Right-wing break out helping Shorten’s ALP

Commentators who say there’s no difference between Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten are telling a big fat political porky.

In his years as a minister in the Howard government, as opposition leader and finally as prime minister, Tony Abbott always made it clear he regarded editor-at-large Paul Kelly as the doyen of Australian historians and political analysts. He was unequivocal on many social occasions in front of people who wrote for me when I ran this newspaper.

What then to make of the hostility shown Kelly by my long-time Melbourne colleagues Andrew Bolt and Terry McCrann over Kelly’s analysis of the problems of modern government in Australia, the collapse of the political centre and the fracturing of the conservative side of politics?

First remember this was Kelly’s analysis long before ­Brexit, the election of Donald Trump or the so-called revolt against the elites. Paul wrote at the end of the Rudd and Gillard governments in his Walkley award-winning 2014 tour de force, Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation, that Australia was now on the “down escalator” of nations because of its inability to make tough decisions in the national ­interest. The book is a forensic and fierce criticism of Labor’s six years in office.

Kelly’s thesis was bagged in the left media, and especially on Crikey, and is still regularly ­attacked by Crikey political editor Bernard Keane for being too conservative. But as usual with the best political brain in the country, events soon fell the way Kelly predicted they would, and systemic problems within the Senate have taken us down the international league tables of economic performance. Events most surely will fall the way Kelly predicts again.

Conservatives in the press and especially on Sky News weeknights see themselves as representing the Coalition base. And they do indeed have a strong audience among conservative Liberals and Nationals, and One Nation voters. They also have the courage to call out blunders on their own side of politics.

Yet as Kelly, Miranda Devine and Janet Albrechtsen have all pointed out, whatever your feelings about Malcolm Turnbull, the real alter­native to the Coalition is Bill Shorten’s Labor-Greens ­alliance. This is where this media scrum on the right of politics ends up. It destroys a centrist conservative government and Australia ends up with Shorten leading the most left-wing national government in the nation’s history.

Shorten would lead a government for trade unions, for public sector workers and for people on welfare.

Forget budget repair: Labor ­already went to last year’s election promising a slower return to surplus than the Coalition.

In government it will make a virtue of deficit financing in a low interest rate environment, knowing its electoral fortunes will be under­pinned, not by Paul Keating’s aspirationals, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families, but by Wayne Swan’s class war welfare dependants.

A Shorten government will ­ignore the legacy of Labor’s Hawke-Keating reform era and run class war campaigns against corporate Australia and high wage earners built on higher taxes for those who already carry the vast bulk of the taxation burden in one of the world’s most progressive taxation systems.

Conservatives who say this would be the dose of salts the ­Coalition needs are deluded. In a country where more than half of all voters already receive more in benefits than they pay in tax, this Labor government could easily hang about for four terms, having learned the lessons of disunity that seem to have eluded the ­Coalition’s “bed-wetters’’, as Sky News’s Peta Credlin likes to call them.

This would be a punishing price for the nation to pay to avenge ­Abbott. Which brings us to the gigantic lie at the heart of Australia’s conservative rebellion. Commentators who argue there is no difference between Malcolm Turnbull and Shorten are hiding their bile behind a big fat political porky.

They point to the government’s renewable energy target as proof of a lack of political differentiation between Coalition and Labor. What rot.

Turnbull is completely committed to Abbott’s own direct ­action policy on climate change and to Abbott’s renewable energy target of 23 per cent by 2020. ­Shorten’s policy is a mammoth 50 per cent renewable target by 2030, double the nation’s Paris emissions reduction target and enough to destroy industry in many states, plus an emissions intensity scheme that will look much like a carbon tax.

Labor wants a banking royal commission, more regulation of the economy and, above all, more tax to fix structural problems in the budget.

The Coalition is committed to lower taxes and spending cuts and went to the 2016 election promising lower company tax.

This raises another dubious political claim: that the Coalition since the leadership change in September 2015 has frittered away ­Abbott’s mammoth mandate. The leadership change was always going to backfire but the frittering was mostly Abbott’s and done long before the change.

Abbott could not get his 2014 budget through the Senate. He lifted taxes with a levy on all earners over $180,000 a year. He knighted Prince Philip, a move Bolt himself wrote could be the end of his prime ministership. He was given an ultimatum by his party in a spill motion in February 2015 after which he vowed to take notice of his MPs’ warnings, but he left his festering problems unresolved. Abbott lost 30 Newspolls in a row. His supporters can now scarcely cite Turnbull’s poor performances in eight polls and not accept Abbott trailed Labor for two full years.

Yet it was clearly a mistake to roll Abbott. Sitting PMs can peg back 10-point poll leads months out from an election. Polling is not predictive of events years out and Howard lagged a long way behind Kim Beazley in early 2001 and Mark Latham in early 2004 only to defeat both.

While Kelly, Chris Kenny and Dennis Shanahan, as well as this paper’s editorials, throughout 2015 urged the Coalition’s bed-wetters not to emulate Labor by cutting down a first-term prime minister, Turnbull at least won a majority at last July’s election.

Neither Abbott nor Julia Gillard in 2010 managed that after Rudd’s removal. Neither leader could get to Turnbull’s 76 seats after Rudd was cut down in similar circumstances to Abbott.

And, of course, Abbott’s large win in 2013 was largely a rejection of Labor’s chaos rather than an ­endorsement of Abbott’s conservatism. History suggests changes of federal government produce large swings that are wound back at first and second re-election campaigns.

Hawke won strongly in 1983, picking up 24 new seats with a swing of 3.6 per cent but in 1984 he faced a swing of 1.5 per cent, winning the two-party preferred 51.8 to 48.2 in a poll that expanded the size of the house. He faced another 1 per cent swing against in 1987. Howard trounced Keating in 1996 with a 5 per cent swing and an extra 29 seats, but almost lost the GST election in 1998, facing a swing of 4.6 per cent and the loss of 14 seats.

I published many editorials suggesting that in 2015 Abbott could beat Shorten, but he would surely have lost a lot of seats along the way.

Yet he would have campaigned harder than Turnbull on the ­Coalition’s key issues: doubts about Labor on asylum-seekers, on power prices and carbon taxes and on Labor’s commitment to fixing the budget.

History shows Turnbull, taking the advice of pollster Mark Textor, tried to run a positive campaign in 2016 that almost met the same fate Campbell Newman’s Queensland government did when it, too, followed Textor’s playbook in 2015.

History also provides a guide to how populist breakouts on the right end for the Coalition.

On Thursday, Bolt’s blog keenly promoted The Spectator Australia and a piece by former Treasury secretary John Stone naming a potential Abbott cabinet after the former PM’s return to the top job.

This is the same Stone who in 1987 joined the barking mad Joh for Canberra push that cost Howard the election that year after the Coalition agreement was dumped and the Nationals ran a series of three-cornered contests.

Stone ran as a National Party senator for Queensland under the tutelage of the disgraced Bjelke-Petersen.

Those with long memories will recall the whole debacle was cooked up by the white shoe brigade leaders Brian Ray (of Costigan royal commission and bottom of the harbour tax case fame) and Mike Gore (who fled Australia in 1998 to Canada owing creditors $45 million).

What is to be done? Well, conservative bed-wetters should see they are no better than the bed-wetters who undermined Abbott. An election is 2½ years away.

And Turnbull, badly lacking in political instinct and struggling with issues such as how to appeal to small business to try to head off Shorten’s outrageous push against a Fair Work Australia penalty rates inquiry he initiated, should reinstall Abbott in cabinet and harness the former PM’s tactical aggression to start winning the simple politics.