No doubt the stars are aligning for favourably for the Coalition
The government is making major mistakes in its time-honoured areas of policy weakness and electoral vulnerability. On top of this, Dutton is proving a wily Opposition Leader. But for the crucial battles to come, he needs to provide alternatives.
We are told federal governments always get a second term, yet not since John Howard has an elected prime minister won a second term. Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott were cut down before their first term was up, mainly because their parties believed they were on track to lose. And we will never know what would have happened.
Four prime ministers in a row (Rudd, Julia Gillard, Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull) failed to front a second election campaign precisely because they were expected to lose, or at least it looked likely.
In the case of Gillard in 2010, Labor effectively lost the election for a second term but saved itself by luring across two conservative-aligned independents, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, to support the Labor government.
Indeed, the Coalition almost failed to win a second term under Turnbull in 2016 when it lost 14 seats but held on by a single seat. Going back to 1998, even Howard lost the popular vote in his first bid for re-election, but the Coalition got its second term thanks to the large majority he started with and smart campaigning in the seats that mattered.
The oft-cited factoid that the last one-term federal government was the Scullin Labor government that lost power in 1931 provides more comfort than it should. The lesson for Albanese Labor is sobering – losing power after just one term is more likely than a superficial reading of history would suggest.
Peter Dutton reportedly told his partyroom this week that talk of a two-term strategy to regain government was bunkum – he is focused on a one-term strategy. Whether he achieves it or not, this is the right approach; to do otherwise is to accept defeat and duck the responsibility of offering a viable alternative government.
There is no doubt the stars are aligning favourably for the Coalition. It is united, and the government is making major mistakes in its time-honoured areas of policy weakness and electoral vulnerability – border security, economic management, foreign and defence policy, and climate and energy.
On top of this, Dutton is proving a wily Opposition Leader, operating with certitude and acute political judgment. He wins many plaudits for defeating the Indigenous voice, understandably, but he effectively defeated it the moment he chose to oppose it. History tells us that defeating a referendum is the easiest contest any major party can tackle.
For the crucial battles to come Dutton must provide alternatives.
What is his plan to deliver cheap and reliable energy? Where would the Coalition cut government spending? What is its plan to address the skills shortage while lowering the immigration rate? How will the Coalition boost our defence capability in time to meet our strategic threats?
What will it do to address the institutional green-left groupthink across education, the bureaucracy and academe? How would the Coalition get federal public servants to turn up at the office, and will it need to reaffirm our border security regime? The indications are that Dutton will do better on this than most opposition leaders. He is poised to take a leap forward on nuclear, for instance. But much of the policy challenge will be left blank as the Opposition Leader seeks to keep the focus on the government.
The former Queensland policeman is sufficiently disciplined to manage this task, but is his frontbench? Would a Dutton cabinet have even the depth of the Morrison cabinet? Hardly. He should sharpen his team and could start by elevating Dave Sharma as soon as possible. James Paterson and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price have shown how quickly the right talent can make an impact.
Nobody should get carried away by opinion polls halfway through a term, and all first-term governments get the wobbles at some stage. Yet the flaws in the Albanese government are serious and central; they look likely to get worse.
Since the very start I have argued climate and energy policy would be its downfall. Nothing has changed my mind.
Power prices are crippling businesses and hurting families. Across the summer the reliability of supplies will be tested on hot days. And Labor is dogmatically doubling down on the renewables crusade that has created the supply and pricing crisis, so it will all get worse.
Dozens of regional communities around the country are up in arms about wind turbine projects, solar factories and transmission lines. Hundreds of people travelled from the regions to protest against these “reckless renewables” in Sydney on Thursday.
Labor and the media ignored them, but they all vote and under Labor’s nutty renewables plan every project causing objections now will need to be followed by 10 more. Every renewable energy project not blocked by community protests will add billions to the capital spend, to be recouped by consumers, so the price pressures will continue. None of these projects will resolve the supply dilemma, which is why we are being warned by the market operator that blackouts will increase.
While Coalition governments have been indolent in the past, Labor now owns this. It will have to explain to voters how and why it has created an energy price and supply crisis in an energy-rich nation.
This week Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen will be in the United Arab Emirates for the COP28 climate talks where major players such as the US and Britain will call for a tripling of nuclear energy. But Bowen is telling Australians that nuclear energy is too expensive and too hard. Perhaps he will take the stage in Dubai to share his retro view on nuclear energy; he may as well tell them the internet will never catch on.
The record immigration influx also will hurt Labor. It is trying to wind it back now but it will take more than a year for effects of the latest surge to wash through our housing and cost of living crisis.
Fears Labor would be weak on China were held at bay for a year, until Albanese went to water in the past few weeks. He threw the welfare of our sailors and the dignity of our defence posture overboard by failing to complain about the sonar attack directly to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Emphasising its weakness, the government kept the incident secret from the public until after the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation meeting in San Francisco last month. It will be difficult to recover our diplomatic self-respect.
And all the while Albanese is dealing with internal pressure over Israel, even though he has already walked back Australia’s position on West Jerusalem as the capital and weakened our support for Israel at the UN.
National Disability Insurance Scheme spending is running off the rails and we are expected to believe Bill Shorten will rein it in.
Labor’s plans on the housing crisis seem limited to more government spending rather than cutting red tape and taxes or allowing people to leverage their own superannuation savings.
Labor’s recipe for productivity seems to be giving the unions more power and allowing public servants to work from home – this will not end well.
The shambolic and unnecessary release of 141 criminals from immigration detention sent a worrying signal of weakness just as a people-smuggling boat delivered a dozen asylum-seekers on to the mainland. We have seen this tragic movie before.
Hopelessly out of their depth, Immigration Minister Andrew Giles and Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil seemed to spend more time this week attacking Dutton than repairing their mess.
Their despicable and implausible smearing of the Opposition Leader as a protector of pedophiles just exposed their desperation and lack of character. Labor is panicking and trying to suggest the man it has framed for years as the unelectable hard man of politics is a soft touch. It is a political attack so inane and unsophisticated that it is likely to entrench the opposite impression.
Underlying all this is the economy. Working families need to see their wages keeping up with their costs, they need mortgage rates to stop increasing, they need cheaper fuel and they were promised cheaper electricity. No wonder they are making noise, as the Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock put it so dismissively.
From all this and more we can see the biggest factor in Dutton’s favour is the sheer weakness of the government. For opposition parties, I guess it cannot get better than seeing a government indulge in national self-harm on a grand scale.
If the economy holds up, unemployment remains low, blackouts are sparse and Labor can tidy up its border security shambles, it will be difficult for the Coalition to win. Despite Labor’s historically low primary vote at the election last year, the rise of the teals has left the Coalition a long way from majority government. It needs to win 18 seats, dislodging some of the teals as well as a clutch of Labor seats.
This is why the most sensible bet may be for a Labor minority government, relying on Greens and perhaps some teals to form a majority. What an alarming prospect for the country – Albanese in co-government with Adam Bandt and Monique Ryan.
Still, the historical precedents, and the fundamental flaws in Labor’s approach show that a one-term government remains a possibility. Especially when you consider how badly Albanese campaigned in 2022 – remember, his best days were the ones he was stuck in Covid isolation.
There is a contradiction between the accepted political wisdom about one-term governments and our recent political history.