Won the battle, lost the war

John Howard’s legitimacy problems are larger than the question of whether he played a race card with the Afghan asylum seekers – they go to the root of the way he framed the entire election contest.

Howard has proved himself to be very clever at fighting battles on side issues, and winning them. In the republic referendum campaign he split the republican vote by framing the question as a choice between types of republic rather than between republic and monarchy. Having split the republicans into two major camps he (or lieutenants like Tony Abbott) found a theme – distrust of politicians – which welded half the split together with the monarchists and delivered Howard victory.

By the end of the campaign it was clear that the majority of Australians are republicans yet Australia was to remain a monarchy.

While this might be clever politics it is ultimately a self-defeating strategy. It delivers the result he wants only by avoiding the key issues and fighting on entirely tangential grounds. If you don’t fight for a constitutional monarchy and instead align yourself with public mistrust of politicians, then support for a monarchy will shrink, and distrust of politicians will grow. The reverse of what a monarchist politician should want. But if the key issues were addressed, the strategy would come undone because the coalition would not hold together. So the battle for power is won, but the war for hearts and minds is lost.

The federal election was a more sophisticated example of this technique. In this case the coalition was put together from a number of niches. The most significant one was the 8.43 per cent of the nation that voted for One Nation in 1998. It also included working-class voters in areas like western Sydney and south-east Queensland – a group that Howard has called his "battlers". But it also included the majority of the Liberal Party’s traditional heartland in the affluent metropolitan areas. All of these groups have very different agendas. In this case the one issue that intersected with all groups was the refugee issue.

When we interviewed One Nation voters online there was universal glee. Howard was doing Pauline Hanson’s bidding on refugees and they were giving him their enthusiastic second preference as a result. When probed about the rest of Howard’s agenda they were much less enthusiastic. Was Australia "heading in the right direction"? No, it hadn’t been for more than 25 years, but Labor would probably be worse. A number of them had a highly strategic aversion therapy attitude to politics. They said they had voted against the Liberal party in state elections to punish them and to encourage them to adopt One Nation policies. The message was clear. We are voting for Howard, but only so long as he does what we want. For these people refugees and big "L" leadership were the major issues that mattered. While we specifically spoke to One Nation supporters, their attitudes ought to be read as being more widely representative. Many traditional Labor working-class voters would hold similar views.

Not so for centre voters. Refugees was an issue, but more likely to be a negative issue for both Howard and the Opposition than a positive one. To a certain extent it was a distraction. They actually wanted to hear about domestic issues, but most of these weren’t making it through the clutter. They didn’t buy the style of leadership on offer from either Howard or Beazley, looking for something more lower case, inclusive and post-modern. No-one was offering it. In our last focus group discussions with them, the message from the Government had cut through, but that from the Opposition was blunt. They saw Beazley addressing the issues that interested them and looking to the future, and they saw Howard caught in the past and offering nothing new, but they thought Howard could deliver, and they were doubtful of Beazley’s capacity.

Voters on the traditional left were enraged at the Government but they were disillusioned with the opposition. These people are some of Labor’s strongest "talkers", but this election they were keeping mum and toying with voting Green or Democrat.

So, while only one group was voting directly for the government on the refugee issue, it was affecting most voters in some way. Blue collar conservatives loved it. For centre voters it was providing dirty air that prevented the opposition from getting its message through. Left-wing voters were being driving away from both Government and Opposition.

The Government has argued since the election that they didn’t win on the refugee issue, and if they did that this doesn't amount to playing the race card. If they mean that most people who voted for them are not racists and were not motivated solely or predominantly by the issue then they are right. But if they mean that they would have won the election without it, they are wrong. This is the legitimacy issue that the press, the elites and their political opponents have pointed to.

Their majority looks like being 0.98 per cent, so their win can be wholly explained by the transference of votes from One Nation to the Government. (One Nation lost 4.09 per cent of its vote this election). We know that a large proportion of this vote is xenophobic, and that there was a big jump in the Government’s vote immediately after the Tampa incident. This indicates a decisive shift in some demographic group, almost assuredly blue collar conservatives. Circumstantially (which is as good as one can do in this type of analysis) race, or at best xenophobia, would appear to be the deciding factor.

However, on the basis of the thoughts of traditional centre and left voters the government might argue that it was the opposition’s handling of the issue that delivered it government, not the fact that it jumped on the boat people. There is some truth in this. The left came back to the Labor Party via preferences, but it wasn't doing its usual job of talking up the issues and bagging the Liberal Party. Centre voters were more likely to be struck by the "me-tooism" of the Labor approach. As our qualitative poll of persuadable voters showed, their largest single hesitations in voting Labor (accounting for 50 per cent of the sample), were that they were unhappy with the way that it had dealt with the refugee issue, and thought it was too close to the Government.

One of the things that has struck me since the election is not that various Liberal Party identities have been arguing that the election was not run on refugees, but the number of run-of-the-mill traditional Liberal voters who have been telling me that. To some extent this is a reflection of their own voting decisions. They object to being tarred with a racist brush when their personal decision was not racially based. I think it is also a denial of what happened. Their personal moral quandary when any government is elected on this basis is too hard to bear. Part of this denial is the argument that the ALP is as much to blame as the Government because it supported the Government’s position.

I agree that Kim Beazley’s tenure of office has been blemished because he did not take a stand against the government on this issue. But it is much more complex than that. Beazley did not choose to play the issue, a desperate John Howard did. Beazley’s sin is one of omission rather than commission, and therefore less severe.

Some in both parties would also claim "greater good" justifications for what they did. They would both say that they did what was necessary so as to attain other ends. So Beazley would say, "If I hadn’t gone with the government on the refugee legislation we would have lost the blue-collar conservative vote and be even further away from government than we are now." In other words, it is not a question of morality, but of political strategy.

One of the reasons that the Labor Party lost this election is that its political strategy was astray. It did not recognise, or was institutionally unable to respond to, the fact that the Tampa radically changed the rules of engagement. Rather than continuing to play low-risk politics, helping the government to lose, it had to take a higher-risk strategy and differentiate itself on the issue to haul back the huge lead that the government opened up. By playing twins with the government it not only alienated traditional left-wing voters, but it made itself unable to compete for headlines whenever another boatload of refugees came over the horizon. It also couldn’t point out the manifest absurdities and exorbitant cost of the South Pacific solution which were becoming very obvious by the end of the campaign.

Could a campaign opposing the Government’s legislation have worked? Peter Andren the Independent member for Calare increased his vote by 15 per cent in this election. The Australian Electoral Commission hasn’t done a two-party preferred distribution yet, but it looks to me that on this basis his vote would be around 70 per cent. He achieved this result while opposing the Government’s asylum seeker policy. Andren supports a lot of policies that the ALP doesn’t, so causation is difficult to isolate but it certainly proves that it was possible to oppose the policy and prosper.

Beazley’s embrace of the Government’s position represented a reversal of five years of the party’s electoral strategy, which was to beat up the One Nation problem on the government’s traditional right, destablising a proportion of its vote, while making a grab for the middle. Howard wriggled out of this fix by appropriating a large slab of the One Nation vote. His problem now is how to keep it, and this is the tougher legitimacy question.

As most commentators noted, the Government didn’t put much of a third-term agenda in front of the electorate. It certainly didn’t push economic reform because it was busy cosying up to the very group in the community most opposed to it. By their own admission voters in this group swing heavily in order to punish governments. With the war in Afghanistan coming to a quicker than anticipated end it is likely that the flood of refugees will stop. Where is Howard’s tool to keep the One Nation voters in the fold?

During the last term of Government the Liberal Party plumbed new depths in terms of the strength of its first-preference vote. Expect that to happen again very quickly. By not arguing the merits of his policies and running on an issue at a tangent to the real issues, Howard has put himself in a position where he has a very limited mandate, outside of the small number of campaign promises that he made. He will certainly find it difficult if he tries to implement further economic or industrial relations reform. Sometimes the price of victory is too high.