Shorten walks in Abbott’s shadow

As opposition leader, Bill Shorten may have more in common with someone from the other side of politics than he’d care to admit.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has a lot in common with Tony Abbott.

If Bill Shorten wins the federal election this year he will become the first opposition leader since Andrew Fisher in 1914 to take over immediately after a change of government and then go on to ­become prime minister.

However, Fisher had been prime minister before, twice. Shorten obviously has not.

The last opposition leader to survive two full terms was Kim Beazley, from 1996 to 2001. Like Shorten’s 2016 effort, Beazley almost snatched government back after just one term in opposition.

Beazley lost the 1998 election in the key marginal seats, failing to secure a majority despite winning 51.1 per cent of the national two-party vote with a big swing against the Howard government.

Shorten reduced the Coalition majority to just one at the 2016 election and also secured a big swing against the government but won slightly less than 50 per cent of the two-party vote. Since then, through defections and a lost by-election courtesy of leadership instability, the now Scott Morrison-led Coalition has become a minority government. Beazley never became prime minister, so Shorten won’t want that comparison to be extended any further than it already has.

Another opposition leader he may have more in common with, despite no doubt bristling at the comparison, comes from the other side of politics: Tony Abbott. Abbott didn’t quite serve two full terms as opposition leader; he took over less than a year out from the 2010 election. But he did fight two campaigns, narrowly losing the first and winning the second in a landslide.

The polls suggest Shorten is on target to do the same by defeating Morrison in a landslide come May. The last two Newspolls put the Labor Party on 55 per cent of the two-party vote.

Abbott won the 2013 election with 53.5 per cent of the vote.

“What looks like a safe pair of hands leading the opposition puts more pressure on a prime minister,” says Wayne Errington, associate professor of politics at the University of Adelaide.

“It’s unusual historically because people often can’t picture the opposition leader as prime minister, which helps explain poor personal polling. But, for whatever reason, in modern politics people don’t seem to care about that. It may well be a reflection of the job opposition leaders like Abbott and Shorten have done exposing government weaknesses.”

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Abbott waged a relentless campaign as opposition leader against Kevin Rudd and then Julia Gillard, contributing to both prime ministers being rolled by their colleagues in partyroom coups.

Shorten did the same to Abbott and then Malcolm Turnbull. Both suffered the same fate as Rudd and Gillard at the hands of colleagues.

“The similarities are striking,” according to Richard Holden, professor of economics at the University of NSW. “Modern politics is being defined by leadership instability but the approach of opposition leaders is certainly having an impact on the fortunes of governments. Even if opposition leaders who go on the attack depress their personal popularity, it can contribute to the decline in support a government faces, which is the more important data point.”

Neither Abbott nor Shorten could be described as a popular opposition leader — and Shorten remains unpopular, according to the latest Newspoll.

But the similarities don’t end there. Even the ups and downs of both men’s polling have been strikingly similar at comparable points of the electoral cycle.

Before both leaders faced their first electoral test, they started their periods running the opposition with positive net satisfaction ratings, albeit briefly.

Abbott’s net satisfaction rating dropped to minus 15 but crept back up to minus eight by the time of the 2010 election.

Shorten’s rating sank much further, perhaps because of his longer stint in the job ahead of his first electoral test in 2016. His net satisfaction rating fell as low as minus 38 in his first term, climbing back up to minus 15 by the time of the election.

In their second terms as opposition leaders the similarities between Abbott and Shorten’s personal ratings are even more analogous. While Abbott’s net satisfaction after the 2013 election started at positive 10 (for only one poll), 10 months out from the 2013 election it nosedived to minus 36.

Five months out from the election it was back up to minus 19, having crept as high as minus 11 two weeks earlier. With five months to go before the next election, Shorten’s net satisfaction rating is minus 15, according to the final Newspoll of 2018. It had dipped to minus 28 in March 2017.

Griffith University professor of politics Anne Tiernan sees similarities between both leaders when it comes to unpopularity with female voters.

“Abbott was deeply unpopular with women. Shorten is also more unpopular with women than men,” Tiernan says.

“It will be interesting to see how that plays out as we get closer to polling day, as well as how it plays out if he (Shorten) becomes prime minister.”

On the better prime minister ratings, Abbott managed to steadily improve his scores ahead of the 2010 election, from 23 per cent when he replaced Turnbull as opposition leader in 2009 to 37 per cent by the time of the election.

He then started on 34 per cent after the narrow 2010 defeat, rising to a maximum rating of 43 per cent in September 2011, when Gillard’s prime ministership was under immense internal pressure.

Ten months out from the 2013 election Abbott as the better prime minister was supported by only 32 per cent, yet with five months to go it was back up to 40 per cent.

“As elections draw closer, voters who have settled on their desire to punish a government, even if they aren’t particular taken with the opposition leader as the alternative PM, start to put more support behind the opposition leader in the polls as they contemplate the reality that he or she will shortly become PM,” Errington says.

“That was certainly the case with Abbott. We are yet to see meaningful changes to Shorten’s ratings, however.”

Shorten’s better PM rating has been stuck on 36 per cent for the last three Newspolls. It hit a peak of 39 per cent during the government’s leadership crisis last year.

The phenomenon Errington talks about was evident ahead of the 2016 election for Shorten, even though he didn’t win that contest. Shorten’s numbers fell as low as 14 per cent in his first term as opposition leader when voters simply couldn’t countenance the idea of him becoming prime minister, before rising to 31 per cent just ahead of the 2016 election, when polls showed that a tight election was in the offing. He was still well behind Turnbull, however. This suggests Shorten was the reason Labor was competitive, because of his tactics, but also that he was a drag on the party vote because of his unpopularity.

While Abbott is viewed now as having run a small-target strategy that harmed him in government when he sought to legislate cuts in areas that he had said before the election would be off-limits, the small-target label isn’t entirely valid. Abbott also campaigned for a generous paid mater­nity leave scheme his col­leagues didn’t support, which led to him dropping the idea in government.

Shorten has shunned the small-target approach, partly to placate the NSW Right within his party but also perhaps to draw a distinction between the ultimate fate of Abbott as prime minister and how Shorten hopes to govern.

After losing the 1913 election, Fisher won back the prime ministership just a year later at the 1914 double dissolution.

Shorten will have been Opposition Leader for nearly six years by the next election.

“Labor’s lesson from government was to avoid disunity,” Tiernan says. “Perhaps ironically, Bill Shorten has almost certainly benefited from the rule change initiated by Kevin Rudd protecting the leader. This has been crucial in opposition and provides a contrast to the previous experiences of many opposition leaders.”

Examples of the Shorten-led opposition not shying away from big-target policy scripts include the negative gearing policy the government is attacking as well as changes to capital gains tax concessions. The dividend imputations policy is another example, as are mooted changes to family trusts.

“It is interesting Shorten’s team is going big-target in the area of economic policy. It arguably speaks to the strength of his economic team,” says Holden, who wrote a paper detailing how Australia’s negative gearing system could be reformed. One of the options he canvassed was subsequently adopted by Labor in its policy design.

Labor’s economic team includes Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen, finance spokesman Jim Chalmers (Wayne Swan’s former chief of staff) and assistant Treasury spokesman Andrew Leigh (a former economics professor).

Bowen has said he wants Labor to win with clear economic polices so it comes “through the front door” into government, not the back door as Abbott did, by saying one thing before the election and acting very differently afterwards.

Abbott was hurt by his backflip on cuts. It gave Shorten the ammunition he needed to attack an already unpopular prime minister, using against him the same approach Abbott had used in opposition. Abbott lampooned Gillard for breaking her carbon tax pre-election pledge. Shorten did the same to Abbott on spending cuts in the first Coalition budget in 2014. “People seem to have really underestimated the long-term damage of the first Abbott-Hockey budget,” Tiernan argues. “It opened the door to the Labor narrative that the government was out of touch.”

It was a narrative that seemed to stick, with the decline in polling for the Abbott government ultimately being used by Turnbull as a key reason to oust him from the prime ministership in 2015.

Shorten will hope that, though he and Abbott have similar contours in their personal polling in opposition and in the ways they have heaped pressure on their political opponents from opposition, the similarities end come May.

Not because Shorten intends to emulate Beazley and fail at the polls. Rather, Shorten will be hoping for a big win (like Abbott) but with his agenda fully laid out — paving the way for a more popular prime ministership than Abbott enjoyed after his landslide victory, as well as a break from the enduring unpopularity Shorten has faced as opposition leader.

It’s worth remembering that, even though Abbott had a negative net satisfaction rating as opposition leader, once elected PM that rating jumped into positive territory. Australians can be a generous lot and, having elected Abbott, albeit with the primary intent of punishing the other side of politics, voters were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

That quickly faded off the back of broken promises. Shorten will hope for the same uptick in his net satisfaction rating if elected, without the subsequent downward spiral that contributed to Abbott’s early demise.