Scare tactics that go bump on election night

The Morrison scare campaign shaping up as a central component of his 2022 re-election strategy also happens to be deeply untrue.

The Liberal Party is nothing like the party Menzies founded. And moderates in its ranks are by and large weak and voiceless. Picture: Adam Taylor

Scare campaigns are always a feature of election countdowns, and more often than not they are bogus. But they can work. In 2016, Bill Shorten disingenuously argued that a re-elected Coalition would abolish Medicare. No such thing has happened, nor was it ever going to.

The success of Labor’s scare campaign reduced the size of Malcolm Turnbull’s majority, leaving the accurate impression that ousting Tony Abbott as PM led to a ­disastrous election outcome. Victorious, yes, but pyrrhic all the same. A majority of just one sparked endless speculation about Turnbull’s leadership, culminating in his removal.

Shorten was never going to win the 2016 election, but his scare campaign worked.

John Howard was the master of scare campaigns, using them effectively for a decade to retain power. Claims of Labor economic mismanagement was his pathway to victory in 1996, despite the Labor government he ousted legislating the most profound and important macro-economic reforms in the nation’s history.

In 2001, national security and Labor’s supposed lack of ticker on such matters was held up as a reason not to change the government. In 2004, concerns over Mark Latham’s inexperience was the foundation of his undoing. This is probably the right time to note than scare campaigns aren’t always based on a false premise. Vanquishing Latham as a prime ministerial candidate may well be the greatest service Howard did for this country.

In 2007, Kevin Rudd knocked off Howard with the mother of all scare campaigns: hammering WorkChoices into submission before dismantling it once elected. Last year’s election saw a return to the false premise used for scare campaigns when Scott Morrison claimed if Labor was elected it would introduce an inheritance tax. That rubbish made Shorten’s Mediscare campaign appear a comparative truism it was so egregiously false. But Morrison backed that fallacy with a truth voters ultimately baulked at: if you vote for Labor, you’ll get Bill Shorten as prime minister. It was enough to re-elect a dysfunctional Coalition for a third term.

Fast forward to today and the Morrison scare campaign shaping up as a central component of his re-election strategy in 2022 is to tether Labor to the Greens in a bid to dislodge swinging voters from the Labor camp in key outer metro marginal seats. Greens leader Adam Bandt fuels Morrison’s strategy when he tweets and talks about the power the Greens would have in an alliance with Labor in government.

Such rhetoric serves the Greens well, but it is the last thing Anthony Albanese wants dominating attention. It also happens to be deeply untrue. Whatever Albo’s faults as a politician, he’s been fighting Greens for years in his own electoral backyard of inner city Sydney. While a creature of the Labor Left, and therefore more sympathetic to Green issues than most within Labor, Albo knows full well that Labor cannot give the Greens an inch. He has already dismissed even the prospect of negotiating with the Greens on emissions policy. He won’t negotiate with them to form minority government, nor on anything else for that matter.

Albo knows that playing footsies with the Greens opens Labor to a scare campaign that will erode its vote in the centre. It is a lesson he’s learnt over a lifetime of staving off Green threats in his electorate. He was a vocal critic of Julia Gillard’s decision to publicly spruik her alliance with the Greens after the 2010 election as she sought to build momentum towards forming minority government. He knew where it would lead: right into Tony Abbott’s scare campaign at the following election. Abbott duly used the deals done to hammer Labor at the 2013 election, which saw the Coalition returned with a sizeable majority.

While any scare campaign linking Labor and the Greens ahead of next year’s federal election will be a false one, that doesn’t mean it will fail to resonate. A false premise is not necessarily an inhibitor to success. Which is why Albo needs to strike hard at the false premise and not give an inch when doing so.

One of the reasons scare campaigns often succeed is because they go unanswered for too long, only responded to long after they have become a political problem for the party under attack. Turnbull initially chose to ignore the Mediscare campaign because he found it so preposterous. By the time the Coalition took it on the sentiments underpinning it were well established in voters’ minds.

The problem for Albo is that mainstream concerns Labor is in bed with the Greens are somewhat entrenched. Morrison doesn’t need to build the false narrative to cement it. It already exists as a real historical narrative. It just so happens that Albo is a very different Labor leader who despises the Greens and what they have done to erode the left flank of his beloved Labor Party. His task is to find a way to penetrate that fact into the subconscious of the mainstream without appearing like some sort of political figure disinterested in the goals of the environment and social justice. Not an easy task, even for someone who has forged a political career promoting exactly those values.

Whatever Albo’s faults as a politician, he’s been fighting Greens for years in his own electoral backyard of inner city Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone

While Albo has his problems countering a scare campaign about the Greens, Morrison and the Liberals need to worry about the plethora of independents challenging moderates in inner city seats, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne. The loose alliance of female independents spruiking their environmental and transparency credentials is a distraction Morrison doesn’t need. It will require fundraising in seats the Liberals can usually take for granted, and it will see MPs under threat in those seats use their voices to disrupt Morrison’s louder message designed to attract votes in less progressive marginal seats.

But aside from a distraction (even one capable of costing the Coalition the election) it is hard to see any (or many) of these so-called independents winning their way into parliament. If they do, it will be because the Coalition is on the way out anyway. In other words, there is a national move already happening costing Morrison in the seats that matter.

If the election is close, these independents will most likely strike granite as they attempt to dig deeper into traditional Liberal support in these blue ribbon seats. They will reduce margins, perhaps even coming close to winning. But when they strike granite with a few percentage points to go to claim the 50 per cent plus one required for victory, things get tough. It happens, but not often. Most headlines about a conga line of well-funded independents will end up as clippings in the bottom drawers of those who ran and failed.

That said, for the most part I wish them well, because the Liberal Party is nothing like the party Menzies founded. And moderates in its ranks are by and large weak and voiceless. The irony is they will become even weaker and more silent if the independents’ collective succeeds, because every Liberal MP being targeted is a moderate rather than a conservative.