Peter Hartcher writes in The Sydney Morning Herald
When an election is held, powerful explanations for victory and defeat form quickly. They will direct political behaviour for years. Some explanations will be well founded. Others will be myths.
What explains last week’s election results? Why was the Coalition defeated? Why did Labor win? What’s the meaning of the ‘‘teal wave’’, the female climate change independents who captured the Liberal Party’s traditional heartland? And the others – Greens, Pauline Hanson, Clive Palmer?
There’s been an immediate effort to claim an overarching ideological shift. Some progressives argue that Australia has moved to the left. And if you put together the gains made by Labor, the teal independents and the Greens, you can see their point.
It’s true that Labor made a net gain of at least seven seats, the teals six, the Greens two. That’s a total of 15 seats in a House of Representatives with 151 seats. But is it true that this represents a shift to the left?
The first problem with this claim is that the teal independents are not ‘‘left wing’’ in the traditional sense. Yes, they all put a priority on climate action. They all want an integrity commission and they all want justice for women.
But the teal independents do not advocate for a redistribution of income. They don’t like unions. They are ‘‘business-focused’’ in the words of Allegra Spender, who took Sydney’s eastern suburbs seat of Wentworth, formerly Malcolm Turnbull’s, from the Liberal Party. Or, as one of the two incumbent teal MPs, Zali Steggall, put it recently, her northern beaches electorate of Warringah, formerly Tony Abbott’s, is ‘‘aspirational – people of all income levels work hard to get ahead, they don’t want the traditional socialist way of viewing the economy’’.
Her supporters ‘‘like competition, free trade, small government, opportunity’’. She increased her share of the vote last week by 3.5 percentage points to 60 per cent on a two-party preferred basis, so presumably she knows what she’s talking about. She voted 51 per cent of the time with the Morrison government on legislation. The other incumbent teal, Helen Haines, says she voted 90 per cent with the government on legislation.
The confusion over the teal independents is in thinking that climate policy is progressive or left-wing. It is not, certainly not any longer. It is now a mainstream matter. For example, the Liberal Party’s research found that action on climate change is one of the top three priorities motivating voters across the country, across all the electorates in which it ran candidates.
Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce got good political mileage by making climate change a point of divisive partisan politics. But it was temporary. The Australian people eventually figured out the realities. The Liberals’ mistake was to think that climate boofheadedness would be a permanent winner. No longer a matter of partisan divide, the need for climate action is now a national unifier, with some possible pockets of exception in central Queensland.
Scott Morrison knew this, which was why he took the trouble to force the Coalition to adopt a policy of net zero by 2050. But he wasn’t able to bring all of the Coalition with him, and not able to construct a serious set of climate policies. It still looked insincere. The Liberals suffered accordingly.
And the teals’ other two top priorities
– integrity in government and justice for women – are not left-wing causes. They are mainstream and bipartisan. Only Morrison could manage to position himself to seem in favour of corruption and against women. That took special efforts of ineptitude. This was a Morrison special.
The teal independent movement represented a civil war within the centre-right of Australian politics, an updating of it perhaps, but not an abandonment of it.
Labor and the Greens do represent the left on the Australian spectrum, and they certainly did improve their numbers in the House, but not their primary vote. Labor’s haul of primary votes fell from 4.75 million in 2019 to 4.15 million last week. That’s a loss of 600,000 votes for Labor. The Greens did increase their primary vote, but by just 4000 votes. These numbers are the official Australian Electoral Commission figures from late yesterday afternoon.
Labor and the Greens – the left – improved their position in the House, but shed more than half a million voters from their combined base since the last federal election. They appear to have lost some votes to teal independents in socalled ‘‘tactical voting’’ – that is, not voting for your favoured candidate but to achieve a tactical outcome: the removal of the Morrison government.
How do we know? In 15 seats where there was a new and credible ‘‘teal’’ independent candidate standing against a sitting Liberal, the vote share for Labor and the Greens fell by markedly more than it did in other seats.
The Australian people overall did not shift to the left. Any political party that assumes so will be acting on a false signal. The central dynamic of the election was the rejection of the Morrison government. The Coalition was hammered. The number of primary votes cast for the Coalition fell from 5.9 million in 2019 to 4.59 million last week, a loss of 1.31 million. That is, 22 per cent fewer people voted for the Coalition than three years earlier. Its vote splintered in several directions – to the teal independents, to Labor, to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, to Clive Palmer’s United Australia.
Why, exactly? The various political parties will conduct their detailed postmortems but we already have plenty of evidence in plain sight. The Morrison government’s polling numbers were holding up well in the first phase of the pandemic in 2020. He won kudos for quickly closing the borders, for quickly introducing JobKeeper, and so on.
But the government’s standing fell and fell hard last year when the vaccine rollout faltered. Its failure to respond credibly to Brittany Higgins’ Parliament House rape allegations and the Women’s March for Justice compounded the problem. Its fate was sealed when, at the end of last year as Australia was beginning to emerge from lockdowns, the Omicron variant arrived and lockdowns resumed. When it failed to organise RAT tests and then failed to respond to the floods on the eastern seaboard, it was all over.
‘‘We’re going to spend months now arguing about whether we went too far left or too far right,’’ a Liberal strategist says. ‘‘It’s all pretty inane. Most Australians don’t care about the ideological position of the Liberal Party. They don’t follow what’s said on Sky After Dark or in the Guardian. They just want good government.’’
Morrison’s office put primary importance on making policy announcements to ‘‘communicate values’’ to the electorate, as one of his close advisers liked to explain during his term. Not to solve problems, note, but to ‘‘communicate values’’. This is campaigning, not governing. Competence went missing.
And, if voters were inclined to reconsider during the election campaign, they were shown yet further government incompetence.
The Solomon Islands security deal with China discredited Morrison’s claim to national security superiority. Both major parties say their own research shows that this really registered with voters. ‘‘The government’s shrill response to the Solomons deal convinced people they weren’t up to it,’’ a Labor strategist says.
Fast-rising inflation and rising interest rates similarly damaged the Coalition claim to superior economic management. ‘‘With all the cost of living pressure facing ordinary Australians,’’ the strategist says, ‘‘the government had nothing to offer. All their responses were temporary.’’ And voters saw through it. ‘‘The nature of the economic problem facing the country was changing and the government had nothing.’’
Morrison was an unpopular prime minister, no question. But unpopular prime ministers have been re-elected in the past so long as they were seen to be capable, or, at least, more capable than their opponents. Morrison was disliked but also incompetent. It was fatal.
It was a Liberal strategist who pointed out the central resonance of one of Labor’s campaign slogans: ‘‘No more mistakes. No more Morrison.’’
It’s been asserted that this election showed a continuation of the people’s abandonment of the two main parties. And that’s certainly borne out in their declining combined share of the primary vote. Between them, the current count gives the two majors just 69 per cent of the total electorate.
But this trend isn’t inevitable. The Liberal Party forgot its traditional values and so lost its traditional voters, while failing to provide basic competence to the nation. Labor, still traumatised from its 2019 loss, offered a timid alternative. Can the main parties win new support? That’s entirely in their hands.
The party fanatics and cheerleaders, the true believers and camp followers will offer endless ideological and philosophical arguments as they dissect the results. That’s their nature. They will overlook competence. At their peril.
Peter Hartcher is the SMH political editor.
