David Speers: How poor candidates can sink campaigns
Voters are finally engaged and the whole campaign is getting bogged down by poor candidate vetting. Surely there are passionate, interesting, accomplished people ready to help their party who don’t hold offensive views on women, Muslims, Jews or the LGBTQI community, writes David Speers.
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Scott Morrison “hasn’t put a foot wrong” according to his colleagues. He’s campaigned far better than his MPs expected and somehow managed to shift the debate away from the Liberals’ internal wars and onto Labor’s big target policy gamble.
But the hard heads in the party still doubt Morrison can win. “If we had another three months, who knows,” says one who understands the maths and what can realistically be achieved over the next two weeks.
The Coalition’s primary vote remains below 40 per cent in all of the polls, which is simply not high enough. John Howard won the 1998 election with a primary vote of 39.5 per cent, but he went into that contest with a handy 40-seat buffer.
Scott Morrison, by contrast, has no buffer. He actually needs to win three seats to hold a majority.
He may win some, but he’s almost certain to lose others. A net gain of three or more for the Coalition is a huge challenge.
There is still a path to Coalition victory on the electoral map and, as Donald Trump showed in 2016, that path can sometimes come up. But most of the time it doesn’t.
Within Labor, the week ended with growing confidence about their chances, despite a shaky start to the campaign for Bill Shorten. “He’s lost his mojo,” one shadow minister said at the start of the week. By Friday, things had steadied.
Shorten doubled down on climate change this week. While still refusing demands to detail the impact of his emissions reduction policies on jobs and wages, the Labor leader has returned to the emotional appeal of the need for more “climate action”.
Plenty of voters don’t buy Shorten’s argument that it’s “impossible” to calculate the exact cost of such policies, and Labor should have come into this campaign with a better answer on this.
But the party is betting even more voters, particularly in marginal seats, believe the need for stronger climate action outweighs these cost concerns. Labor may well be right.
The ALP also ramped up its campaign advertising this week, which should also help.
Yet for all the careful planning, timed policy announcements and choreographed marginal seat visits, both campaigns were knocked off course this week by some of their own dud candidates running in unwinnable seats.
The homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, racist and sexist social media rantings of the various Liberal, Labor and One Nation wannabe politicians highlighted a sad reality: political parties often struggle to find decent candidates to run in seats they’re unlikely to win.
The major parties have to field candidates in these seats to at least show they are serious about governing for all, and to help drive up their Senate vote.
The High Court’s dual citizenship ruling, though, has made the task of finding these candidates that much harder.
The Liberal Party lost three candidates in Victoria before the election due to dual citizenship concerns. The party is now reluctant to endorse anyone who may be in doubt, which has narrowed the gene pool dramatically.
Some say as many as two-thirds of potential candidates in some multicultural Melbourne seats simply can’t run. This is yet another reason why the constitutional ban on dual citizens in parliament needs rewording, but that’s a debate for another time.
Right now it means dud candidates slip through in the rush to find someone who’s not a dual citizen, not a public servant, has no financial interest with a Commonwealth entity and is still willing to run in a seat they probably won’t win.
This, however, does not excuse the flawed vetting procedures that failed to spot the appalling comments some have made about minority groups they don’t like.
As this week has shown, campaigns can be badly disrupted by the weakness of party organisations to forensically identify the historic hand grenades lurking among their endorsed candidates.
If the party organisations aren’t equipped to do this vetting themselves, they need to bring in experts before election time who can. Contract out the social media screening process to a team of professionals.
It’s not as if Australia is the only Western democracy grappling with the disruption that social media is creating to the political processes.
Nor does the failure of political parties to properly vet excuse the candidates themselves.
Surely there are passionate, interesting, accomplished people ready to help their party by running for parliament who don’t hold offensive views on women, Muslims, Jews or the LGBTQI community.
There are just two weeks to go in this campaign.
Voters are now engaged. They’re watching, listening and making up their minds, if they haven’t already.
They’re also voting. Pre-poll results are at record levels.
On Sunday, Labor will hold its official campaign “launch” in Brisbane. The Liberals will follow next weekend.
Morrison still needs something more in this final fortnight, but Shorten can’t just coast to victory.
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