Joe Hildebrand: Path to Coalition victory no walk in the park despite Albanese’s tumble
The fact that Anthony Albanese couldn’t name the unemployment rate or official interest rate on his first full day on the hustings is a stark lesson in the dangers of complacency, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Opinion
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Last week I attended a candidates debate in the most marginal seat in the country — the outer-Sydney/Blue Mountains electorate of Macquarie held by Labor’s Susan Templeman by a cigarette paper of 0.2 per cent.
Yet with Labor riding at around 55 per cent in the polls at the time, Templeman should have theoretically needed only a how-to-vote card and a heartbeat to win.
And so I remarked to the ALP camp beforehand that they must be feeling pretty good. They looked at me like I was mad.
Such is the PTSD the party is still experiencing from its last shock election loss that not only are ALP operatives worried they might fall short of the mere seven new seats they need to form government, they are worried about even holding all their current seats.
This might not be right but it is definitely wise. They say all politics is local and despite the undeniable unpopularity of Scott Morrison, there is every chance a strong Liberal candidate could buck the national trend in a handful of marginals.
Indeed, the government is counting on it – especially in NSW, where the Coalition is targeting Labor seats in an effort to offset losses it knows it’s going to get in Queensland and WA. Seats like Macquarie, for example.
Macquarie is also a strange fish in that it is what you might call a proto-bellwether. While it does not always go with the government of the day, it seems to reflect the mood of the electorate and perhaps even anticipates the next government an election or two in advance.
Hence it turned Liberal in 2010 when Labor was forced into minority government after the disastrous Julia Gillard coup and then turned back to Labor in 2016 when it looked like the Liberals might be forced into minority after Malcolm Turnbull’s coup.
Then when everyone was predicting a massive swing to Labor at the 2019 election, Macquarie swung the other way – just like the polls should have done.
Little wonder the Templeman camp is as nervous as Will Smith’s image consultant.
Yesterday’s Newspoll showing the race tightening to 53-47 and Morrison pulling further ahead as preferred prime minister will have done little to assuage anxieties.
The fact that Anthony Albanese couldn’t name the unemployment rate or official interest rate on his first full day on the hustings is a stark lesson in the dangers of complacency.
Of course, if 53-47 was the result on polling day it would be a thumping Labor win. If the poll was out by the full three per cent and the real number was 51.5-48.5, even that would almost be enough for Labor to scrape home.
Election guru Antony Green puts the exact magic number at 51.8 per cent – namely a 3.3 per cent turnaround from its 2019 result that would give it the seven Liberal seats from Bass to Longman.
But of course that assumes the swing is uniform. The pesky thing about elections is that they never are.
Hence why Labor under Kim Beazley won the majority vote in 1998 but still lost to John Howard – who was campaigning for a new tax, mind you – simply because the Coalition outran Labor in the marginals that mattered.
Howard could’ve been a oncer, but thanks to that campaign he became the second longest-serving Liberal PM after Menzies – and the undisputed elder statesman of the party.
And so we come back again to Macquarie, and seats like it on Sydney’s regional rim that will decide who sits in The Lodge. Labor must hold it, as well as the Central Coast swinger of Dobell and the south coast seat of Gilmore being targeted by veteran state minister Andrew Constance.
Meanwhile the Libs need to sandbag Robertson on the CC, Reid in the outer-inner west and Lindsay in what should be the Labor heartland of Penrith, even as they try to make inroads into Labor’s home turf.
And so while other states might see bigger swings and more seats changing hands, NSW will be the state that really matters and it will be tight close-quarter combat.
And, if you want to know how tight, you only need to pull back to look at the broader national picture.
The Liberals hold just three seats on a margin below three per cent. Labor is sitting on 12. No wonder the Coalition has decided the best defence is offence and the ALP is reaching for a few stiffeners.
But having said all that, the path to a Coalition victory still makes Frodo Baggins’s little road trip look like a walk in the park.
Yes, there are eerie parallels with where the two parties were in 2019 but Morrison was nowhere near as unpopular then as he is today and Albanese is nowhere near as unpopular as Bill Shorten.
And analysis by Resolve Political Monitor in Nine Newspapers yesterday confirms the Coalition has experienced a double-digit drop in its primary vote in Queensland and WA, which in turn confirms its only hope for survival is to go on the attack in NSW.
This means it will have to go hard and negative against Albanese and the ALP. This is where Labor’s greatest strength lies – there simply isn’t that much for the Coalition to attack.
And that’s because the ALP has spent the past three years doing the hard, smart, internal work it needs to do to win: Rejecting the rhetoric of wealth redistribution and the ideology of woke left activists, and restoring Labor’s place as the centred and pragmatic party of mainstream Australia.
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