Five PMs, fractured political parties: tribal politics loses its flavour
In the 2010s, there have been five changes of prime minister. The party system continues to fracture. The polity is more polarised. A dismal decade in Australian politics is drawing to a close.
A dismal decade in Australian politics is drawing to a close. In the 2010s, there have been five changes of prime minister. The party system continues to fracture. The polity is more polarised. Transformative policy change is harder to achieve and progress has been mixed. Political forces outside parliament have altered. And the pervasive influence of social media presents opportunities and risks for politicians.
The upshot is that fewer Australians identify with the major parties, we are disappointed with our leaders, citizens are more disengaged from politics, and trust in government and satisfaction with democracy continue to fall.
It is especially worrying that only 55 per cent of Australians under the age of 30 support democracy over authoritarian forms of government.
There are five key trends that help define and explain the 2010s: leadership instability; party dealignment; the impact of social media; the change in traditional activism; and the degeneration of the political class.
Leadership instability
Never before have so many prime ministers been ruthlessly removed from power by their own parties: Kevin Rudd (2010), Julia Gillard (2013), Tony Abbott (2015) and Malcolm Turnbull (2018). The degree and manner of prime ministerial churn is unprecedented.
Australia has had revolving-door prime ministers before. Between 1966 and 1975 there were seven prime ministers: Robert Menzies, Harold Holt, John McEwen, John Gorton, Billy McMahon, Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser.
The difference is they exited because of retirement, death, transition, election or dismissal rather than execution by their colleagues. (Gorton effectively resigned when a partyroom confidence motion was tied 33-all in 1971.)
In the past 10 years, prime ministers rose and fell mostly due to simmering blood feuds redolent of a Jacobean revenge tragedy. The hatred between Rudd and Gillard and between Abbott and Turnbull was, and remains, barely disguised. They still blame the other protagonist for their respective demises. Both major parties were also seduced into thinking changing the leader was the only way to boost their chances of remaining in power.
This roiling prime ministership has been bad for democracy. No other country changed leaders more often than Australia in the past decade. While Gillard, Abbott and Turnbull were tormented by poor opinion polls, the Australian National University’s Australian Election Study shows there was no majority of voters that thought their removal was justified. Nor did most voters support Rudd’s termination in 2010.
Scott Morrison, the sixth prime minister in 10 years (counting Rudd twice), defied the odds by becoming the only one since Paul Keating to take the top job midterm and win a majority of seats at the next election. But Morrison did not slay the incumbent; it was done for him by Peter Dutton.
There are now six members of the bulging former prime ministers club: Keating, John Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott and Turnbull. (There were eight between 1945 and 1947.) It is also a decade when we lost three political giants: Whitlam (2014), Fraser (2015) and Bob Hawke (2019).
It would be a mistake to think leadership instability is a thing of the past because the major parties now provide some protection from challenge. The partyrooms are masters of their own destiny. When a leader falters and places election or re-election in jeopardy, and a better prospect waits in the wings, all it takes is a simple majority of MPs to change their rules.
Party dealignment
The 2010s saw four general elections: 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019. Labor did not win a majority of seats at any of them. Labor has won a majority of seats at only one election (2007) in the past 26 years. This is an appalling record. If Labor were a business, it would be in receivership.
The party’s primary vote registered 37.9 per cent (2010), 33.3 per cent (2013), 34.7 per cent (2016) and 33.3 per cent (2019) — a decline of 4.6 percentage points across the decade. Labor’s vote needs to be in the 39-40 per cent range to form majority government. Labor won with 43.3 per cent in 2007, 49.4 per cent in 1983 and 49.5 per cent in 1972. It is a long time since Labor got anywhere near this level of support.
The party’s long-term viability as an electoral force capable of winning government and being in office for lengthy periods is in doubt. Labor has suffered a dealignment of voter support as non-tertiary-educated working-class voters have shifted to the Coalition and far-right parties such as One Nation, while inner-city progressive voters motivated by post-materialist concerns have shifted to the Greens.
It will be difficult for Anthony Albanese, the most left-wing Labor leader in more than a half-century, to bridge this divide. The most successful Labor leaders — Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and Rudd — were moderates who won elections and governed mostly from the centre of politics. Since the May election, Labor has flatlined in Newspoll at 33 per cent.
A further threat to Labor’s electoral viability is on policy.
At the election in May this year, the Coalition had a strong advantage over Labor on economic issues, immigration and asylum-seekers, according to the AES. This has increased at every election in the past decade. At the May election, Labor had an advantage on education, health and environmental issues but these were not significant enough to overcome the Coalition’s strengths. This suggests that Labor may find sustained electoral success only in state politics, where these issues are paramount.
The political divide
Moreover, Labor is struggling to reconcile its different constituencies: socially conservative working and middle-class suburban and regional voters with a wealthy progressive cohort of voters in the inner cities. The political divide in the next decade will be as much about culture and values as it is about specific policies. Labor, already breaking away from its historic moorings, will find the next decade more difficult.
While the Coalition has been threatened by populist breakouts on its right flank — notably Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party and Bob Katter’s Australian Party — the combined primary vote of the Liberals and Nationals (including the Liberal National Party in Queensland and Country Liberals in the Northern Territory) has not fallen below 41 per cent in the 2000s or the 2010s. The Liberal Party’s vote, however, reached its lowest level at 27.9 per cent at the May election. (This figure does not include the LNP in Queensland.) Nevertheless, Fraser and Howard led the party to victory with primary votes in the range of 33.8 per cent (1998) to 41.8 per cent (1975). Abbott’s victory in 2013 — 32 per cent of the primary vote — was lower than any of the Fraser or Howard-led victories.
The Nationals have proved resilient even though they have been saddled with lacklustre leaders in Michael McCormack and Warren Truss, and the scandal-prone Barnaby Joyce. They have increased their primary vote from 3.4 per cent in 2010 to 4.5 per cent in 2019. The party’s seat share has increased from 12 to 16.
The Greens are the most successful minor party. They received 1.4 million lower house votes at the May election, which represents a 10.4 per cent share. This is more than three times that of One Nation. While the Greens have nine Senate seats and one MP in the House of Representatives, their goal of supplanting Labor as the major party on the left of politics remains a fantasy.
The 2020s will continue to favour minor parties and independents as partisanship further breaks down. One-quarter of the electorate did not vote Coalition or Labor at the May election. Those who always vote for the same party have fallen from 69 per cent of voters in 1969 to 39 per cent in 2019, according to the AES. Those who regard themselves as lifetime Coalition voters have fallen from 35 per cent in 1969 to 17 per cent today. Lifetime Labor voters have fallen from a high of 38 per cent in 1987 to 14 per cent today.
Social media
Radio transformed politics in the 1930s and 40s, TV transformed politics in the 60s and 70s, and the internet transformed politics in the 90s and 2000s. The defining technological change in the 2010s was social media. No politician can succeed without engaging voters via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms. They need to be seen to be active. It is a good way to send a message quickly and effectively. But this is the wild west of politics. It cannot be tamed, let alone controlled. What is trending on Twitter is not the real world. This is a risk for politicians and the media.
Much political campaigning takes place on handheld devices away from the scrutiny of the media and most voters. Messages, often fake, are highly targeted. (Remember Labor’s “death tax” or the Coalition’s plan to privatise Medicare?) Divisions are exploited. Political debate is dumbed down. The added danger for voters is that their personal data is being collated, analysed and used to influence their vote without them even knowing it.
Activism
The 2010s have also witnessed a new form of activism that takes place increasingly online, through social media, petitions and the like. Outrage is the new norm. Some issues still motivate people to take to the streets, but without much success in changing mainstream attitudes. Grassroots campaigning, especially by organisations such as GetUp, has had an impact but it is often overstated.
The union movement continues to shrink, now representing only 14 per cent of the total workforce. The ACTU squandered $15m campaigning for Labor at the May election. The business community has scant authority to campaign for policy changes and lacks the mettle for confrontation. Think tanks and lobby groups, especially on the centre-left, have had negligible impact in advancing policy causes. It is therefore harder for governments to build coalitions for policy change when those they have traditionally relied on for support — unions, business groups, think tanks — have become so enfeebled. Institutions such as banks and churches that once were community pillars are utterly discredited. Scare campaigns arguing against change, as ever, are easier to mount.
The political class
The political class has continued to degenerate. Those MPs who have not worked as a political staff member, party or union official, or as a lawyer are few and far between. Labor has degenerated the most and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of sub-faction leaders and union secretaries with diminishing real-world authority.
The membership of political parties continues to decline and constitutes less than 1 per cent of the electorate. As they are less representative of the community, and those who vote for them, parties are finding it difficult to attract a diversity of candidates. Labor has shifted leftward and the Liberal Party has shifted to the right. Populism, while not as prevalent as overseas, is evident on the fringes of the major parties and is the stock-in-trade for minor parties.
The influence and authority of the public service has tumbled. It is now challenged by competing sources of advice, including the inexorable rise in political staffers. Public servants rarely offer, or are asked for, frank and fearless advice. The bureaucracy’s effectiveness has been sapped by cost-cutting, efficiency dividends and many bright young people preferring a more lucrative and rewarding career in the private sector.
The challenge for the 2020s is to bring greater stability to the political system and make progress on policy issues such as energy and climate change, workplace relations and taxation reform. We have done this before. There is little disagreement between the major parties on issues such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme, school and higher education policy, health and Medicare, foreign policy and national security.
The focus for the decade ahead should be to set aside the destructive tribalism of the past and surrender the idea that progress means one side, left or right, achieving victory over the other on a contestable policy area. Agreement is not built like that. The task is to achieve a workable consensus that advances the country and its people. This is, after all, the purpose of politics.
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