fact, precisely nothing happened when the markets opened yesterday. Absolutely nothing happened on the stock market and a little less than that happened on the foreign exchange market. There’s a little more movement today but it’s hard to suggest today that the panic that was absent yesterday would suddenly turn up today. So the financial markets I would suggest concur with my judgment that it was a low stakes election. And the outcome need not be so terrible. Here’s why. Two thoughts.

In the last few days, we’ve seen a sudden switch in the agenda items under discussion in our national polity. Have you heard anything about boat people in the last couple of days? No. Have we heard anything about the debt in the last couple of days? No. Now, these are both real issues and real problems but were hyper-inflated through the political campaigning to become the giant national crisis that they evidently are not. A country with 6 per cent of GDP peak debt when the entire industrialised world is running peak debt of over 90 per cent of GDP is clearly not a major front row casualty of the sovereign debt crisis. So what do we hear now as the foremost items on the national political agenda? Well, we hear about water, we hear about health, we hear about communications and broadband, we hear about climate change and we hear about an agenda for good governance. I would put it to you that all and any of these actually are larger, more pressing, more central problems for the country than those which came to dominate much of the campaign discourse.

The second thought about why this isn’t necessarily such a shocking outcome is that the one agenda item that the Independents can agree on, where they all want to see improvements, is good governance in our federal system. The sorts of changes that the big political parties, comfortable with the status quo, never rush to make. The sorts of changes that we’ve seen imposed by Independents in the State governments. What we’ve seen imposed in NSW and Victoria and other states by governments that are minority governments that have depended on Independents. They are the strengthening of the powers of auditors general, the strengthening of the powers of Ombudsman, cleaning up political donations regimes, and changes to Question Time. These, I would suggest, all sound like pretty good and useful agenda items in pursuit of better governance.

There is an extremely good chance that we will end up in the weeks or months ahead at a second election. There’s a pretty good chance that this process will not end in a clear stable governing agreement and we’ll all be back at the polls. The only precedent we have in federal politics is 1940, when the Menzies Government was able to win with a minority government with the support of two Independents was a government that lasted only 12 months before collapsing and that may be the precedent. When I put this to Julia Gillard on Monday, she said, “Maybe but the precedent I’m looking at is the precedent of the Bracks government in Victoria.” That minority government managed a full four year term, was fairly stable, and made improvements to governance. In New South Wales, the equivalent was Greiner and Fahey and, once again, I don’t think anybody would look back on that and say that was the time, in either state, of terrible crises. So the Independents are meeting right now in between the Australian Electoral Commission and the haystack amigos, our national future is in the balance. We’ll find out soon enough.