Coalition, Labor draw a line in the sand

Too many Coalition MPs are unwilling or incapable of fighting on the frontline. Pity, because this electoral contest will be brutal.

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

While most of the country has been swatting flies and catching waves this past week, Josh Frydenberg and his opposition counterpart, Labor’s Treasury spokesman, Chris Bowen, have been duelling via media sound bites and opinion pieces in this newspaper. The nation is still rinsing the sand from its feet and the starting pistol has been fired on this election year.

This is only as it should be. An early and aggressive start to the year is essential, especially for the government.

For the Coalition to turn its superior record and policy agenda into an unlikely election victory, it will require a level of energy, advocacy, unity and savvy that has been almost entirely absent for the past six years. The government needs to get cracking and some of its MPs have — the Treasurer and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton have been the busiest so far this year. The thrust of their effort has been to warn about opposition policies or to take actions that sharpen the contrast with Labor in areas of strength for the government. This is precisely what was lacking during the 2016 campaign and hasn’t been seen often enough since.

For their part, Bowen and Labor have taken the opportunity to claim the high ground by accusing the government of negative tactics against an opposition that is shaping the agenda. And the ALP has doubled down on its class warfare rhetoric, entrenching itself as the party of welfare, entitlement and resentment.

There are sufficient elements of truth and hypocrisy in the approaches of both main parties to ensure this battle will remain willing for the next four months. Where the 2016 campaign was officially extended but soporifically lacking in ferocity from the Coalition side, this campaign is destined to be unofficially long and should be aggressively contested. Labor always fights hard — witness “Mediscare” — and is buttressed by even more willing efforts from allies such as the union movement and GetUp.

This week Labor even tried to use the antics of rogue Queensland senator Fraser Anning as a stick with which to beat the Coalition, ignoring the reality that fringe populist parties harm the Coalition and unintentionally but inevitably assist La­bor. For instance, at the time of last year’s Mayo by-election, Anning was a member of Katter’s Australian Party, which campaigned against the Coalition’s Georgina Downer in support of independent Rebek­ha Sharkie.

We saw this week how GetUp is looking to choose this year’s election targets based on the conservative MPs it most wants to eliminate rather than who it wants to endorse. This negativity tends to be unquestioningly echoed by the public broadcasters, much of the press gallery and even, as we saw this week, by the University of Sydney’s law school, which posted, then deleted, a reference to the GetUp campaign on social media.

Little wonder the Liberals and Nationals desperately need warriors; the Coalition can’t even rely on big business for much assistance as it tends to hedge its bets on a likely Labor ascendancy. Worse still, too many Coalition MPs are unwilling or incapable of fighting on the frontline. It has become a sad reality of political life for Coalition supporters that many of their ranks are more effective running internal battles than tackling Labor.

Take the latest intervention by former health minister Sussan Ley when she publicly endorsed female quotas for Liberal Party preselections on the day the focus should have been on Labor and how it would deal with one of its highest profile and most radical union acolytes, John Setka, who was facing court action.

Dutton, so harangued and maligned by Labor, leftist media and the so-called moderates within his own party, has been everywhere in the media in recent weeks, cancelling a terrorist’s citizenship, closing another detention centre and floating a public register for child sex offenders. Here is a conservative politician who understands the need to create conversations around key areas of strength for the Coalition, and who knows that borders, national security and law and order matter.

Frydenberg, likewise, has been directing debate to the Coalition’s turf, talking tax, economic performance and retirement incomes. While Bowen has feigned delight at debating Labor’s plans for higher taxation on personal incomes, real estate and share investments, the truth is that every day the national debate engages Frydenberg and Bowen is a good day for the government.

The Coalition’s economic record, though far from brilliant, is a strength and Labor’s tax plans are one of its main weaknesses. That is not to say Bowen doesn’t hold his own or make some reasonable arguments.

“There’s no surer sign of a flailing government when its chief economic spokesperson has nothing to say except spend every minute of every day talking about Labor and not about the slowing economy or wages growth,” Bowen said this week. The former treasurer — he held the job for three months under Kevin Rudd’s 2013 reanimation — desperately wants a proper stint in the job and is right to say Labor has been diligent, bold and honest in putting so much revenue policy into the public arena ahead of the election.

Bowen is also right to highlight the Coalition’s broken promises during its early spending cuts. He also might be tempted to remind voters it was the Coalition under Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey that increased the top personal income tax rate (temporarily) after promising no new taxes.

Still, there is no mistaking this as the Coalition’s ground, and additional taxation in the present climate is not a winning argument on economic or political grounds. Which perhaps explains why opposition employment services spokeswoman Terri Butler put some of Labor’s welfare policy into the main arena this week, switching the debate to mutual obligation.

By weakening demands on the unemployed to maintain their eligibility for the dole, Labor is shamelessly identifying itself as the party of welfare recipients rather than taxation contributors. While this may sound like a harsh assessment, it is perhaps a logical political evolution in a nation where reported estimates show at least 60 per cent of households receive cash payments from government and where, according to the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, the split between households that are net tax contributors and net beneficiaries has reached 50-50.

As the size and reach of government continues to grow, the political constituency for those who propose more handouts and greater largesse expands along with it. It is a self-perpetuating process that recklessly has been fuelled by some Coalition policy — think family tax benefits, baby bonuses, children’s sport rebates. There must be a possibility that it is already too late to win the necessary arguments and the reckoning might have to come through fiscal calamity, but it would be encouraging to see someone at least try.

We didn’t even see much publicity this week for Acting Prime Minister Michael McCormack as he ran the country from Wagga Wagga in regional NSW. Here was the chance for a cute summer story about the Nationals leader holding the fort from the bush, emphasising a government in touch with the regions and not wedded to the big-city elites. It went missing, like so many other Coalition media opportunities.

Our dispirited Coalition politicians too often look for excuses not to fight. They accept the critiques of the so-called progressives: that the voting population has drifted to the Left, that there is no appetite for small government and that the public wants government guidance in every facet of their lives. But it’s a cop-out. Such propositions run against everything we know about the attributes of self-reliance and aspiration that have long characterised mainstream voters. They also run up hard against their voting behaviour at federal elections — supporting Rudd’s professed economic conservatism and embracing Tony Abbott’s campaign against “big” taxes.

What has been missing of late is leading figures willing to make the arguments for cost-cutting, smaller government, personal responsibility, self-reliance and aspirational families. Too often it seems Coalition MPs walk with their backs to the zeitgeist, taking the easy steps as they are swept along with the media/political class instead of comprehending that their mission is to turn around and march the hard yards, resisting fashion in favour of proven realities.

If they make the tried and tested arguments about fiscal rectitude, enterprise and aspiration, they will find the mistakes of the Left always bolster their case: such as the way the pontifications of the ABC about alleged worker exploitation and “wage theft” by big business have been exposed as empty sanctimony by a public broadcaster failing to practise what it preaches; or how the nasty exaggerations of misogyny and indolence on gender issues levelled by Labor and the unions against the Coalition have been undermined by the travails of a leading union militant; or the way the so-called progressive advocacy for increased female representation in right-of-centre politics is exposed as cant by the Left’s vicious assaults on the character of conservative female voices (just ask Sophie Mirabella, Bronwyn Bishop, Peta Credlin, Janet Albrechtsen or a host of others).

“When the class war rages on the factory floor,” sang politically charged band Redgum 40 years ago, “If you don’t fight you lose.” It is sound advice for the Coalition in an election year when Labor is intent on a hard-fought battle on old-fashioned arguments about envy and class warfare. Dutton and Frydenberg have been attempting to show the way. If they are not joined soon by many others on the Coalition side — fighting even harder — the government will be annihilated in May.