If the election race tightens, as I expect it to once the imminent campaign gets under way, don’t be surprised if Australia ends up with another hung parliament.
At least as significant as this week’s slight improvement for the government, Newspoll showed a quarter of voters intending to vote for anyone other than the Coalition or Labor. While the bookies, often as good a guide as the published polls, still strongly favour a Labor win, their next pick, well ahead of a Liberal win, is a hung parliament. Bad at any time, in today’s more turbulent world, facing far greater economic and budget pressures than previously, another hung parliament would be diabolical.
But that’s where we are headed if the campaign doesn’t move the needle for one of the two major party leaders, and if the real agenda of the so-called Voices independents isn’t exposed.
For the Coalition, seeking a fourth term, with retirements in key seats and an unfavourable redistribution, and without damaging Labor tax and climate policies to campaign against or Clive Palmer’s $80m ad blitz to help, winning this time was always going to be harder than last time.
Yet Labor has been utterly unconvincing, with a leader who has supported death taxes and wealth taxes, who has said that coal has no future (despite the budget’s reliance on it) and that he couldn’t bring himself to turn boats around. Anthony Albanese now claims he supports the government on nuclear-powered submarines and border protection, isn’t “woke” and won’t change “anything much” in Labor’s first term.
The Opposition Leader is no centrist like Bob Hawke, despite his claims, and there’s no real momentum behind him as there was with Kevin 07. As an astute observer of numbers reminded me this week, the electoral arithmetic is tougher for Labor than its boosters admit. The Coalition’s strong defensive ground game in 2019 has given it only three seats to defend with a margin under 3 per cent, whereas Labor has to defend 13 seats on margins up to 3 per cent. It’s why Albanese’s failure to make real polling gains in Queensland has strategists increasingly concerned. It’s also why the ALP has turned its attention to NSW, where it’s doing better; that, and the fact the Liberal Party’s civil war has hurt its chances and depleted the usual army of volunteers and supporters.
It’s why the campaign matters as much as it does, because whoever can land the big bloc of undecideds will move into the Lodge. It’s also why the left has worked up its clever insurance policy of the so-called Voices independents. Labor hardheads recognise that Albanese isn’t the man likely to win them a landslide, so they’ve got a plan B if there’s a repeat of the 2010 election outcome.
In 2010, the result was undecided for more than a fortnight while three independents in conservative seats tried to work out what they wanted. Two of them, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, never seriously negotiated with the Coalition at any stage.
In the end, they opted for a Labor minority government that had already climbed into bed with the Greens to foist on voters the carbon tax that Julia Gillard had ruled out, emphatically, just before polling day. It was a shambles, with Gillard eventually rolled by Kevin Rudd and Labor finally swept out in a landslide win by Tony Abbott.
The only policy achievement of the Gillard government was the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which may be a boon for people with disabilities but is turning out to be a fiscal time bomb, and a debased parliament mired in tawdry manoeuvres such as installing one-time Liberal Peter Slipper in the Speaker’s chair.
This time, a Labor minority government would be hostage to the Greens again, but at a time of significant global uncertainty. If the Liberals had to negotiate themselves into minority government, they would find themselves hostage to left-leaning independents in leafy seats that were once Liberal and who got elected only by beating Liberals. That’s assuming these independents could ever back the Coalition, which is doubtful given Zali Steggall’s recent comments on the ABC’s Q&A that she could support the Lib-Nats but it would help if they dumped Scott Morrison as leader.
It’s bad enough when the electorate votes for one prime minister only to have the Labor or Liberal party rooms suddenly decide they should second-guess the voters. It would be even worse were the people to vote for Morrison only to have a cabal of GetUp-linked independents suddenly give us a prime minister who hadn’t been one of the contenders at the general election and hadn’t been tested in a campaign. In such a case the election effectively would be decided not by the electorate at large but by a handful of MPs, whom hardly anyone outside their seats knows, based on their personal likes and dislikes. I can’t think of anything more corrosive of faith in our democracy, but the risk is real.
That’s why the only question that matters for any of the independents with a credible chance of winning a seat is: who would you support in the event of a hung parliament – Labor under Albanese or the Coalition under Morrison? Forget their electoral patter about a better environment and more integrity in government, because that’s all just a facade.
The real agenda of the key independents running in Liberal seats – Allegra Spender in Wentworth, Kylea Tink in North Sydney, Sophie Scamps in Mackellar, Monique Ryan in Kooyong, Kate Chaney in Curtin and the others – is to drive the Liberal Party to the green left, then to push the Coalition out of government. What else would you expect from candidates whose campaigns are linked to former Labor and GetUp activists, funded by green financier Simon Holmes a Court, and are so scant of any policy substance as to verge on embarrassing?
In the current parliament, the voting record of the independents in former Liberal-held seats shows their real nature. Based on Parliamentary Library data, here’s how often they’ve voted with Labor: Indi’s Helen Haines 67.92 per cent of the time; Warringah’s Steggall 66.04 per cent of the time; and Mayo’s Rebekha Sharkie 64.64 per cent of the time.
If the independent MPs and candidates won’t say exactly who they’d support in the event of a hung parliament, they themselves have no integrity. All of them need to answer that question now, in the campaign, to show voters their true colours and to ensure that voters are not dudded after the election – win, lose or draw.
Peta Credlin is the host of Credlin on Sky News, 6pm weeknights.
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