Peta Credlin: Remember chaos of last hung parliament before voting Greens or Teals

Given how challenging and dangerous these times are globally, a weak PM and another hung parliament is the last thing Australia needs, writes Peta Credlin.

Cyclone Alfred has done what no Canberra journalist has managed to do and that’s to force Anthony Albanese’s hand on the date of the looming election. Faced with the risk of storm damage and angry voters if he were to call it today as planned, the PM announced on ABC television Friday night that “yes, the election would be in May” and he would deliver a March budget.

I am told public servants choked on their chardonnay as they watched, given most had already packed up their desks assuming Albanese would call the election for April 12, and that they would get to take the next five weeks off as Australia slipped into “caretaker mode”.

Not so now as they all scramble back into the office tomorrow and dust off a budget they thought would never be delivered.

So what happens now? Can Labor use the extra time to arrest their slide in the polls? Will the mop-up after the cyclone emergency make a weak man look prime ministerial again? And what does this all mean in terms of the hung parliament almost every pollster says is heading our way?

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Queensland at the Kedron Emergency Services Complex. Cyclone Alfred has forced his hand on the date of the looming election. Picture: Adam Head

LOOMING CATASTROPHE

First, a May election was not Labor’s preferred date because it now forces the government to deliver a budget that will lay bare the scale of our economic woes and the decade of red ink (the debt and the deficits) ahead.

Labor wanted to go early to avoid this and, as late as Thursday night, this was still the plan; until the fear of a Queensland-NSW backlash post-Alfred if the PM had called it this weekend forced him to rule it out.

Labor has been trailing in the polls since the failure of the PM’s signature Voice referendum. Picture: Tim Hunter

And second, other than the PM who is busy telling everyone he can win in his own right, almost everyone in Labor thinks that their majority is gone. The fact that the government really wanted an election in April, not May, betrays Labor strategists’ fear that the trend is not their friend.

Ever since the failure of the PM’s signature Voice referendum 18 months ago, Labor has been trailing in the polls. Only two of the past 15 polls have had Labor ahead. The rest are mostly 51:49 (or better) to the Coalition, meaning a 3 per cent two party-preferred swing since the 2022 election.

Based on the electoral pendulum adjusted for the latest redistributions, on a uniform basis, a 3 per cent swing would deliver seven Labor seats and three Teal or Green seats to the Coalition (so 10 seats); and deliver two Labor seats to the Greens, leaving a hung parliament with 69 Labor seats, 67 Coalition seats, five Greens, four Teals, and five independents. In other words, there would almost certainly be a Labor minority government dependent on the Greens plus the Teals.

Given the Greens want a faster move to net zero, a total phase-out of coal mining and gas extraction, lower spending on defence, higher spending on social security, even more migration (especially of asylum seekers), much more support for Palestine, and the legalisation of recreational drugs (an agenda supported by most of the Teals), the result of this hung parliament would be a strategically more vulnerable, economically more stagnant, and socially more divided Australia.

A catastrophe, in other words. And that’s what is considered Labor’s best result. More recent polls show a growing chance that Peter Dutton will get enough seats to govern in his own right.

To all those voters who think that they’re worse off than three years ago, that the government does not deserve to be re-elected, and that Anthony Albanese is weak and out of his depth – and that’s most likely a strong majority of all voters if the polls are to be believed – a Labor-led hung parliament would be the worst possible outcome because it would mean an even weaker and more left-wing government after the election than before it.

Yet that’s the likely outcome unless there’s a considerably stronger swing to the Coalition than the majority of polls currently indicate. To win the 19 seats needed for a Liberal majority would require a uniform swing of 4 per cent – by no means impossible or even unlikely, given the recent tendency of the Coalition to strengthen during a campaign and Albanese’s poor performance last time – but it would still be a greater swing than the 3.6 per cent achieved by Tony Abbott at the 2013 election (when the Coalition won an extra 18 seats) and up there with the 5 per cent swing achieved by John Howard at the 1996 election (when the Coalition won an extra 29 seats).

SLIM MAJORITY

Labor and Albanese are in trouble because when he won against Scott Morrison in 2022, the size of his victory was incredibly small by modern standards – just 77 seats.

First term PMs usually win by a landslide and it’s that big incoming margin that gives them a second term even when the honeymoon has faded – think 94 seats for John Howard (1996), 83 seats for Kevin Rudd (2007), 90 seats for Tony Abbott (2013) and you can see why having just 77 makes Albanese so vulnerable to a hung parliament. Struggling in the polls, he has virtually no buffer to withstand the usual swing against an incumbent government.

Kevin Rudd in 2007.

Tony Abbott in 2013. Picture: AP Photo/Rob Griffith

Remember the chaos last time there was a hung parliament in 2010. It took 17 days before Julia Gillard could cobble together her motley-crew of a minority government by promising the Greens the carbon tax that she’d explicitly denied she would introduce pre-election.

For three years, the government was not only hostage to two bitter, narcissistically inclined former National Party independents (Oakeshott and Windsor) but it was also vulnerable to any defectors in its own ranks. It was to shore up the government’s numbers that it dumped its own speaker in favour of the Liberal turncoat Peter Slipper; and it was to defend the scandal-plagued Slipper that Gillard made her notorious misogyny speech after Slipper’s unprintable comments about female genitalia. These were lost years for our country when billions were wasted trying to buy the votes of crossbenchers and yet that’s what we will get again unless voters give Dutton the seats needed to govern in his own right.

Say what you like about Julia Gillard, but she was tough. Picture: Gary Ramage

Say what you like about Gillard, but she was tough. Imagine Albanese in the seething cauldron of a hung parliament, a man who has never been on top of the detail and who’s already half-checked out to his clifftop retirement mansion, and you can understand why it would be Adam Bandt with the whip hand in any Labor-Green alliance.

Maybe there are voters so keen to punish the big parties that they don’t care if they end up punishing the country. But given how challenging and dangerous these times are globally, a weak PM and another hung parliament is the last thing Australia needs.

Hence my plea to left-wing voters upset with the Albanese government, for your country’s sake, “don’t vote Green”. And to any right-wing voters who haven’t forgiven the Morrison government, “don’t vote Teal” or you will trash our future.

THUMBS UP

Victorian Liberals – it looks like they’ve forced a massive backdown from Premier Jacinta Allan who now says she is open to banning machetes. They should be banned and that ban needs to be national too, so that they can’t be imported into Australia. Needed for gardening said Labor? Give me a break!

THUMBS DOWN

Tax free AFL – Why does the AFL pay no tax even though it makes over $1bn a year and pays its executives massive salaries while grassroots sport struggles to survive?

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Remember chaos of last hung parliament before voting Greens or Teals