There’s no future in a Labor-lite opposition

The job of opposition is not to make weak compromises with a bad government, it’s to be a strong and clear ­alternative.

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In politics, as in life, almost nothing is as good as it seems, or as bad. Understandably, the election has been portrayed as a triumph for Labor and a catastrophe for the Liberals.

Anthony Albanese can take justified pride in becoming only the third Labor prime minister to win successive elections; but the idea that the Coalition is doomed to at least two terms in the wilderness is emotion trumping facts.

Consider this: in 2004 John Howard won 87 seats (and a Senate majority) at his third election (almost the same number that ­Albanese has secured so far) on a hefty 46.7 per cent primary vote – more than 10 percentage points higher than the 34.7 per cent of the primary vote that Albanese has.

Back then, it was said that Labor was out for a generation. Yet, just three years on, it was the Coalition that was thrown out of office, with Kevin Rudd in the Lodge and Howard famously ­losing his own seat.

And the same Coalition that’s now supposedly completely out of step with a modern electorate, just 18 months back was so much ­better than Labor at picking the national mood when it opposed Albanese’s divisive, race-based ­Indigenous Voice – as did a majority of voters.

Of course, there’s much to learn from this poll but Labor’s eulogists and the Coalition’s obituarists are equally jumping the gun. Rudd’s 83 seats in 2007 came off a primary vote of 43.4 per cent, almost nine percentage points higher than Albanese’s.

Indeed, Albanese’s current vote is no greater than the 34.7 per cent that Bill Shorten won in his 2016 loss to Malcolm Turnbull.

Or look at it another way: the 4.62 million Australians who voted for Labor hardly swamp the 4.23 million who voted for the Coalition – a difference of just 390,000.

And while Peter Dutton failed in his bid to replace the government, he does have three significant achievements to his credit. He helped stop the Voice that would have permanently entrenched race in the Constitution. By his principled decision to preference Labor ahead of the extremist Greens, he has driven most of them – maybe all of them – out of the lower house. And by encouraging the Libs to pick suitable candidates to take them on, he may have brought an end to peak teal.

The teals have likely failed to gain the seat of Bradfield, Zoe Daniel has lost Goldstein and the other Melbourne teal, Monique Ryan, who also prematurely claimed victory in Kooyong last Saturday night, now looks like a loser as pre-poll and postal votes flow strongly to the Liberals. Part of what the Coalition has done is start to unmask the teals.

They’re not idealistic “community independents”. They’re the incredibly well-funded, well-drilled political arm of the renewable energy industry that wind and solar barons have organised and funded into the parliament to protect their subsidy-­harvesting business model. And it’s why there will be a concerted effort to try to force the Liberals to dump nuclear.

Monique Ryan

Zoe Daniel

Rather than being the “nicer” Liberals, the teals are Gucci Greens, no less determined than Adam Bandt to stop the Liberals from ever forming government. It’s significant that a big donor to the teals is Malcolm Turnbull’s son Alex, who’s given $25,000 to the Spender campaign in Wentworth not once but twice. So, see the teals for what they are: Turnbull’s revenge. Plus, have a close look at their other relationships: the teals’ top donor, millionaire share trader Rob Keldoulis, bought a Tasmanian cannabis farm in 2022 and was a high-profile backer of the Legalise Cannabis Party that acted as preference harvester in many teal races. There’s very little principled politics here; it’s “follow the money” and self-interest at play.

In the immediate campaign ­aftermath, most commentators have forgotten that Dutton had Labor on the ropes as recently as March. It was the dead-air period of Cyclone Alfred that exposed the Coalition’s inability to fill the ­vacuum and maintain momentum that saw the Liberals’ poll ratings go into sharp decline. And it was all made manifestly worse because of the shockingly bad Coalition ­campaign and the absence of substantive policy.

Poor ads ran way too late. There was a failure to tackle the character hits against their leader. And, yes, Dutton was unpopular but unpopular Liberal leaders such as Howard and Tony Abbott have won in landslides if perceptions are tackled early enough.

Disappointingly, there was ­almost no negative campaign against Labor or its predictable lies, such as the claim that the “Libs would destroy Medicare” that the Liberal Party should have well and truly anticipated and prepared for. It announced its most popular policy, halving fuel tax, but then took a week to organise Dutton’s first visit to a servo. Right up until last Saturday, it seems, the Libs’ pollster was claiming they were on track to gain at least 10 seats, thus stymieing any chance to sandbag marginals.

Liberals candidate, Tim Wilson celebrates after defeating Independent Zoe Daniel in the seat of Goldstein. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

There was a near-complete lack of comprehensive policy behind the sugar hits of daily “announceables” that typically turned out to be more government spending financed by debt, unrelated to any coherent strategy, that jeopardised the Coalition’s standing as the best party to manage the economy. Another core Coalition equity – national security – hardly got a look-in until the penultimate week, and then it was just a defence funding envelope without firm commitments to further military capabilities.

The Coalition’s bid to get public servants back to the office was released as a thought bubble in a speech and then withdrawn after Labor turned it into a general attack on working from home, even though it’s in the Liberals’ DNA to want smaller and more ­efficient government.

The Coalition said it would cut immigration but never released a detailed policy to explain how. It said it would have a policy on ­revising the national curriculum but then declined to produce ­anything. It released a gas reservation policy before it had modelled the impact on prices.

It failed to argue for its policy to give first-home buyers access to their super for a deposit.

Even its signature civil nuclear power policy was hardly mentioned during the campaign, despite modelling that it would be at least $200bn cheaper than Labor’s energy policy.

Then there was the almost complete failure to mount any sustained attack on Labor’s ongoing threats to national economic dynamism: the unrealised capital gains tax; the government’s refusal to approve the new resource projects vital for our ongoing prosperity; the threats to agriculture driven by looming climate restrictions; and the environmental devastation from wind farms and transmission lines in national parks and along our coastline.

So, where to now?

John Howard makes victory speech at Wentworth Hotel, Sydney.

As Winston Churchill famously said, “success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to go on that counts”. The new leader must honestly confront the party’s mistakes and weaknesses but keep perspective. Convulsions about turning left or right are counter-productive; the Liberal Party’s ­values are its North Star, and that’s where the rebuild starts.

To win elections from opposition, the policy work starts yesterday, and the best possible shadow ministry team needs to get to work, with the lazy, back-stabbing, leaker types shown the door.

Importantly, the Coalition cannot get spooked by the call from its enemies to “drop the culture wars” because it’s the “long march through the institutions” that’s the reason for the left’s ascendancy.

As Julia Gillard told her Labor colleagues back in 2003, they must “muscle up for the hard task of winning the culture war and creating a new vision for this nation”. And that’s just what they’ve done.

The job of opposition is not to make weak compromises with a bad government, as Abbott used to say; it’s to be a strong and clear ­alternative. Whatever happens, there’s no future for a Liberal Party that’s Labor-lite.