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Apathy rules in Victoria

By Rick Brown - posted Monday, 15 December 2014


Newspaper polls predicting a landslide to Labor in the Victorian elections (e.g. Newspoll predicting a 55/45 two-party preferred vote for Labor and an Age poll predicting a 56/44 two-party preferred vote for Labor) were always fanciful.

The prevailing mood in Victoria was one of apathy and apathy is not a recipe for landslides. Rather it is an indicator of a 51/49 two-party preferred type outcome.

Regardless of the re-writing of history, a couple of days before polling day, Labor was not confident. On Thursday, telephone workers were identifying Green voters and asking for their second preferences - hardly the actions of a party bristling with confidence in the outcome - and on polling day some Labor people were rehearsing their lines for a narrow loss.

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In the end Labor has won four southern suburban Melbourne seats, a couple by margins of one per cent or less and another by less than two per cent.

Labor also picked up another seat because two Coalition seats were abolished in a re-distribution prior to the election, the loss of one of which was negated by the Liberals winning a rural seat from Labor.

The Nationals lost Shepparton to an Independent.

To put this result in perspective: in 2010 the Liberals won 12 Melbourne seats from Labor and the Nationals won a seat from an Independent. Labor has regained four of those seats and the Greens have finished a short head in front of the Liberals and Labor in Prahran which is always volatile because of the size of the voter turnover between one election and the next.

The election result is hardly an overwhelming endorsement of Labor. Not only was result close, but Labor's primary vote, while up by just under two per cent was barely 38 per cent.

The Liberals primary vote was down by about 1½per cent to 36.5 per cent of the vote and the Nationals down by just over one per cent to 5.5 cent.

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Still the Coalition primary vote was 42 per cent.

What these statistics demonstrate is Labor's dependence on Green preferences.

Nevertheless, the question is why the Coalition lost given that history indicates that voters give first term governments the benefit of the doubt, and that there did not appear to be compelling reasons to vote against the government.

The Liberals closed the gap between Labor and themselves during the election campaign, and may be the result could have been closer. If the swing to the Liberals was continuing during the last week of the campaign it may have stalled two days before polling day when Victorians, like all other Australians, became consumed with the tragic and extraordinary death of cricketer Phillip Hughes.

Still, as Professor Julius Sumner Miller used to ask, why is it so?

Why did undecided voters largely voted for the Coalition in 2010 and this time vote for Labor?

One of the differences between the Liberals' 2014 election campaign and their 2010 campaign is that they acted to move the undecided vote by putting the Greens last on their how-to-vote cards in 2010 and made an issue of it.

This time they relied solely on their campaign both to make up ground and to move the undecided voters.

The fact that that the Liberals did not make an issue this time of their decision to put the Greens last by talking up the possibility of a Labor/Green government, especially given the dependence of Labor on Green preferences, is a reminder that they were dragged kicking and screaming into making the decision in 2010.

While everything makes a difference in a close result, there are probably significant reasons which lie directly at the feet of Denis Napthine for the Liberals' not receiving the benefit of history.

From a political perspective there five or six critical portfolios ̶Premier, Treasury, Health, Education and Transport and arguably Attorney General and Police.

A government needs its best people in these ministries. Under Ted Baillieu that was not always the case.

Further Ted Baillieu was becoming a reason for people to vote against the government. Partly it was due to his style and approach and partly due to policies such as TAFE cuts which revived memories of the Kennett years.

It is interesting that, during the election campaign, the Electrical Trades Union ran an expensive television campaign focusing on the TAFE cuts and that the ALP also made the TAFE cuts a major focus of their advertising campaign.

Then there was the dispute with paramedics which began during Mr. Baillieu's stewardship and continued on under his successor. Ambulance vehicles were used as mobile billboards, much to the consternation of the backbench who could not understand why nobody in the Government apparently had the wit to settle the dispute and to have political messages removed from the vehicles, and why, at the 11th hour when it was all too late, the Government seemingly capitulated.

Of course it would be convenient to blame Tony Abbott for the result. That would absolve everybody at a state level of responsibility, thus enabling them to keep their jobs.

Tony Abbott may have been a factor, but not a decisive one. It is interesting that the ALP ran their anti-Abbott television advertisement only in the last couple of days of the campaign.

Blaming the state director, in this case Damien Mantach, also has its pluses since that limits responsibility for the results to one individual.

Regardless of the fact that the Liberal vote improved during the election campaign, Mr. Mantach's problems began well before then with decisions which called his political judgment into question.

For example, in the middle of the year, when the Government needed all the clean air it could get, Mr. Mantach participated in a witch hunt which might have benefited the personal careers of a couple of Liberal politicians but not the Government.

He authorised an investigation into the source of the distribution of a tape of an Age journalist which had been stolen by the ALP revealing (shock, horror) that Ted Baillieu did not like a few Liberal, pro-life politicians.

Despite rumours and innuendo, nothing came of the investigation and it withered on the vine. Meanwhile, however, stories about the inquiry and the suspects occupied the pages of The Age for a week.

The pre-selection of candidates, for which the state director is not responsible, also will be in the minds of some.

Many believe that the candidate for Frankston, which Labor won narrowly, should have been the mayor and that a reason the Liberals did not perform as well in Yan Yean as they hoped, despite allocating substantial resources to the campaign for that seat, is pre-selecting the wrong candidate for that seat.

The Nationals were big losers in these elections before which they had 13 members. Now they have ten. They lost one seat in the re-distribution and did not retain the third Coalition Upper House position in Western Victoria which was always problematic.

Most importantly, they were blind-sided by a well-funded Independent in Shepparton. Worst of all they shot themselves in the foot.

The retiring member Janette Powell and her predecessor Don Kilgour supported a staff member of Mrs. Powell's over a candidate supported by the leadership of the Party.

Had the other candidate been pre-selected, the Nationals would have retained the seat.

This is the second time the local Nationals have defied the Party leadership with disastrous consequences. In 1996 the result was the loss of the federal seat, Murray, which is based on Shepparton, to the Liberals.

This time the consequence is that the National Party has lost party status and the resources that go with it because they now have fewer than 11 members.

As for the Greens, they finally have won the state seat Melbourne and fell over the line in Prahran.

However, as stated earlier, despite these victories, their vote was static −a fact also disguised by the number of seats they delivered to Labor because of Labor's low primary vote.

The real disappointment for the Greens is that they will not have the balance of power in the Upper House.

To add salt to the wound, the balance of power will be shared by three members representing pro-shooter parties.

Turning to the future, there are those who think that excessive public service union influence over this Government could be its Achilles' heel, especially if, as predicted, the unemployment rate increases as the economy deteriorates.

From that perspective, the early signs are unnerving. Those who have examined the deal that Labor did with the firefighters' union say that it is under-costed and that the degree of influence the union will have over the operations of the Country Fire Authority is excessive.

Apart from the financial cost, a political problem is that the firefighters union have an agenda dating back to the days of the Bracks government to reduce substantially the number of volunteer firefighters, who are not union members, and to increase the number of full-time firefighters who are more likely to become union members.

Then there is the fact that Gavin Jennings who is the minister responsible for overseeing government transparency, integrity, accountability and the public sector reform. called the Community and Public Sector Union before the announcement of his appointment.

Liberal supporters will be hoping that this situation eventuates.

However, Labor supporters will be hoping that, in four years time, history will be on its side, and not just because it is a first term government.

When former premier and Victorian Liberal legend Henry Bolte retired as premier in 1972 he told his successor Rupert Hamer that the Liberals would have a further ten years in government, and so it turned out to be.

Since then they have won two elections. One was in 1992 when Jeff Kennett won government by defeating a totally discredited Labor Government led by Joan Kirner but managed to lose office after the second term.

The other was in 2010 when the Liberals fell over the line in an election in which the major issues were all running against Labor, but have now become part of history for the wrong reason.

Labor also has won twice. It won the elections in 1982 and retained power for 11 years. In 1999 Steve Bracks formed a minority government and Labor went on to govern for 11 years.

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This article is to be published in Letter from Melbourne.



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About the Author

Rick Brown is a director of CPI Strategic, which focuses on strategic advice and market analysis. He was an adviser to Howard government ministers Nick Minchin and Kevin Andrews, from 2004 to 2007.

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