Won the battle, lost the war

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.