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Shifting politics

By Mark Bahnisch - posted Monday, 2 April 2007


Political analysts don’t often make confessions, but I have one to make. My initial caution and scepticism about Rudd’s chances looks to have been dead wrong, if (I think) reasonable at the time of writing. A very good case could now be made that we’ve reached a tipping point and the election has already been won by Labor. That’s not to assert definitively that it will be, because it’s still a long way to go, but at this point in the election year cycle, it’s eminently plausible to think that some tectonic plates have shifted mightily.

Political analysis and psephology are as much arts as sciences, so commentary often only reflects the prevailing state of the political front. Much of politics is a battle for position, and day to day moves can frequently obscure longer term trends.

But two common errors are made in the practice of electoral analysis. The first is to assume every election is going to be similar to previous campaigns. Much commentary so far this year has followed a script which seems to be based on the assumption that this election will be a replay of the last one. Fighting the last war, in other words.

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For instance, Kevin Rudd has had to prove to the commentariat that he is “not Latham”. But at the same time every move in this year’s political game is compared against the Latham-Howard contest of 2004. Some pundits could barely contain their glee when they seized upon the broadband policy as “Rudd’s forest policy mistake”. And we've heard an awful lot about honeymoons.

The second mistake is to ignore or misconstrue such evidence as does exist about electoral behaviour. For instance, it’s often asserted that a large number of voters make up their minds very close to the end of a campaign. That’s held to be an advantage for incumbents. But in the American midterm elections, undecided voters broke very much the same way as swinging voters who’d already decided their vote - overwhelmingly for the Democrats. In fact, despite all the noise of the battle and the negative campaign, the Republicans had probably lost Congress when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

Whether or not Labor wins in a landslide this year (as the polls overwhelmingly suggest may be on the cards), it’s quite plausible to suggest that a tipping point occurred quite some time ago. In 2004, evidence from the Australian Electoral Survey suggests that interest rates as an issue wasn’t a major vote switcher. That’s not to say that it didn’t play a part, but it’s likely that Howard was on to something with his central theme of “trust”. Put bluntly, there was a lot of evidence that the electorate were desperate for an alternative to Howard in 2004, but that Mark Latham blew himself out of the water. Not least the fact that Labor, with a disastrous leader, still managed to score 47 per cent of the two-party preferred vote.

It’s instructive in this context to have a look at two very different recently published analyses of the state of political play in Australia, from Judith Brett in The Monthly, and from Peter Hartcher in the latest Quarterly Essay.

In some ways, it’s a bit of a puzzle as to why Hartcher was given 20,000 or so words to write what is little different from the ephemeral political op-ed that passes for political analysis in the Australian media. Hartcher is by no means an incompetent analyst, but like Steve Lewis in The Australian, his writing rarely departs from conventional wisdom.

In “Bipolar Nation: How to Win the 2007 Election” (see On Line Opinion for an edited extract), his advice to Labor can be distilled down into that familiar nostrum of newsprint commentary - Rudd must overcome Howard’s advantages on national security and the economy.

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In truth, Rudd probably doesn’t need any more advice on how to win the election than he’s already receiving.

Howard is winning it for him, by losing it.

As I wrote recently in Crikey, incumbency only provides an unassailable political fortress for a long term government when the opposition is so disunified and incompetent that voters opt for the devil they know, but with a fair degree of disgust. This analysis derives from research Graham Young and I carried out for The National Forum on the Queensland and New South Wales state elections, which picked the trend that an incompetent Liberal party would actually go backwards in some seats as voters punish the opposition for not providing a viable alternative to a government they’d love to see replaced.

The problem the Howard Government has at the moment is that it’s looking very far indeed from a safe and secure set of hands. Setting aside the immediate effect of a string of scandals, Ministers are sounding increasingly shrill and hyperbolic in their dire warnings about a Ruddian dystopia. While Rudd is on the front foot with policy announcements, the Coalition look every inch a dysfunctional opposition rather than a confident government with their eye on the prize of the national future.

No doubt Labor does have to establish credentials on national security and the economy.

But the dynamic on foreign policy is starting to resemble the turnaround on these issues which has beset the Republican Party (GOP), albeit with something of a time lag. In the states, Democrats now enjoy an 18-point advantage on terrorism over the GOP (Grand Old Party). When perceptions that the Republican foreign policy was simply misguided and incompetent set in, they coalesced to the point where all the rhetoric in the world about a “vote for the Democrats being a vote for the terrorists” had no effect, or worse, rebounded on those articulating it.

The problem the government faces on the economy is two-fold. First, the unending prosperity message simply doesn’t ring true with many voters, who have suffered through a falling housing market, creeping real wages growth, and four interest rate rises. While Howard battlers probably aren’t aware of figures showing that the share of GDP going to wages is at a 35-year low, they’ll be feeling the effects, and the close alliance of big business and the Coalition in championing WorkChoices raises the spectre of “economic reform” fattening corporate profits rather than being in their direct interests, or the national interest.

The Coalition is also on the back foot because Rudd’s emphases on co-operative federalism and infrastructure respond to real public desires. The government has been simultaneously blaming the states for every conceivable failing in services, while getting its paws all over policy directly related to infrastructure and service delivery.

Its agenda has either been largely symbolic (as with the culture wars in education), or it’s pretty clear that the commonwealth simply hasn’t been playing its part. Infrastructure is going to be a huge winner in Queensland for Labor because voters are well aware that federal funding just hasn’t been forthcoming for things like major road projects and water. And investing in infrastructure is going to look a lot more forward thinking than the politically unsexy proposition of tipping massive surpluses into a public service pension fund.

All that is to say that the government's advantages in the polls in these two key areas Hartcher identifies, is likely to be residual. The trend towards Labor on national security and the economy is likely to accentuate, and when it does, to do so quickly.

Which brings us back to the question of whether a tipping point has passed already.

Latrobe Professor of Politics Judith Brett makes a persuasive case that it has. She argues that Howard is caught on the wrong side of a number of key issues which point to the future, not the past. Most importantly, climate change. The link between the age of his government and his own age may have already seen Howard’s sun set.

The aggression and indiscipline the government has recently displayed will have reinforced this perception. When every utterance of the Treasurer is bluster and hyperbole, the government faces the danger that they now stand where Kim Beazley stood - no matter what they say, no one will be listening. If there’s evidence that is the case over the next few months, and particularly if the budget sinks like a stone, then the argument that the Coalition will have already lost will be clinched.

If voters have indeed tired of the Howard era, incumbency won’t save them if Rudd continues to present as a viable and trustworthy alternative prime minister. All the sound and fury in the world and a negative advertising campaign to beat all negative campaigns may shave a few points off Labor’s lead. But it’s worth remembering also that when federal governments lose in Australia, they have a tendency to lose big.

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About the Author

Dr Mark Bahnisch is a sociologist and a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development. He founded the leading public affairs blog, Larvatus Prodeo.

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