The 2016 Election: A Reflection

Aaron Patrick is Deputy Editor, The Australian Financial Review & author Credlin & Co – How the Abbott Government Destroyed Itself. During the 2016 election campaign, The Australian’s Caroline Overington joined Aaron Patrick to present their views on the way the campaign was unfolding. It was an entertaining event. To follow up, The Sydney Institute asked both journalists to return immediately after the election, on Tuesday 5 July 2016, to offer their take on the results.

THE 2016 ELECTION: A REFLECTION

AARON PATRICK

Thanks everyone for coming out on this winter night. I was hoping to canvass four areas tonight. The first one is, did the elites get it wrong? Did they call the election wrong? The debate over what went wrong, the lessons and what happens next.

Did the elites get it wrong? Did they call the election wrong?

I don’t know about you, but I was really stunned sitting there on Saturday night watching the first results come in with some Liberal friends. Particularly I think the first result that really shocked me was the 10 per cent swing in Lyons in Tasmania. And the people around me did what normal, rational human beings did which was write it off as an aberration. And they were wrong. And what we had here was I think a pretty significant failure of elite opinion to understand what most Australians were thinking and to misinterpret what was going on in the election campaign.

This stemmed from a number of reasons. Partly it was underestimating Bill Shorten and the Labour campaign. Partly it was underestimating the willingness of Australians to push back against a first term government that hadn’t made any particularly spectacular mistakes. But you also had sort of media elite feedback loop where you had senior people in the media being told information by the parties. And the information that was coming out was that the coalition was going to win.

Partly it was underestimating Bill Shorten and the Labour campaign. Partly it was underestimating the willingness of Australians to push back against a first term government

I spoke to a cabinet minister on the Friday who I’ve known for a long time and whose judgement I trusted, and he said, “Look I think we’re going to come in with about 82 seats”. I believed that, not only because I trust the individual but because that’s what people had been saying in the media. So the elites, and I include myself in this category, got it wrong. You saw what was happening in the polls. Essentially, what the elites were doing was discounting the polls, because the polls showed that the election was going to be a narrower result than it really was.

So there was a rationalisation going on, which was “national polls don’t work anymore” because they can’t inform us as to what is going on in specific seats, and because of the changing nature of society, primarily with younger people not using landlines, there was a general belief in elite opinion that those polls had become a less reliable indicator.

the elites were doing was discounting the polls, because the polls showed that the election was going to be a narrower result than it really was.

But it turned out the polls were pretty good. Ipsos and Newspoll got the primary vote within 1 percentage point. Ipos was quite close, at least on the primary vote. And what you saw was a lead opinion influencing the betting markets. You saw the Labor Party out to $8 and the Coalition, someone might correct me here, but it was down to $1.20. It may have even been narrower than that at around$1.08.

So my first point is, we got it wrong. And that is a really sobering lesson for us.

What’s more important, though, is what went wrong. And how did one of the most intelligent, talented men of a generation of Australians who took power with an enormous feeling of enthusiasm behind him in the community, across all parts of society almost, in such a short time, how did he lose Australia? How did he lose Australians?

There is no one answer and we’re going to be debating this for years. The debate at the moment is pretty fascinating. You’ve got one group, a not insubstantial group in the Liberal Party, arguing Malcolm Turnbull wasn’t conservative enough. You’ve got other people arguing he wasn’t liberal enough. You have people saying his campaign was ineffective. You’ve got people saying he wasn’t aggressive enough. And I don’t know the answer, but it’s pretty interesting. You look at the rise of the Liberal Party and essentially what they’re saying is that he needed to be more Abbott like. Not only did Turnbull need to go more aggressive, more negative, he needed to campaign on those key conservative issues like Islamic immigration, refugees, boat people, national security. They argue Turnbull would have kept all those Western Sydney seats if he had.

Then there is another quite legitimate argument, which is, Turnbull inherited the 2014 budget of Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey and didn’t largely repudiate it. So there is definitely an argument to be had that Australians were uncomfortable with the kind of classical Liberal policy that Malcolm Turnbull and his cabinet have implemented.

You have the Prime Minister out today in a way acknowledging that. His key argument at a press conference this afternoon was that there is a very clear message about the importance of health policy in Australian society. The Liberal Party likes Medicare as much as the Labor Party is what he said, and he acknowledged the party needed to send a clear demonstration of its commitment to that.

People on the right and economic rationalists would say that the healthcare system is unfunded, and unfundable under current policy settings. There’s an argument that doctors are gaming the system. At least, doctor opposition to changes to health policy are primarily designed to protect their incomes. And there’s an academic argument to be waged that making people pay in small amounts to visit a doctor can be decent policy.

But clearly the politics have been lost on that. So this is going to cause a reassessment of what’s politically possible in terms of changing (I hate to say reforming) or modernising health care policy which most of us are paying a huge amount through our taxes to support.

Organisational issues were also really important. Why did the Liberal Party not pre-select candidates in some of those Western Sydney seats until the campaign had started? That’s absurd. Candidates need years working the communities and getting themselves known. Jamie Briggs may have cost this government its majority. A brilliant young man, Jamie Briggs played a key role in Howard’s office in Work Choices. He had a stellar career ahead of him. Trying to pick up a diplomat in Hong Kong meant he lost the seat of Mayo. A seat the Liberals should never have lost. Why is it, such privileged men in this party do not have the discipline to behave themselves when in a position of power. That’s a legitimate question that has to be asked.

This election had some powerful lessons for how politics work. For me, the key lesson is that fear is effective. Fear is a fantastic driver of voting behaviour. No matter if that fear is underpinned by a colossal lie or exaggeration, fear is a great way to get what you want. One of Bill Shorten’s great contributions to political understanding in Australia was the “Mediscare” campaign. It was absurd but it worked. What’s so wrong with improving the efficiency of the payment system for Medicare which is doling out tens of billions of dollars per year? The government showed an inability to defend that. Immediately, they promised they’d drop their own internal policy. Straight away they said, “Look, we’re not going to touch it, we’re going to let the public servants continue to run it.” That didn’t work. Shorten was able to make hay from that defensiveness very effectively.

Let’s be honest here, it isn’t just Labor that does this. The right side of politics has been very good at doing this as well. Look at the “children overboard” scare, that happened during the Howard Government. This is a bipartisan approach to politics.

The question is, was Turnbull naïve? Was he too comfortable? Did Turnbull think, he could lose ten seats and be a good guy about it. That he could afford not to run an overly negative campaign because it would undermine his persona. And he had plenty of scare campaigns available. He had scare options. He had the union movement which he could have pushed hard on. The CFMEU. He had Bill Shorten’s background in the union movement. He had material generated by the Royal Commission into trade unions. He had the threat of refugees coming by boat. He had the Budget, he had a blow out in taxes. He had all these issues he could have deployed and he didn’t. And he’s lost because of it.

Another key insight as to what we’ve learned is that electorates forget. The electorate has got a short memory. A few years ago, Bill Shorten was persona non grata. Bill Shorten had brought down two Labor prime ministers. He’d brought down Australia’s first female prime minister. He had a long history of dodgy behaviour in the union movement. Suddenly, now, he’s been hailed as a potential prime minister. It shows that if you’ve got enough hutzpah you can do anything in politics. And that’s a credit to Bill Shorten’s political skills.

What happens next? Well, a bold prediction here. I think there will be a minority Liberal government. They may or may not enter into a formal pact with the cross benchers. I suspect they won’t. And going out further on a limb, I think a minority Liberal government could be relatively stable. Remember when we had the hung parliament 2010? And I, like many people, expected it to be incredibly unstable. It turned out not to be at all. In fact, as time went on, Gillard was able to increase her position in the House of Representatives and, from a legislative point of view, she governed quite effectively. There’s an argument that that could happen here.

What happens in the Senate is going to be absolutely fascinating. I predict you’ll have Hinch, who may form a sort of voting block with Xenophon, or at least vote along with his group. This will be a more manageable Senate than the previous one because Xenophon is a deal doer who wants to get credit for changing things and therefore is open to deals. He’s a far more adept politician than Clive Palmer ever was and therefore will be able to manage his own people better. Derryn Hinch is a pragmatic guy who has been around a long time. He’s a known quantity. I would assume that Derryn Hinch would be open to discussing deals on policy.

So, you’ve got some rational, political actors in the Senate whom the government will be able to work with. Then you’ve got Pauline Hanson and Jacquie Lambie. There’s got to be a natural fit between Lambie and Hanson. It will be fascinating to see if they form an anti-Islamic voting block. But they’re protest voters. They’re not engagers. How Hanson uses the platform of the Senate, an incredibly powerful platform, to promote herself and her ideology of division and hate, religious hate and religious intolerance, is one of the most dangerous things to emerge from this election. And if she forms an alliance with Lambie she’ll be even more potent.