Who do they think we are

The population debate is front and centre in the PM's campaign, but what does this say about her idea of Australians?

Natalie Manning, from Belfield in southwest Sydney, says there are problems with urban infrastructure and services, but she doesn't think population control is the answer. Picture: Sam Mooy

IN Labor's 2007 election campaign, strategists were convinced by their imported Geordie political adviser, Alan Milburn, that there is room for only "one fooking message" in a campaign. Three years on, the mantra seems to have stuck.

Julia Gillard has spent week one of the 2010 campaign singing one song: Leave it to me, folks, I'll stop the people. It's a message built on a caricature of modern Australians, but Gillard is not the first politician to attempt to win power with a narrative crafted from focus groups.

Under Kevin Rudd, Labor spent years demonising John Howard with an argument about an economic and social "brutopia" that did not exist. This time around, Gillard seems to have a picture in her head of voters who are insular and fearful they are about to lose their spot in the paradise that is Australia. They are hard workers with alarm clocks but, according to Labor's script, they're frightened that foreign workers will take their jobs, along with their lifestyles. That's the theory, but has Labor got it right? Does Gillard really know who we are?

Day one of the campaign and after a friendly visit to Yarralumla, the Prime Minister is talking to the Canberra press gallery, many of them in their Saturday morning clothes. What, Gillard is asked, marks you out from your predecessor? Her answer is a surprise: "I support a sustainable Australia, not a big Australia". It's not a new theme. A couple of weeks earlier, on Sunday, June 27, the Prime Minister had used the Laurie Oakes interview on Channel 9 to set out her stall on population, in what was a clear dogwhistle to those worried about asylum-seekers. But why elevate it to front and centre of the election pitch, ahead of economic management or education or jobs? And why is the Prime Minister focusing on this issue to differentiate herself from the Rudd years? It's a narrow pitch, surely. Except that within a day or two it is clear that for a prime minister trying to avoid a national debate about the failures of a government in which she helped make all the decisions, narrow is good.

"She's talking about immigration because she can't talk about her record," says Graham Young, a market researcher and chief editor of On Line Opinion. David Burchell, who teaches at the University of Western Sydney and is a columnist for this newspaper, says we're in the middle of a phony debate: "She isn't going to cut immigration and is making calming noises about sustainability to keep the intellectuals happy."

But for a Prime Minister in search of an issue - in an election that is as much a referendum on whether she should be allowed to move into the Lodge as it is about policy - the breakdown of Australia's tradition of bipartisan support for immigration in the last few months is proving to be a gift.

Natalie Manning, 27, is living between her boyfriend's house in Campbelltown and the family home in Belfield, both in Sydney's southwest, the target of Labor's Sustainable Australia campaign.

Manning believes there are many issues with Sydney's infrastructure and services, but she doesn't think population control through limiting the numbers of immigrants coming into Australia is the answer.

"I definitely think our infrastructure needs to be sorted out, but I don't think we actually take in that many immigrants," she says. Manning says while Australia has increasing water and services issues "there are many other places people could settle in Australia".

The "little Australia" idea being offered by Labor had its genesis in qualitative polling after Rudd reacted positively to the idea that we would grow to 36 million by 2050. Pretty soon, research was showing that voters in outer suburban Sydney were not happy, Kevin. By running hard on boatpeople, the Coalition had meshed the arguments on asylum-seekers and population control and Rudd had no answers. But the hardheads in the NSW Right-dominated Labor machine had their umbrella issue for the 2010 campaign. Since then, Labor has moved well beyond worrying about containing the anger over boatpeople to creating a campaign universe where population is code for control and sustainability is code for no more change. It's a world where it's time to "take a breath" as we protect "sanctuary" Australia. Social researcher and author Hugh Mackay says the narrative here, such as it is, is about a Prime Minister able to soothe voters. Says Mackay: "It's not really about population. If it were about what it appears to be about, we would be hearing figures and targets, we would be hearing about the abolition of the baby bonus and we would be hearing about the migration intake being cut."

JULIA Gillard could have scripted that AAMI car insurance advertisement where safe drivers complain they pay the same rates as the accident prone no-hopers. "What about me?" the sensible Australians sing. The agency behind the ad, Badjar Ogilvy, says its overall ambition is to offer people better value. Says creative director Michael Knox: "It's about . . .Who's looking after me?"

The answer, it seems, is Gillard. The Prime Minister has an answer for everybody, at least everybody in the two voting blocks she needs to win: working-class voters worried that migrants are choking services and stealing jobs; and affluent Australians who don't depend on a fast-expanding economy and would like to take the pressure off the economy with less growth. Gillard is working off a template of Australian voters as a cross between Pauline Hanson and Clive Hamilton, a mash-up that throws in a handful of John Howard battlers with a slice of Bob Brown's no-growth Greens. Missing are the Hawke globalists and the Keating reformists.

It's a crude picture but Young, who has recently completed qualitative research of about 600 people for the Local Government Association of Queensland, says the PM "could have been reading straight from the report" with her rhetoric.

He found that while attitudes to population varied depending on whether people were from Brisbane, the Sunshine Coast or the regions, the common thread was concern about infrastructure. Young found these worries feeding into refugee issues. "She is on track with that," he says. But these Queenslanders did not see themselves as victims of underserviced or congested areas, they "want the benefits of a higher population with things staying the same as they are." It's a common enough theme. Says Burchell: "People who moved to the outer suburbs for the space do not like the way Sydney is pushing west. They know we need economic growth, just not on their patch." His university serves the marginal seat of Lindsay in the city's outer west, so important in Labor thinking that it seems strategists now believe that what works in Lindsay will work for the nation. It was sitting member David Bradbury, who took Lindsay from the Liberals in 2007, who stood up in caucus in the final days of Rudd's leadership to warn that his electors were worried about boatpeople. Bradbury has a relatively good margin of 6 per cent, but Lindsay defines Labor's rhetoric.

Burchell says the perception that western Sydney is unliveable is stronger than in other cities. He says "the commute from Lindsay to the city has got much worse over 10 years". But he worries Labor seems obsessed with Lindsay on the basis of one opinion poll. "Gillard has western Sydney in her head," he says. "It's difficult to believe they are so amateurish."

It's not easy to measure an emotion like fear. But Young says he is not picking up on a victim mentality in the electorate. It was far more evident in the 2007 election, when conservative workers moved over to Rudd. "They were saying , we might have had a boom but I am not getting my share. There were also some older people who felt that Australians needed to be a bit more generous to those people who had missed out." Three years later, after a global financial crisis that has eroded retirement benefits and kept more people in jobs for longer, there is less of that generosity, he says. But conservative workers are not so fed up as in 2007.

Asylum-seekers bubbles along as an issue and can't be ignored but unlike 2001 when it was set against John Howard's culture wars, Young believes it has been neutralised by Gillard saying that it's OK to disagree. This week she told Radio 2UE in Sydney: "I'd like to have a national conversation where people are free to say what they are thinking. I don't believe in labelling people rednecks because they are concerned about boats on our horizon."

Newspoll research consistently shows immigration as a second-order issue behind the economy, education and health, for example. But part of Labor's strategy is to sweep immigration into a broad image of Gillard as service-provider. Managing population growth becomes a catch-all for providing good schools as well as good roads.

But the problem for the PM is that while she can have it both ways with those from the congested outer suburbs and the slow-growth romantics, she can't have it all ways. What about us, business cried this week as it contemplated cutbacks in immigration and the problems in getting workers. And it was not just business.

"Gillard's dog whistle needs tuning," says John Black, chief executive of planning researchers Australian Development Strategies and a former Labor senator. "People are getting affronted by all the cliches about growth and sustainability, it's so woolly." Black says that Labor's immigration pitch is putting at risk the issue which most interests voters in every poll: economic growth. According to Black, unemployment in parts of Sydney and Western Australia is under 2 per cent, a third of the rate for unskilled workers across the country. It's great news for everybody in the mining industry and global economy but very bad for those at the bottom of the heap. "If we don't get young, internationally qualified people into mining in WA there will be a major boost to wage-inflation," Black warns.

And the people who will suffer as interest rates rise in response will be those who worry about migrants crowding their cities and taking jobs. The areas Black warns will do it tough as parts of the economy slow include those that are already suffering: northwest Melbourne, southern Adelaide, Canterbury-Bankstown in Sydney and southeast Brisbane.

Just like business leaders concerned about a retreat on immigration, Black worries the PM's statements reflect an old-fashioned attitude to the national economy. An attitude that comes out of the Victorian Labor Left, which dislikes the new Australian economy based on minerals and energy exports for the way the strong dollar it generates makes it hard for union-dominated industries. Says Black: "She is getting input from the old protectionist lobby in Melbourne who say 'let's slow mining down to protect manufacturing'. It's turning the clock back to the '50s. And the best way to do this is to starve the miners of the skilled workers, many of them migrants, they need.

"If she means she wants slower growth and more jobs in working-class Melbourne they will be jobs with union coverage and this means slower growth."

Or not. Because there's another coded message running alongside the double pitch to aspirational, hard-working outer suburbanites and greenies and low-growth advocates.

It's the "nudge, nudge" to business and voters, who may be dismayed at the notion of an insular Australia, that policy will not change after the election. Even the PM says this debate is not about immigration and refuses to be drawn on whether there will be cuts to the intake.

Young suspects neither party is sure which buttons to really push in this campaign: "There are not any really big issues out there in the community and this is a dilemma for both of them," he says. Simon van Wyk, who manages Our Patch, a network of rural and regional websites covering 90 per cent of Australians outside the cities, says his discussion sites and journalists are getting zero response to the notion of a smaller Australia. But as the "brutopia" exercise showed, the Labor machine is well-practised at finessing "a fooking message". Former NSW Labor premier Bob Carr stayed in power a long time by dogwhistling about Sydney being "full" rather than tackling infrastructure problems. This campaign will show whether federal Labor can do the same.