Liberals, Labor and leftists in danger of ignoring political past

In Victoria, Labor and Daniel Andrews benefited from a tight preference exchange with the Greens, while the Coalition did much worse with breakaway minor parties on the right. Picture: AAP

Wise heads in politics and media should know better than to be writing off the Liberal Party based on its election losses federally and in Victoria.

It’s not so long since a relatively unknown new Labor federal leader ran on what appeared to be an unthreatening platform to end almost 12 years of federal Coalition dominance.

Styling himself as an economic conservative, Kevin Rudd beat four-term PM John Howard in November 2007.

The similarities with a small target Anthony Albanese – once deputy PM to Rudd – tipping out the Coalition after three terms are obvious.

And guess what Crikey and the ABC said after 2007?

They claimed the Coalition was in dire trouble and the Murdoch-owned media would need to change to come to terms with the reality of near wall-to-wall Labor governments.

Yet only six years later, then opposition leader Tony Abbott banished the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd circus, and the Coalition had won elections in NSW, Queensland, Victoria and WA. The Murdoch papers did not go left and the Liberals did not go into decline.

It’s easy to forget that when Rudd won, Labor had already been in power in Queensland since 1989 under Wayne Goss, Peter Beattie and Anna Bligh. Labor had controlled NSW since 1995 under Bob Carr, Morris Iemma and Nathan Rees before Kristina Keneally’s crushing loss in 2011. The ALP had won elections under Steve Bracks in 1999, 2002 and 2006 before John Brumby finally lost in 2010.

Labor controlled Tasmania from 1999 until 2014 under Jim Bacon, Paul Lennon, David Bartlett and Lara Giddings, and was in power under Geoff Gallop and Alan Carpenter in WA from 2001 to 2008.

This is not to say the Libs do not have problems. They have lost support among young women, professional women and the under-39s, generally. These demographics are growing in number. The Libs also have trouble telling voters what and who they hope to represent.

Just as parts of the media have built audiences by publishing what certain readers agree with, conservative politicians have been fragmenting their vote by either reflecting the views of their membership base back to them or by pretending to be progressives to attract new voters.

While this column enjoys a good culture war, it doubts swinging voters are motivated to change their ballot by such issues.

Former prime minister John Howard remains the Coalition’s best thinker. Picture: AAP

Voters who rejected Labor in 2013 had had enough of the ALP’s revolving Rudd-Gillard-Rudd leadership chaos. They were punishing the party for PM Julia Gillard’s breaking of her 2010 “no carbon tax under a government I lead” promise.

More important still was the border chaos after Labor scrapped Howard’s Pacific Solution, the subsequent arrival of 50,000 asylum-seekers by boat and the drowning of 1200 at sea.

Unfortunately, the Coalition learnt little by watching Labor self-destruct, following with its own revolving-door leadership period. So how can the Liberals regroup?

The political media is polarised. Conservative pundits say the Coalition has moved too far to the left and wins elections when its stands for a clear alternative to Labor.

At the ABC, the Guardian and The Conversation, the problem is the Murdoch media and US-style cultural debates.

Both arguments have merit, but blaming the media is silly given the majority of voters and the Liberals themselves appear to have ignored the recommendations of the Murdoch papers and Sky News in Victoria.

Yet the Liberals have been shedding votes to right-wing minor parties, especially One Nation and Clive Palmer’s UAP, that think Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull stood for nothing. That bleeding to the right was compounded by the loss of six inner-city federal seats in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth to left-wing Teal independents, largely on the issue of climate change. Yet despite losses on their left and right flanks, the Coalition federally actually pulled more primary votes at the May poll than Labor: 35.7 per cent to 32.6 per cent. Labor maintained its traditional tight preference exchange with the Greens, who polled 12.2 per cent.

As Jack The Insider pointed out here last Wednesday, in Victoria Labor benefited from a tight preference exchange with the Greens, while the Coalition did much worse with breakaway minor parties on the right.

The Coalition’s best thinker remains Howard, who said after Morrison’s loss that he had made no real positive case for re-election. During the Abbott prime ministership, Howard spoke of the need for political leaders to be able to advocate for change. Know who you are targeting, and make sure the electorate understands your pitch.

Turnbull’s 2016 election campaign set the example of what not to do. Turnbull lost 14 seats in a drawn-out, unfocused campaign on the slogan “jobs and growth”. It set up the Morrison challenge in 2018. Yet Morrison did not so much win over the electorate in 2019 as benefit from voter doubt about then opposition leader Bill Shorten’s tax and spend agenda.

Howard as PM built a new constituency for the Liberals – the so-called Howard battlers. These were people who would once have been tradies voting Labor, but became independent small business operators after waves of industrial relations reform in the 1980s and ’90s. They were attracted to the politics of aspiration and sceptical about welfare, big government and heavy taxation. Howard spoke to them on talkback radio regularly and in long interviews on commercial television and on ABC 7.30.

These were also the demographics many of the News Corp tabloids were targeting at the time, often with stories about people who were succeeding in the outer suburbs of our cities. They were not dissimilar to the “forgotten people” the Liberals’ most successful PM, Sir Robert Menzies, targeted during 18 years in office across two separate periods.

Two-term Victorian Liberal premier Jeff Kennett in the Herald Sun on Wednesday rejected Premier Dan Andrews’ suggestion on election night that Labor’s win showed “hope always defeats hate”.

Kennett denied the conservatives had engaged in political hate speech, and as Sky News host Peta Credlin pointed out here on Thursday, the Opposition’s agenda was anything but conservative.

Kennett’s piece hit on something – hope is far more electorally powerful than culture wars. Voters want better lives for themselves and their children.

While Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has shown none of the hubris that brought Rudd undone, he has opened policy doors for the Coalition. At a time of high inflation and rising interest rates, Labor and voters may come to regret the new industrial relations legislation passed last week that threatens to unleash trade union militancy. And Albanese’s insistence that renewable energy is always the cheapest form of power will bite him, as anyone following the power crisis in Europe will know.

At the Guardian, the ABC and the Nine papers, the climate wars are apparently over. That is not the evidence from the northern hemisphere. The left media and its allies in the Greens and Labor will use every climate event to scare voters – as they did to Howard in 2007 over the drought during which Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery told voters the nation’s dams would never fill again.

The Coalition needs to remember it was Shorten’s duplicity on coal and the Greens’ convoy to central Queensland’s coalfields that began to turn the 2019 election tide.

The Liberals need to preselect better candidates, especially women, and develop policies to revive aspiration.

They need to project a positive agenda rather than always being a party opposing all change.