Many Americans, and many of those watching around the world, see American democracy cracking, freedoms being eroded and the political system breaking. Much of the blame is sheeted home to Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again followers, and the case against them can clearly and forcibly be made.

But the United States has faced such crises before: in the 1790s, with the intense standoff between Federalists and Republicans; before, during and after the Civil War; in the Jim Crow period of the 1890s, which also saw five consecutive presidents elected with a minority of the popular vote; and after the Watergate revelations. The problems inherent in the American political system are thus compounded by problems and leaders unique to each era.

Trump’s presidency clearly damaged American democracy. Just how damaged and how long-lasting the effect is up for debate (a detailed 2023 report from Brookings discusses the issues well). During his term the United States was labelled a “backsliding democracy” by International IDEA, a European democracy think tank, and for some years the Economist’s Democracy Index has ranked the United States among “flawed democracies” including Greece, Poland and Brazil.

In a recent interview for the Democracy Project at Johns Hopkins University, political scientist Robert Lieberman stressed that democracy exists on a continuum. The United States started out as a constrained democracy, with citizenship limited to white men and only property-owners entitled to vote. For Lieberman, the key question is not “whether we are a democracy, but in which direction are we headed. Are we moving forward or are we moving backward?”

The current situation is arguably more serious than previous democratic crises because there are so many concomitant threats. There’s the pervasive partisan divide; conflicts over racism, immigration and nativism; growing socio-economic inequalities; the erosion of voting rights, particularly those of minorities; lawmakers’ attempts to undermine reproductive health, the rights of LGBTQI+ people, school curricula and library books; and the endless promulgation of lies and distortions that quickly come to be treated as facts.

Some of these threats have been decades in the making. Americans have long been sceptical of the power of the federal government: trust in Washington, which began to decline during the Vietnam war and continued to decline amid the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, is at an historic low. Fewer than one-in-five Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always” (1 per cent) or “most of the time” (15 per cent) in 2023 Pew Research Center polls.

Individual institutions have suffered as well. The US Supreme Court’s  reputation has been damaged by recent rulings contrary to popular opinion, and trust in federal agencies like the Justice Department, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Reserve has eroded. It’s shocking to also see declining trust in the military, police and the medical system.

These troubles pile on top of problems intrinsic to American democracy: the unusual mechanism, an electoral college, for electing the president; equal representation for the states in the Senate regardless of vastly different populations; lifetime appointments for US Supreme Court justices; and the lack of a national system for overseeing elections.

Because of their distrust of the popular vote, the Founding Fathers created the electoral college and other structural protections against what they saw as the uninformed masses. Patently, this system no longer works. Twice this century the person elected president by the electoral college had lost the popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016), and it could happen again in 2024.

Because small, less-populous and mostly White states like Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota have the same number of senators as populous and diverse states like Texas, New York and California, Republican majorities in the Senate this century have never represented a majority of the population. The impact on confirmations of judicial nominees and senior executive branch appointees has been profound.

Finally, there is the deepening polarisation of the American political system. This began post-Watergate, was boosted by Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party, and is today exemplified by the House Freedom Caucus, the MAGA movement and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This deepening polarisation has been marked by an intensifying shift rightwards among each new cohort of Republican legislators, echoing the widening differences between red and blue states and the growing urban–rural political divide.

Bring an ambitious, narcissistic, embittered and malevolent Trump back into this setting and the weaknesses of both the political system and the guard rails of democracy will become very apparent. Trump has schemed to overturn legitimate election results (and is likely to do so again), encouraged violence and discrimination, attacked the media and government institutions, undermined the staff and bureaucrats who worked for him, courted dictators and appeared beholden to foreign interests, lied and denied, and profited from his public office. Most egregiously, he encouraged the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Three years on, amazingly, a majority of Republicans believe Biden was not legitimately elected. Despite Trump’s multiple indictments and legal jeopardy, they are willing to vote for him yet again. Republicans in the Congress increasingly follow his wishes on key pieces of legislation, and even those lawmakers he has belittled and besmirched end up endorsing him.

If Trump is re-elected he will be much less constrained and much more able to get his way than in his previous term. His rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail — dark, violent, authoritarian and vengeful — has generated alarm. We have been warned about a Trump kleptocracy.

Some observers think the worst cannot and will not happen (see, for example, this article by Elaine Karmack). But a Brookings Institution report, Understanding Democratic Decline in the United States, warns that “the electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive”:

People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts.

The most obvious preventive measure lies at the ballot box — though that can only get rid of Trump, not Trumpism. And American voters themselves display some worrying tendencies. The Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 75 per cent of Americans believe that “the future of American democracy is at risk in the 2024 presidential election” and the Democracy Fund found that more than 80 per cent of Americans see democracy as a “fairly good” or “very good” political system; but the latter study highlighted that only about 27 per cent of Americans consistently and uniformly support democratic norms across multiple survey waves. Perhaps not surprisingly, this response differs by political allegiance: 45 per cent of Democrats consistently support democratic norms but only 18 per cent of Independents and 13 per cent of Republicans.

Many voters acknowledge Trump’s true character but rationalise their actions as support for conservative judges, anti-abortion legislation, overturning unfair trade agreements, retaining tax benefits or protecting the Second Amendment. Yes, there are Republicans who consider Trump a “grotesque threat to democracy” and won’t vote for him again, but there are also former Obama voters who see Trump as “our last shot at restoring America.”

Even with Trump gone from the political stage (and that endpoint may result in further efforts to upset democratic processes), considerable effort will be required to restore individual rights and freedoms and deliver the blessings of democracy to all Americans. Ending Trumpism will require a massive effort by the Republican Party to reconfigure its base and operations and find leaders who will promote a different kind of conservatism. For their part, Biden and the Democrats must work to understand the anger and despair that has driven Trump’s MAGA supporters to adopt his bleak and autocratic views. •

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But behind the hyperbolic headlines — “Trump Racks Up Massive Wins in Super Tuesday GOP Races,” “How Trump Steamrolled His Way to the GOP Nomination” or “How a Fighting Biden Took on the State of the Union” — are the many twists and turns that will determine the campaign’s eight-month trajectory and its outcome in November.

The only thing the two putative candidates agree on is the significance and consequences of this year’s vote. Trump says, rightly for once, that the 2024 election will be the “single most important day in the history of our country.” Biden says the election is “all about whether America’s democracy will survive.”

In the days since Biden’s State of the Union speech, duelling campaigns in Georgia and other swing states have offered glimpses of the two candidates’ strategies for courting an electorate less than enthused by another Biden–Trump showdown. It’s clear that this re-run of the 2020 faceoff will test the limits of campaign financing and political decorum.

The endgame is the pattern of voting in the general election — and, more particularly, in the swing states like Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Using polling to make forecasts is complicated by the fact that the winner is the candidate who racks up the most electoral college votes, not the most votes.

Polls offer little in the way of accurate insight at this point in the election cycle. But as their current base of support stands, neither Trump nor Biden can win. The polling averages from FiveThirtyEight and 270toWin have them neck and neck, with their favourability ratings languishing in the mid-fifties.

The votes that will make the difference must be won from independent voters and those party voters who are not strongly committed to either Trump or Biden. Here, despite his age and the general lack of enthusiasm for a second term, Biden seems to have the edge. But he faces problems with some segments of the population: the Democrats’ longstanding advantage with Black, Latino and Asian American voters has shrunk to its lowest point in more than sixty years; his administration’s failure to end the Israel–Gaza conflict has upset young voters and especially Arab Americans and Muslims; and many young people are simply lukewarm about Biden. Nevertheless, the president has consistently gained more than 90 per cent of the Democratic vote in the primaries to date, and even in Michigan, where Gaza war sentiment led many to vote “uncommitted,” he scored more than 80 per cent.

Trump’s base is more galvanised, more rusted on, and smaller. His party’s “Never Trump” contingent remains strong, as seen by the support Haley attracted. On Super Tuesday she received more than two million votes across fifteen states. She pulled 37 per cent of the Republican vote in Massachusetts, 33 per cent in Colorado, 29 per cent in Minnesota, and a surprise victory in Vermont. A week later, after she suspended her campaign, she drew more than 77,000 votes in Georgia (a state Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes).

What is rarely pointed out is that Republican state primaries are increasingly a winner-take-all proposition for the convention delegates (a situation cleverly engineered by Trump campaign staff). On Super Tuesday Trump reaped 93 per cent of Republican delegates while winning only around 70 per cent of the vote.

Haley’s continuing support shows that Trump hasn’t been able to defuse his long-term problems with suburban voters (especially women), moderates and independents. These are the voters who cost him a second term in 2020 and could potentially cost him again in 2024.

A key issue for the Trump campaign is where the Republicans who voted for Haley will go in November. Quinnipiac University polling found that 37 per cent of Haley voters would vote for Biden and 12 per cent would stay home. Emerson College polling found 63 per cent of Haley primary voters would vote for Biden in the general election with 10 per cent undecided. Some exit polls have delivered even higher numbers of voters reluctant to commit to Trump.

Trump, who has derided Haley using sexist and racist language, has shown little interest in reaching out to her voters. In January he seemed to reject them outright, declaring that anyone who made a donation to Haley “will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them and will not accept them.” No surprise then that many of her supporters wonder whether they still have a place in the Republican Party, a perception that will only deepen as Trump, his campaign and his family take control of the Republican National Committee.

Trump’s efforts to appeal to independents have been desultory at best; he seems incapable of moving beyond the rhetoric of stolen elections, woke liberals, the deep state, threats from illegal immigrants and asylum seekers, and his own perceived victimisation. His speeches offer little more than a dark vision for his second term. His embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán and other authoritarians, his suggestion that he was open to making cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and the persistent efforts of conservative Republicans to undermine women’s reproductive rights won’t win over these independents.

This inability to broaden his support is the biggest threat to Trump’s efforts to reclaim the presidency. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Biden will have an easier time sweeping up the independents and undecideds. Will those concerned about the Israel–Gaza crisis who opted for “uncommitted” in the primaries vote for Biden in the general election, or will they simply stay home? (Given Trump’s vilification of Muslims they are unlikely to vote for him.) That will largely depend on what happens in Gaza between now and November. And can Biden and the Democrats reverse their declining support among minority groups and young voters?

The changing demographics of the United States has seen a decline in the White, non-college educated voters who have been the mainstay of the Trump Republican Party, an increase in politically active young voters, many of whom don’t see either party as dealing with the issues that matter to them, and an increase in racial and ethnic diversity at a time when race is a central political issue.

The Pew Research Center has reported that Biden received more 90 per cent of the Black vote in 2020 while Trump received just 8 per cent. But this year these voters are frustrated with Biden over a range of issues, including the lack of progress on racial justice and the economic impact of soaring inflation.

Latino voters, who make up some 15 per cent of the electorate, are a heterogeneous group politically, with divergent opinions on issues like immigration. A recent poll from the New York Times and Siena College shows 46 per cent of Latino voters supporting Trump and 40 per cent supporting Biden (albeit with a large margin of error).

Recently Trump has touted his support among the Black community, though not always in flattering terms. He does have a growing contingent of Black hip-hop artists among his vocal supporters and most recently resorted to using AI-generated pictures to build his credentials with the African-American community. But there’s little evidence of a major shift in support; a December poll showed only 25 per cent of Black adults had a favourable view of Trump.

Jaime Harrison, the African American chair of the Democratic National Committee, has accused Republicans of promoting “fairy tales about their plan to win over Black voters.” He made particular note of the fact that Trump “pals around with white supremacists.” Just days after the Trump campaign began its overhaul of the  Republican National Committee came the announcement that the party is closing all of the community centres it established for minority outreach in California, New York, North Carolina and Texas.

Ideology aside, the issues that will drive voters to the polling booths in November are common to all Americans: the economy and its impact on family budgets, healthcare costs, immigration, gun control and abortion. America’s role in supporting Ukraine and as a potential peacemaker in Gaza will also be important. These issues often play out very differently for Democrats and Trump Republicans: abortion and reproductive rights, immigration policies and gun control are classic examples. Perceptions of other issues, including the economy, interest rates and the outcomes of Biden’s national security and foreign policy efforts, will change — perhaps dramatically — between now and voting day.

For many Trump supporters, policies (or lack thereof) are of little consequence; like Trump, they are not interested in a united country or a bipartisan approach to legislation. They share Trump’s story, described by Biden in his State of the Union speech as one of resentment, revenge and retribution, and, shockingly, many of them embrace his authoritarianism. As one supporter posted on social media, “I’m not voting Republican, I’m voting Trump.”

For Democrats, kitchen table issues also include the erosion of freedoms and the future of democracy in the United States. Historian and presidential biographer Jon Meacham makes this stark statement about America today: “Historically speaking, the forces now in control of the Republican Party represent the most significant threat to basic constitutionalism we’ve experienced since the Civil war. That’s not a partisan point; it’s just the fact of the matter. And I’m not talking about particular policies, about which we can and should disagree. I’m talking about the self-evident willingness of a once-noble party to embrace lies and the will to power over essential democratic norms.”

The months ahead will be some of the most consequential in the nation’s history, with no guarantee this tense situation be overturned or resolved by the vote in November. •

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That was the year when Indira Gandhi ended her seventeen months of authoritarian rule (“the Emergency”) and called elections she expected to win. It was a make-or-break decision: if she prevailed, her opponents feared she would cement the authoritarianism of the Emergency.

Critics have described the spirit of prime minister Modi’s government during the past few years as “the Emergency you have when you’re not having an Emergency.” Techniques to harass your foes, pioneered by Mrs Gandhi and her cronies, have been deployed by the BJP with the efficiency of modern management and the relentlessness of digital technology.

In the elections of 1977, Indira Gandhi and her Congress party lost decisively to a hastily formed alliance of old politicians, some of whom had been jailed during the Emergency. A varied crew, they included fist-shaking socialists, heavyweight dropouts from Congress and future BJP prime minister Atul Bihari Vajpayee. They formed a government committed to undoing the excesses of the Emergency. India, they promised, would get a new start. Voters seemed to share their hope.

The top box-office film that year, Amar, Akbar, Anthony, had everything a Hindi film of its time needed: big stars, including the young Amitabh Bachchan, music, dancing, car chases, crime, murder, slapstick comedy and a happy ending. It was also cheap: filmed in a month entirely in Mumbai.

The plot carried a message. Three small boys are abandoned and separated. Amar is found and raised by an upright Hindu policeman, Akbar by a kindly Muslim tailor and Anthony (Bachchan) by a Catholic priest. Three filmic hours later, the brothers discover each other and together vanquish the criminals who have caused their distress; the family is reunited; the blind mother has her sight restored; the ne’er-do-well father repents, rejoices at the unity of the family — and is packed off to jail.

You don’t have to be into semiotics to get the message about national unity and “out of many, one.” Amar, Akbar, Anthony was so popular it got remade in three south Indian languages, each with a locally appropriate name change (including John, Jaffer, Janardhanan in Malayalam, the language of Kerala).

Today, a number of recent films and those announced for 2024 pack a different punch. They focus on international enemies working to destroy India. Pathaan, the box office favourite of 2023, is about international terrorists, viruses and cloak-and-dagger struggles between Indian secret agents and evil-doers in the employ of shadowy figures in Pakistan. It has earned hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.

This year’s previewed films don’t pussyfoot around when it comes to messaging. The new releases include Bastar, focused on the Naxalites, murderous would-be revolutionaries in a rugged district in central India who killed more than seventy paramilitary police in 2010. “Urban Naxalite” is a common term of abuse for human rights activists and critics of the BJP government. In the film’s trailer, a police officer says that those “supporting” Naxalites “are pseudo-intellectuals, Left liberals” and promises to gather them in the street “and shoot them in public view.”

Pro-government? On the contrary, says the producer, it’s “pro-India”: “Our film talks about what is good for India. Now, if the BJP speaks similarly, it is their political stand.”

Another example with a political kick: Swantantrya Veer Savarkar (“freedom warrior Savarkar”). A prolific real-life writer and translator, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) was imprisoned for years on the Andaman Islands for complicity in plots to murder British officials. He later became a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and a favourite ideologue of the BJP. Savarkar was never incriminated in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, but he didn’t much like Gandhi either. Savarkar “does not hate Gandhi but hates non-violence,” says film’s director.

Kunal Purohit, author of H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindu Pop Stars, an impressive new book on Hindu-supremacism in popular music and publishing, estimates that ten of the films due for pre-election release demonise Muslims and opponents of Hindu ascendancy.

Films like these highlight the political contest going on in Indian popular culture via the country’s digitisation and its almost 900 million broadband subscribers. The BJP and its many subsidiaries are drowning out other voices.

The film business offers another significant angle on electoral politics. The films mentioned above, all in Hindi, come out of Mumbai (Bollywood). But the south Indian film industry, based in Hyderabad and Chennai, has “taken over the commercial and critical reins,” according to one of India’s most experienced film critics. The south, on this view, is where the most original and successful films are being generated.

The south Indian film that made movie people around the world pay attention, and crowds flock to the theatres, is the Telugu-language RRR, set in colonial times. The British and a Muslim prince provide the main villains. It is an expensive production with spectacular fight scenes and box office collections estimated at A$230 million internationally. (“A Netflix top 10 hit in 62 countries,” according to the streaming service, which screens a Hindi version).

South India will be a key focus in the coming elections. Just as its films are enjoying wide success, the region is registering India’s most impressive economic activity and social statistics. The telling number is estimated GDP per person, which is more than four times greater for the southern states than for India’s two most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the Hindi-speaking north. Together, UP and Bihar are home to about 25 per cent of India’s 1.4 billion people; the five southern states have 20 per cent. Female literacy, infant mortality and life-expectancy data are all better in the south.

Mr Modi and the BJP have had notable success in only one of the five southern states, Karnataka (capital, Bengaluru), where they won twenty-five (out of twenty-nine) parliamentary seats in 2019. But the BJP lost state elections to the Congress last year and didn’t hold a single parliamentary seat from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu or Kerala in the 2019 parliament.

On the surface, this inability to win in the south doesn’t matter. The BJP doesn’t need the south to win national elections, and that advantage will grow if a redistribution of seats, which hasn’t happened for fifty years, is carried out next year. The number of seats will be increased and reapportioned on the basis of population. On those calculations, the five southern states together will elect only about fifteen more members than Uttar Pradesh alone.

To people in the south, this looks like power being embedded in regions with poor records in health, education and economic growth. The feckless will be rewarded at the expense of the virtuous. That impression doesn’t fit well with Mr Modi’s frequent proclaiming that his main mission is economic development and material prosperity.

With victories seemingly assured in much of the Hindi-speaking north, the BJP is throwing talent and money at the southern states and at West Bengal. All these states have their own languages written in distinctive scripts, and they don’t regard the BJP’s pressure to use Hindi as the national language of Bharat (the BJP’s preferred name for India) with great enthusiasm.

Opposition leaders around India have as much reason today as in 1977 to be apprehensive about their futures in the event of a thundering victory for the government. Nevertheless, an attempt last year to coordinate opposition election campaigning has fallen apart even before the election dates were announced. Key political leaders in West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha have either aligned with the BJP or, in West Bengal, decided to fight on their own. Elsewhere, the BJP picks off potential adversaries with offers they can’t refuse.

Congress, the only opposition party with national recognition, is frail and easy to deride. Rahul Gandhi, its fifty-three-year-old leader, has few qualifications other than being the descendant of three prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. His elderly Italian-born mother, Sonia, is still part of decision-making.

A big BJP victory will assure the party of fifteen years of power from 2014 to 2029. It will embolden the party to incorporate in the constitution provisions advocated before independence by the ideologues of Hindu supremacy. One of those goals was a centralised government in which the states would be simply implementers of the national program. Changing from a parliamentary to a presidential system has also been discussed in the past.

The long-term project of the BJP and the Hindu-supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh movement, of which Mr Modi was a member from adolescence, is an India in which all citizens subscribe to a common version of what it is to be a Hindu. Non-Hindus may continue to live in India but they must be prepared to be at the back of every queue and expect no favours from the state. In this way, Bharat will reclaim its pre-Muslim, pre-British glory.

Today, someone making an updated version of Amar, Akbar, Anthony might feel the need to recognise how the spirit of the times has changed. The film would tell how a brave Hindu boy saved his two hapless brothers, his blind mother and his country from powerful internal and external enemies. It might also be a good idea to call the film Modi! Modi! Modi! •

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If you live in Frankston and you’ve got a problem with Victorian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.

If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.

Send Labor a message.

— Sussan Ley (@sussanley) February 29, 2024

Having happened to watch question time that day, I can attest that she (or her staffer) was fully on song with the opposition’s chief theme: that Melburnian women should be terrified of being assaulted by convicted sex offenders — foreign (ie. dark-skinned) ones to boot — released into the community by the Albanese government.

It’s a very Peter Duttonesque message, but he and his team usually deliver it with more subtlety — it sticks better if recipients have to join a few dots — and, crucially, with deniability. By blundering in with the quiet bits out loud, Ley made it more obvious, if not necessarily more objectionable.

It’s all part of the Dunkley frenzy, of course. As with all federal by-elections seen as contestable between the major parties, this one, caused by the death of Labor MP Peta Murphy, has gone from being cast as a useful indicator of how the parties are “travelling” to something incredibly important in its own right: massive tests for the prime minister and opposition leader.

Whenever I write about a by-election I devote some words to explaining why these events are useless predictors of anything and why they only matter because the political bubble believes they do. Readers familiar with these observations can skip the next few pars.

There are two main reasons. The first is that the sample, while huge, is neither random nor scientifically weighted. It’s just one electorate. At the 2022 general election a national 3.7 percentage point swing comprised a spread of 151 seat swings, from 14.2 points to Labor in Pearce (Western Australia) to 7.2 points to the Liberals in Calwell (Victoria). (The 8.3 points to the Lib in Fowler (New South Wales) was bigger, but that was an independent–Labor contest and the two-party-preferred figure comes from an Electoral Commission recount for purely academic purposes.)

So even at a general election, one seat’s swing will rarely approximate the national one.

But perhaps more importantly, by-elections (except in the rarest of cases) are not about who will form government. It’s true that a proportion of the electorate — probably still a majority, but a shrinking one — will always vote for a particular major party out of loyalty, but for the rest the triviality of the contest liberates them to act on other impulses. “Sending a message” is tried and tested (see tweet above).

Candidates also make more of a difference at by-elections. So might the weather. Low turnout is a feature of this genre, worth potentially a couple of percentage points one way or the other.

Still, by-elections do end up being important, precisely because the political class believes they are. They can influence the future, particularly leaders’ job security, but only because of how they’re interpreted. (Would we have ever seen a Bob Hawke prime ministership if Liberal Phillip Lynch had not resigned in Flinders in 1982?)

The magic number here is the margin: 6.27233 per cent to be precise. A swing to the opposition above that figure would shake parliament’s walls, generate shock and awe in the press gallery and even, perhaps, send Labor’s leadership hares out for a trot. After the Voice “debacle,” Anthony Albanese fails another electoral test!

A swing to the government would similarly damage Peter Dutton, rendering his chances of surviving until the next election worse than they are now. And anything in between will be energetically spun by both sides and their media cheersquads.

So what can we say about Dunkley? Antony Green’s page is up, and I’ve followed his lead when calculating average swings by restricting the time period to 1983 onwards. But I’ve also excluded by-elections caused by section 44 of the Constitution — of which we had a slew around six years ago — because in all of them (or at least those with identifiable with two-party-preferred swings) the disqualified MPs ran again. These deserve their own category given that the absence of the personal votes of sitting MPs is the big driver of the difference between swings in opposition-held seats and government-held seats.

That leaves twenty-three by-elections in the past forty-one years with two-party-preferred swings. In the ten opposition-held seats (including Aston and the low-profile Fadden last year) the average swing was an almost negligible 0.8 points to the opposition.

Those caused by resignations by government MPs (eleven in total, the most recent in Groom in 2020) average to a much bigger number, 7.6 points to the opposition. And when they’re brought on by the death of a government MP — it’s a tiny sample of two (Aston 2001 and Canning 2015) — the swing is 5.5 points to the opposition. If we include that pair with the resignations we get 7.2 points to the opposition from thirteen events.

(There were no opposition by-elections caused by death with two-party-preferred swings in that period.)

So you might want to use that 5.5, which would see Labor retain the seat, or 7.2, which wouldn’t. Or you could slot in any other number, because another feature of by-elections is that they’re unpredictable.

The graph below shows Labor two-party-preferred votes in Dunkley since 1984. To adjust for redistributions, notional swings are subtracted from results going backwards. The blue dots show the actual vote at each election; the fact that so many are below the orange line reflects a 2018 redistribution that favoured Labor by an estimated (by the AEC) 2.5 points after preferences.

The big gap between the orange and red lines from 1998 to 2013 (particularly from 2001) is largely because of the big personal vote built up by the energetic Liberal Bruce Billson, first elected in 1996. He ended up in Tony Abbott’s shadow cabinet and then in cabinet; he was subsequently dropped by new prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2015 and retired at the 2016 election. See the dramatic narrowing between red and orange at that election with the absence of his name on the ballot.

Dunkley was retained by the Liberals’ Chris Crewther, but the aforementioned redistribution saw the electorate going into the 2019 poll as notionally Labor. In that year Victoria was the only state to swing to the opposition, and Murphy (who had also contested in 2016) took Dunkley (or retained it vis-à-vis its notional position) with a swing slightly above the state average. If Crewther generated a sophomore surge in that single term, it was counteracted by other factors, perhaps including the Labor candidate and campaign. Murphy seems to have enjoyed a surge in 2022, registering a swing well above the state average. Which takes us to where we are now, and that margin of 6.3 points.

Note that the orange line is above 50 per cent in 1998, 2010 and 2016. All else being equal, this suggests Labor would have won on the current boundaries in those years. All else ain’t equal, and the assumption gets more questionable the further back we go because of demographic changes and compounding errors in those post-redistribution estimates of notional margins. (Notional margins are rather hit and miss. For one thing they can’t take into account postal votes; for another they ignore personal votes in booths from neighbouring electorates.)

But it is reasonable to believe that Dunkley, as it is defined today, would probably have been won by Labor in 2010 and 2016. So although Dunkley was long held by the Liberal Party it’s not really accurate to call it a natural Liberal seat.

Other factors?

Federal electorates tend to be pulled by state tides. One element is the standing of those second-tier governments, and while Victoria’s Labor government under new premier Jacinta Allan is still ahead in opinion polls, the leads are more modest than under Dan Andrews. Put less clinically, Andrews was an accomplished communicator, including on behalf his federal counterparts, and he is gone.

Working the other way, Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto still seems as pitiably bogged down by his party’s right wing as he was eleven months ago during Aston.

Then there’s the personal vote. On the evidence, which isn’t substantial, Murphy had a good one. (The bigger her personal vote, the worse for Labor’s chances on 2 March.)

The Liberal candidate is the Frankston mayor Nathan Conroy, who should bring a ready-made personal vote in parts of the electorate. Labor’s Jodie Belyea has long been involved in the local community but from reports lacks his profile. As noted above, attitudes to candidates can matter a lot at by-elections.

Conroy drew the top ballot spot and Belyea the bottom. That’s got to be worth a point or two for the Liberal overall.

Dutton is reported to be spinning “that a swing of between 3 per cent and 5 per cent would be a respectable outcome,” which suggests his party is expecting something bigger. YouGov, with a small sample, puts the Liberals on 51 per cent after preferences (about a 7 point swing). Polling before by-elections, including surveys conducted by the parties, is notoriously rubbery.

Anything can happen at by-elections, but if forced to choose I would tip a Liberal victory. If that does eventuate, the media frenzy about Labor’s leadership, including whispers from unnamed party sources, will not be for the faint-hearted.

December’s “one-term government” sightings will certainly make a comeback. •

Further reading, in alphabetical order

• ABC’s aforementioned Antony Green
• Kevin Bonham
• Pollbludger (William Bowe)
• Tallyroom (Ben Raue)

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January’s rejigged Stage 3 tax cuts announcement — warmly received in voterland, it seems, and made an ostentatious meal of by the opposition — has turned a new page. Now the political class has all but unanimously declared the return of the prime minister’s mojo. Albanese is in control again, looking and acting confident. But the Dunkley by-election on 2 March could change all that, of course, potentially dramatically.

So what’s the point of these incessant, whiplash-inducing analyses of how the parties and leaders are “travelling”? At core they must be about the next election; they can have no purpose otherwise. But once we’ve voted, this term of government will be viewed through the lens of the 2025 result and all today’s twists and turns will be forgotten. The caravan will move on to how the next election is shaping up.

One popular school of thought sees the media’s incessant horse-race adjudications as self-fulfilling. It is in a party’s interests to be described as being on track for electoral victory because the happy vibes will help it get there. With apologies to Sting, I don’t subscribe to this point of view. The narrative certainly influences reality, even around the edges of opinion poll results, but its effects on elections are usually minor and unpredictable.

The idea matters a lot to politicians and their staffers, though, partly because many of their jobs are dedicated to generating good reviews and partly because those reviews can ultimately affect their professional survival.

Peter Dutton, who was always facing a battle to remain Liberal leader for the full term, went into the summer break looking rather happy, but now he’s biting his nails about Dunkley. Albanese, who as prime minister enjoys more institutional fortification, would be harder to shift in the event of a bad result, but government MPs and staffers still imbibe the commentary. No leader enjoys forlorn troops and nervous backbenchers.

Judgements about how the participants are travelling are largely driven by opinion polls — and most of all, far ahead of the others, by Newspoll in the Australian. The tendency reached a nadir of sorts back in 2015 when Malcolm Turnbull talked about Tony Abbott “losing” all those Newspolls. (Albanese borrowed that formulation on the ABC’s 7.30 this month to point out his government has never “lost” one.)

The first Newspoll of 2024, in early February, found 62 per cent believed the government “did the right thing” by rejigging the tax cuts, with just 29 per cent saying they “should have kept their promise and implemented the tax cuts without changing them.”

Voting intentions and personal ratings were virtually identical to Newspoll’s final 2023 survey, which is widely seen as evidence the government didn’t “take a hit” for breaking that election promise. Along with the problems the decision caused (and will continue to cause) for the opposition right through to the next election, and along with the fact that the government was taking control of its destiny, the figures were enough to make it a “win.”

Just between us, though, Labor was a bit lucky with Newspoll’s phrasing. The fact that the changed policy represented the breaking of an ironclad, repeated promise was hidden in one of the responses, the one very few people nominated.

When another pollster, Redbridge, conducted a big survey at about the same time, it posed several questions about those Stage 3 tax cuts. The first (on page 21) simply asked if the government should stick to its repeated promise not to change them; it received a slight plurality in support of sticking with the cuts designed by the Coalition. The second (page 26) described the reported changes and asked about approval; this time the rejigged policy received large support, rather like that found by Newspoll.

All these pollsters’ questions are valid; the point here is that different wording can produce different headlines. A Newspoll question that resembled Redbridge’s first one would have generated very different perceptions about how the changed policy had been received by punters.

Redbridge also found a decrease in the government’s two-party-preferred support from 52.8 per cent in December to 51.2 per cent in February. Yet despite this “swing” the survey was reported very positively for the government in News Corp tabloids. Perhaps it can be difficult to break from the press gallery consensus.

Note that the prime minister is a bare relic of the figure, a year ago, who could do no wrong. How might voters have reacted if he’d announced these changes back then? He might well have taken that “hit” from those sky-high poll numbers. We’ll never know.

Broken election promises are as old as politics itself. From electors’ point of view Albanese is now just another politician; perhaps he had already become one last year. All prime ministers end up like that. “My word is my bond” is henceforth a punchline, like “Honest John” Howard in a previous era.

Like his predecessors, the prime minister is relying on the allure of incumbency: yes, I’m less than honest at times but I get the job done; I make the hard calls for the nation, and that’s what matters.

He even trotted out, also on 7.30, the sense of “trust” reclaimed by both Howard (in 2004) and Gillard (2012). “Australians,” he told Sarah Ferguson, “can trust me to be prepared to have the strength to take the right decisions that are needed.”

It was an overly long sentence, with spits, starts, lulls and twists, but he got there eventually. Rather like the government’s path to Stage 3 Mark II. •

The post How’s he travelling? appeared first on Inside Story.

Prabowo and his running mate, president Joko Widodo’s eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka, need to get more than 50 per cent of the vote to avoid a late June run-off with the second-placed candidate. Opinion polls put them just above this threshold, or tantalisingly close to it.

Jokowi, as the current president is known, hopes to extend his dynastic foothold in the system by supporting the Indonesia Solidarity Party, or PSI, which is trying to enter parliament for the first time under the leadership of his second son, Kaesang Pangarep. PSI’s ubiquitous television adverts feature Kaesang’s image alongside that of his father, with the slogan “PSI is Jokowi’s party.”

This is no doubt news to Indonesia’s Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, which for now still counts Jokowi as a member. But a breakdown in president–party relations in 2023 accelerated Jokowi’s shift of support to Prabowo, capped with the appointment of Gibran as his running mate. PDI-P’s candidate, former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo, has seen his support collapse over the three-month campaign period as Jokowi’s supporter base has followed the president’s lead and defected to Prabowo.

The irony is that Jokowi’s betrayal of PDI-P in favour of Prabowo and his son’s candidacy has worked almost too well for the president’s own good. Ganjar has been overtaken for second place by former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan, a government critic who maintains ties to conservative Islamic opposition groups and is now attracting support from progressives who see him as the candidate best placed to challenge the Prabowo–Widodo alliance. But polls show Prabowo with a huge lead in a head-to-head with Anies, and PDI-P, despite its anger with Jokowi, would likely endorse Prabowo in a second round in exchange for an advantageous deal on representation in Prabowo’s cabinet.

But Jokowi is understandably not eager to see a four-month run-off campaign that would offer Anies a platform to dial up criticisms of his policy legacy and his government’s erosion of democratic norms. Efforts by Jokowi to use the levers of state to drum up support for Prabowo have become a major point of controversy in the media. Both Ganjar’s and Anies’s campaigns have alleged behind-the-scenes intimidation of voters, donors and campaign workers by police and other officials.

A more above-board mode of government favouritism is occurring in plain sight. During the campaign, Jokowi has wheeled out close to US$1.3 billion worth of cash transfers and food aid, justified as an emergency response to El Niño–related disruptions to food security. Nobody sees it as anything other than a well-timed attempt to boost goodwill towards the administration — and by extension, to Prabowo and Gibran.

Jokowi wants to reduce the risk of an unexpectedly tight run-off to zero, but a hole-in-one for Prabowo isn’t without its downsides if Prabowo enters office with too forceful an electoral mandate. No non-incumbent president has won a multi-cornered contest without a run-off since the introduction of direct presidential elections in 2004.

Not only does Prabowo have a strong chance of scoring an unprecedented first-round victory. His personal-vehicle party, Gerindra, could also beat PDI-P for first place in the legislative elections — allowing it by custom to claim the strategic speakership of parliament. If all breaks well on election day, Prabowo could become the most authoritative incoming president in the democratic era.

For Jokowi, such a landslide would only bring forward the point at which Prabowo no longer owes him anything. One son in the vice-presidency and the other as the head of a minor parliamentary faction would offer him only limited avenues to push back against any effort by Prabowo to sideline the Widodos in the course of asserting his authority over the political elite.

There remains uncertainty over the ends to which that authority might then be put. Prabowo’s 2024 campaign has been premised on continuity with the Jokowi era. His television advertisements and campaign speeches have featured Gibran prominently, listing off the hugely popular social programs that have been built by the Jokowi administration and promising to continue and expand them.

Yet the hallmark of Prabowo’s political career has been shifts in his political persona and alliances to serve his presidential ambitions. In 1997–98 he posed as a bitter-ender for former president Suharto’s foundering dictatorship, forging links with a rising Islamist civil society as part of his manoeuvring to succeed his then father-in-law. In the post-reformasi era he reinvented himself as a Sukarnoist ultranationalist, then later posed as a friend of political Islam in his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns against Jokowi.

More than twenty years of trial and error have now led Prabowo to mimicry of Jokowi’s secular, technocratic populism, with very successful results. But nobody — including Jokowi — can assume that this persona will hold fast if, or when, Prabowo has at his fingertips the powers of the overbearing presidency Jokowi has created, with the added bonus of a strong electoral mandate Jokowi helped him earn.

Prabowo has lately become proud of talking about how much he has learnt from Jokowi while serving as his defence minister since 2019 — and as PDI-P knows all too well, nobody but Jokowi is a better teacher of the art of the double-cross. •

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By the beginning of 2024 a record-breaking 21.3 million Americans had signed up for health coverage through Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges — five million more than a record high at the same time last year. Intriguingly, the largest increases have come in Republican-dominated states. In Florida, one in four people under the age of sixty-five are enrolled in an exchange plan; in Georgia, Texas, Utah and South Carolina the figure is more than one in ten.

Much of the recent increase can be attributed to the unwinding of Covid-era rules that made it easier to gain access to Medicaid, the healthcare scheme for people on low incomes. Under Biden, marketplace subsidies for health insurance premiums have been increased and eligibility widened, although this enhanced assistance will expire after 2025 without an extension from Congress. The administration has also boosted publicity about how the insurance exchanges work — publicity substantially reduced under Donald Trump — and removed a glitch that deprived some families of subsidies.

Fourteen years on, the data show that Obamacare is increasingly doing what Obama and the Democrats wanted — not just providing the security of health insurance but also reducing income inequality and racial disparities in healthcare. It has reduced the out-of-pocket costs of preventive healthcare for all Americans and the burden of medical spending on families, particularly those on low and middle incomes. America still doesn’t have the universal coverage standard in other wealthy nations, but some states, including Massachusetts and New York, are getting close.

Trump and Republicans in Congress couldn’t repeal Obamacare in 2017 largely because it had become too popular. It’s even more popular now. Around 60 per cent of Americans support the healthcare law and the figure is even higher for some of Obamacare’s specific provisions, including protections for pre-existing health conditions.

When Trump vowed late last year to “never give up” his call for Obamacare’s repeal — claiming it is “too expensive, and otherwise, not good healthcare” and promising to come up with “a much better, and less expensive, alternative!” — he was offering a campaign gift to Democrats. The promise, which Trump has made frequently since his 2016 campaign without ever detailing a replacement, has contributed significantly to Republican electoral defeats since then. On this issue he has failed to attract a groundswell of support even among Republicans: polling last December by independent healthcare analysts KFF showed that only 32 per cent of self-identified Republican voters considered it very important for candidates to talk about the future of Obamacare, compared with 70 per cent of Democrats.

But that same polling indicates voters are eager to hear the presidential candidates discuss healthcare affordability. Eight in ten voters describe this topic, and the future of Medicare (the federal insurance program for older people) and Medicaid, as “very important.” They regard access to mental healthcare as a healthcare priority too, along with prescription drug costs, gun violence, the opioid crisis, abortion and climate change. (The pandemic barely makes it to the list — only 22 per cent of those surveyed said it was very important.) All these issues and more show up among Biden’s election commitments, whereas Trump’s election statements are vague or absent. (A recent article from KFF Health News outlines what a second Trump presidency could look like for healthcare based on Trump’s previous record.)

Abortion, gun control, immigration, LGBTQ rights and climate change — all issues relating to health — are now seen as “litmus test” issues that drive voting choices. Ironically, though, the most potent policy decisions in these areas in recent years have been made not by elected politicians but by the courts, with the US Supreme Court, now dominated by conservative Trump appointees, as the final arbiter.

This sort of policy rule-making has not always worked well for Trump, Republicans or voters. A classic example is the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the federal guarantee of abortion rights. This ruling delivered Trump and Republicans one of their most significant victories and one of their biggest political vulnerabilities.

Americans’ support for abortion is now at a record high; 69 per cent believe abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy and 61 per cent think that overturning Roe v. Wade was a “bad thing.” Voter anger over abortion restrictions was widely credited with Democrats’ wins in the 2022 midterm elections. This is expected to be the case again in 2024, with abortion on the ballot in many states, even those where abortion rights are legally enshrined.

When asked which party best represents their views on abortion, more people say the Democratic Party (42 per cent) than the Republican Party (26 per cent). Women of reproductive age and young voters see abortion as a factor galvanising them to vote — and American women consistently vote more often than men. Some analysts believe angry Republican women could spell trouble for the party vote in 2024.

Litigation over abortion restrictions and access to reproductive health services is nevertheless proceeding in many Republican-controlled states, and the US Supreme Court is set to rule before November 2024 on two cases involving reproductive rights and healthcare: one on access to mifepristone, the pill used in more than half of US abortions, and another on emergency, life-saving abortions in hospital emergency departments.

Both Trump and his surviving rival in the primaries, Nikki Haley, struggle to articulate a coherent position on abortion that is acceptable to both conservative Republican Party officials and voters. Biden, by contrast, has put reproductive rights squarely in the middle of his re-election campaign. He has committed to enshrining abortion rights in federal law and has issued an executive order aimed at strengthening access to contraception.

The Affordable Care Act and its regulations guarantee coverage of preventive services, including birth control and contraceptive counselling, at no cost for women with health insurance. In 2020 the US Supreme Court upheld a Trump administration regulation that allowed employers with religious or moral objections to limit the birth control cover provided by Obamacare. Last month the Biden administration released proposed rules that would remove the moral exemption but retain the religious exemption, potentially restoring free contraception coverage to 126,000 women.

Abortion and contraception in the United States — a country where maternal and infant mortality rates and healthcare and pharmaceutical costs are shamefully high — are often economic decisions rather than moral or ideological ones. Even in some of the most conservative states with very few abortion services, rates of legal abortions are high. Access to reproductive healthcare services is crucial for many women, regardless of political affiliation, and especially those who are poor. Reproductive health researchers at the Guttmacher Institute say 75 per cent of American women seeking an abortion are either in poverty or just above the poverty line.

It’s worth noting that over the past forty years the sharpest drops in abortion rates have been under Democratic presidents, presumably because of their greater focus on delivering comprehensive healthcare services.

A study released in September 2023 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace provides an interesting insight into partisanship more broadly in the United States. Since the Tea Party era there has been almost no policy overlap between the two major parties in Congress (and the situation grows more partisan by the day). Among voters, by contrast, considerable agreement exists even on hot-button issues like abortion and guns.

But voters’ policy views are not strongly held and the American political system doesn’t easily allow them to express their policy preferences. What is strongly held is a sense of identity: what is referred to as emotional or affective polarisation. Voters don’t like people from the other political party — largely based on misbeliefs, misinformation and misperceptions — and will alter their policy preferences to match their partisan identities. In this respect, media like Fox News and Newsmax are seen as having a bigger impact than social media and political campaigns.

The fate of the Affordable Care Act sees two key issues — rising economic pressures and the polarisation of politicians and voters — come together. The act was initially very unpopular because of poor messaging from Democrats and misinformation and disinformation from Republicans and the conservative media. Confusion about a complicated law that took years to come into effect was widespread. And many Americans didn’t realise that the Affordable Care Act (which they liked) was the same as Obamacare (which they despised and/or feared), though those who benefited soon became supporters.

The situation in Florida (an increasingly Republican state) exemplifies the split. Florida has far more people enrolled in Obamacare’s federal health insurance marketplace than any other state. Floridians, bombarded with misinformation from then governor Rick Scott (“everyone now realises that Obamacare was a terrible notion”) and from current governor Ron DeSantis (who wants a healthcare plan that would “supersede” Obamacare), were initially loathe to take up government-subsidised health insurance, deriding it as “socialism.”

But Medicaid has never been expanded in Florida, which ranks among the five most expensive states for healthcare, many local employers don’t offer health insurance, and many retirees are younger than sixty-five and not yet eligible for Medicare. Obamacare offers affordable options for all these groups. Its increasing uptake and popularity has been driven by Republican-leaning Hispanics in the Miami area, where it’s described as “ingrained in the community” and the Obama campaign logo is routinely used to promote insurance.

Despite all this, a November poll showed Florida’s Hispanic voters backing Trump. While only 30 per cent of those surveyed indicated they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for Biden, 36 per cent opted for Trump. Results like these suggest that emotional polarisation will continue to drive voting patterns in November, even if this risks the loss of healthcare insurance and associated benefits.

On the upside, the Affordable Care Act no longer faces quite the same existential threat that once loomed. Despite Trump’s renewed threats, the scheme’s popularity continues to increase and Republican hostility is fading. It has become deeply embedded in the US healthcare system. (It would be no easy task to untangle its provisions from Medicare.) And it will be hard to sell voters a promise to take away the health insurance they know and value — even if there is a replacement, with all its own complicated and time-consuming details. •

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The DPP’s main opponent is the Kuomintang, or KMT, a party with roots deep in pre-revolutionary China and members that are far more inclined than their DPP counterparts to claim Chinese heritage. The KMT’s presidential candidate, New Taipei mayor Hou Yu-ih, is a centrist pragmatist from a local Taiwanese family, but both his running mate and the first-placed candidate on the party’s list are “deep blue” — strongly pro-Chinese figures from families that fled to Taiwan after the communist victory in 1949. Intra-party tensions reflecting these different views could complicate legislative processes after the election.

The third party fielding a presidential candidate, the Taiwan People’s Party, is predicted to retain its present strength in the legislature. It has feistily courted younger voters during the campaign.

On current predictions the next president of the legislature will be the KMT’s Han Kuo-yu, whose position on the party ticket assures him of a win despite his having made history in 2020 as the only mayor ever recalled from office by popular petition.

Outside Taiwan, the election is attracting interest more for its international than its domestic repercussions. The war in Ukraine alerted the world to the possibility of a matching war on the opposite side of Eurasia. The dramatic increase in incursions by Chinese fighter jets into Taiwanese airspace over the past two to three years resonates with the build-up of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border in the months ahead of its February 2022 invasion. From London to Tokyo, commentators have been speculating on the potential for a bellicose response to the election in Beijing.

Not surprisingly, the prospect of war has been a theme in the election campaign. KMT posters show Hou Yu-ih declaring “Peace on each shore; we don’t want war.” The fact that all candidates agree with this sentiment doesn’t stop it being invoked as a point of difference between the DPP on the one hand and the Kuomintang and the Taiwan People’s Party on the other. A widely read article by influential American commentators advocating greater restraint in Washington’s approach to Taiwan has been weaponised by the opposition parties to attack the DPP for a China policy they portray as flirting with war. China’s defence ministry has weighed in, criticising the DPP for “deliberately hyping up the so-called ‘military threat from the mainland’” for electoral purposes.

In fact, says the DPP’s Lai Ching-te, “In the eyes of Beijing, the three of us [running for president] are all supporters of Taiwan’s independence.” In this sense, Taiwan seems to have passed a point of no return in its journey towards resolving its political status. China’s claim to Taiwan is grounded largely in the historical struggle between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang, a struggle that culminated in the flight of the Kuomintang to Taiwan and its reconstitution there of the shattered government of the Republic of China. The government in Taipei has now long since ceased to be a government-in-exile, waiting for the Communist Party of China to collapse.

People in Taiwan have also stopped thinking of themselves as Chinese. Mostly, they don’t know very much about China. Research by Chinese social scientists suggests that the more they know the less they like it. Taiwanese businesses are withdrawing from China, taking their money and nous elsewhere.

All this has had a profound effect on electoral politics in Taiwan, where there is next to no interest in becoming part of the People’s Republic of China and no advantage for politicians in pro-China policies. At best, critics of the DPP can claim they will manage relations with China better than has Tsai Ing-wen, who has presided over extremely frosty cross-strait relations.

But when Hou Yu-ih’s “deep blue” running mate Jaw Shau-kong declared himself and Hou at one in their rejection of Beijing’s “one China, two systems” policy, the legacy of Tsai Ing-wen was apparent. “Regarding the ‘one country, two systems,’” said Tsai, ahead of the 2020 election, “our answer is: that is not possible.” Tsai won that election in a landslide. Now, all three current presidential candidates have put defence as their top priority.

Neither US restraint nor Taiwanese domestic politics necessarily have much bearing on the prospects of war or peace in the Taiwan Strait. If the Kuomintang were to be victorious in the presidential election, Beijing would be gratified but might not greatly alter its present course. On the 130th anniversary of the birth of Mao Zedong on 26 December, and again five days later, on New Year’s Eve, Xi Jinping declared yet again what he has often stated before, that the reunification of Taiwan with China is a historical necessity.

On this point Xi is in no danger of outraging China’s netizens, who naturally share his conviction that Taiwan belongs to China. A majority, though not an overwhelming one, supports “recovery” of the island by force. Xi has reassured Taiwanese that “Chinese people will not strike Chinese people” but left himself with a way out: “if [Taiwanese] don’t want to be Chinese, we just can’t look on and do nothing.”

Voters in Taiwan display a remarkable insouciance in face of such threats. While jets scramble overhead they go about their daily lives with barely an upward glance. They are nonetheless alert to the need for skilful management of Taiwan’s international relations. If the DPP retains the presidency despite the electorate’s favouring a rotation of power, it will be partly because Tsai Ing-wen’s assertion of the sovereignty of Taiwan and its separateness from China satisfies the views that most Taiwanese hold of themselves and their country.

Opinion polls also suggest that voters have confidence that Lai Ching-te, at heart a strong supporter of independence, will adhere to the status quo in cross-strait relations. And they have a high opinion of Lai’s running mate, Hsiao Bi-khim, who performed spectacularly well as Taiwan representative in Washington during 2020–23. With Lai focusing on domestic issues on the campaign trail and Hsiao responding on international issues, the electorate has been presented with an image of complementarity and compatibility that distinguishes the DPP’s candidates from their rivals.

Yet, in the final analysis, maintaining the status quo in Taiwan — by far the preferred option among Taiwanese voters — is likely to depend more on Xi Jinping than on the election. Xi’s dream of national rejuvenation, articulated at the beginning of his time in power, has a territorial aspect that is manifest in tensions on many of China’s borders. The conflict over Taiwan is significant partly because China’s entire diplomatic relations framework is premised on the accommodation of the politically powerful claim of “one China.”

War games conducted in the South China Sea by China and by a US–Philippines alliance just a week ahead of the Taiwan election are a reminder, however, that Taiwan forms part of the “First Island Chain,” which includes islands of Japan in the north and of the Philippines in the south. Control of the chain would give China a commanding position in the Pacific. More than Taiwan is at stake in any change in the status quo.

There are many reasons why Xi might hesitate to start a war in the Taiwan Strait. These include the dispiriting example of Russia in the Ukraine; the People’s Liberation Army’s lack of combat experience, flawed missiles and corrupt generals; the potential loss through wartime casualties of tens of thousands of “only children,” the products of China’s former one-child policy; and the parlous state of the Chinese economy in combination with the impact of the inevitable trade sanctions.

Weighed against Xi’s personal ambitions, however, all these might count for nought. Last year, Xi turned seventy. In Chinese lore, this is the age for “pursuing the heart’s desire,” but by anyone’s calculation the window of opportunity for doing so is shrinking. He has time to play with: his father lived till eighty-nine and his mother is still alive. But Mao Zedong, born an auspicious sixty years before him, died at eighty-two. Xi will want to achieve his heart’s desire before he reaches a comparable age.

A shrinking population, a slowing economy, and an underperforming global infrastructure project — the Belt and Road Initiative — mean that much on which Xi has staked his prestige is beginning to slip away. It is not impossible that he will see the election in Taiwan as offering an opportunity to respond to the call of history, reunify the nation, and establish an enduring legacy for himself. •

The post The call of history appeared first on Inside Story.

Might it continue dropping? (The rather jumpy Roy Morgan had Labor support dipping to 49.5 earlier in November before bouncing back to 52.5 per cent. Let’s see what December brings.)

Coming after the Voice result, the trajectory has led at least a couple of excited commentators to anticipate a one-term Albanese government. The Australian’s Peta Credlin has penned a rallying of the troops and a hoorah for Liberal leader Peter Dutton. In the Nine papers, Shaun Carney’s rather tendentious offering, aimed squarely at prime minister Anthony Albanese, even implies the PM might not last until the next election.

A fortunate by-product of the narrowing is that we no longer need to endure stories of the Coalition’s existential crisis because of low support among young voters.

But how much do surveys this far before an election tell us about the upcoming result? The answer: nothing at all. This was true when the Labor government was way ahead, and it’s true today. It’s only big, sustained leads for oppositions that should give us pause, and even then we’ve seen the last-minute government comebacks getting bigger over recent decades.

Can we treat this as routine midterm doldrums? Dutton “cutting through”? Damage inflicted by the Voice referendum and the perception that it was an expensive indulgence? Kudos for the opposition leader for backing the right horse?

Or is it the economy — with hip pockets screaming about high inflation, particularly among that not-insignificant minority of voters with variable mortgages?

Or was this always going to happen once the honeymoon ended?

Everyone with a keyboard can explain what the government’s been doing wrong, but that’s all post hoc rationalisation of the polls, much as we saw in the Voice campaign. The next election will be decided by voters’ perceptions of the alternatives on offer, not illusory poll-generated “momentum.”

Still, as the year comes to a close, Mr Albanese must be a rather gloomy prime minister. For election watchers and the political bubble, opinion polls tell us how parties are “travelling” — and who doesn’t want to be seen to be “travelling well”? It makes for an easier life in the media and keeps MPs, most importantly marginal seat holders, and the wider party content. Most would agree that the current polls don’t predict the next election result, but they do measure something approximating the electorate’s happiness with the government.

It’s all indisputably good news for Dutton. The polls, and the interpreting of them, buttress his leadership. And if more friendly ones arrive in December he’ll be able to relax over summer.

But is what’s good for Dutton’s position good for the Coalition — specifically, its chances of forming government after the next election?

The Liberal leader has explicitly repositioned his party away from big business, with its “woke” attitudes and “virtue signalling” — and implicitly away from voters in wealthy, urban, formerly blue-ribbon electorates too — towards the “outer suburbs and regions.” Such politicking, politely referred to as “values”-driven, involves encouraging a fear of the outside world and, at home, resentment towards ethnic minorities. This is Dutton’s political comfort zone and indeed his brand. It’s what drove his rise to the top of his party.

In olden days the Liberals had to tread carefully on this path lest they alienate voters in wealthy blue-ribbon electorates. Now they’ve lost most of those seats, the constraint has loosened. It’s easier to forgo potential gains than consciously sacrifice current sitting MPs.

The six teal 2022 wins were all at the expense of Liberal “moderates.” Each of those Liberals supported Malcolm Turnbull against Dutton in the 2018 leadership spill, for instance. Who in the current party room is vulnerable to teal-like incursions? Paul Fletcher (Bradfield) and Julian Leeser (Berowra) on Sydney’s north shore come to mind. They also supported Turnbull, so perhaps would be no great loss from Dutton’s point of view.

The strategy might work, but it would probably require a very big national vote for the Coalition. Anything around 51–49 either way would likely produce a hung parliament, and while the teals won’t necessarily vote as a bloc, it’s difficult to imagine the six, and independents Zali Steggall (Warringah) and Helen Haines (Indi), supporting a Dutton-led Coalition.

Put simply, Peter Dutton is not a Liberal leader the teals would be likely to elevate to the prime ministership.

And then there are voters in teal seats. We don’t know what the crossbench will look like in 2025. If Steggall’s 2022 re-election is any guide then the six will romp home. But that was against a poor Liberal candidate, and Scott Morrison as prime minister.

Detestation of Morrison was a core driver of the teals’ success. And many of the characteristics those voters couldn’t abide in Morrison are shared by the current Liberal leader.

We do live in unpredictable times, with low primary vote support on both sides leaving more to the vagaries of preferences and how-to-vote cards. With those teal seats in the way, the Coalition will very likely need a lot more than 50 per cent of the national two-party-preferred vote to form government at the next election. More like 52 or 53 per cent.

Or another leader. One the crossbenchers felt they could work with. •

The post Peter Dutton’s momentum appeared first on Inside Story.

In an election noted for the number of male candidates promising to take on a female running mate, Hsiao was not the first woman to make an appearance. In September, independent presidential candidate Terry Gou, billionaire founder of Foxconn, made headlines with his choice of running mate: actress and motivational speaker Tammy Lai, familiar to Taiwanese Netflix subscibers as the fictional presidential candidate in the series Wave Makers. Gou has withdrawn from the race but Terry and Tammy posters can still be seen on buses all over Taipei.

In contrast to Tammy Lai, Hsiao Bi-khim’s political experience is firmly grounded in Taiwanese party politics. She first came to prominence in 1999, when at the age of twenty-seven she was invited to serve as international affairs director for the DPP. Appearing on television for the first of many such interviews, she explained who she was: born in Japan in 1971 to a Taiwanese father and American mother, educated in the United States, Taiwanese in her heart. In transliterating her personal name into English, she uses the Taiwanese pronunciation, Bi-khim, not the Mandarin.

Her career unfolded within the occasionally uncomfortable embrace of the DDP. She grew up under martial law in Taiwan, before multi-party elections were a possibility, and left for the United States in 1986, the very year the DPP was founded. By the time she returned as an adult, Taiwan was in transition to democracy and the DPP was beginning to challenge the ascendancy of the ruling Kuomintang, or KMT.

Hsiao was working for DPP leader Chen Shui-bian in 2000 when he inflicted on the KMT its first crushing defeat in a general election. She surrendered her American citizenship that same year in order to qualify for public office. The following year, aged thirty, she was herself elected to the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s parliament. She has now spent close to quarter of a century working in political or para-political roles in or for Taiwan.

This second homecoming comes at a crucial time in the political cycle. The 2024 election is less than two months away. President Tsai Ing-wen, who brought the DPP back to power in 2016, has completed two terms of office and by the terms of the constitution is ineligible to stand again. Next May she will hand over to whoever wins the 13 January election. The DPP will be hoping that it is Lai Ching-te, and so far opinion polls have him in the lead.

Although the lead is steady, it is slim, and popular sentiment favours a change of government. If Taiwan had a two-party preferred system of voting, Lai would be staring at defeat. Last week that possibility seemed closer to realisation when the dynamic new Taiwan People’s Party, or TPP, signed an agreement with the KMT to run a unity ticket. In the lead-up to the agreement, support for Lai dropped to well below the 35 per cent “safety bar.” This marriage of convenience quickly collapsed, but with Lai’s approval ratings so low, even a victory in the presidential election would mean political chaos if a correspondingly low number of DPP legislators were to be returned.

Under these circumstances, Hsiao Bi-khim’s appearance at Lai’s side on Monday could not have been better timed. For the preceding five days, the media had been in a frenzy first over the deal between the KMT and the TPP and then over its spectacular collapse. For longer still, the potential deal and its brokers had dominated the local political news. The DPP’s loss of visibility over this period contributed to its decline in opinion polls. With the deal in shambles, the sight of the high-achieving and well-regarded Hsiao standing alongside the current vice-president should have been reassuring to more than simply DPP supporters. That has yet to show in the polls.

Disaffection with the DPP government in the electorate is attributable to Taiwan’s economic slowdown. Projected growth this year is the lowest in eight years — since Tsai Ing-wen took office, that is. Outside an enviable high-tech industry, manufacturing on the island is disappearing. Salaries are stagnant and prices are rising. The workforce is ageing. Youth unemployment is high and job security low. A young male “precariat” is flocking to alternative parties.

Adding to the malaise are sanctions by China, including bans on tourism to the island and imports of Taiwanese produce, which are slated home by critics government to the deterioration of relations with China under Tsai Ing-wen. Markets responded positively to news of the opposition unity ticket — while it persisted — last week.

If the economy were booming, other things would matter less. As it is, opposition parties have found plenty of other targets for attack: the government’s handling of Covid; corruption on the part of legislators; incidents of sexual harassment and their cover-up (not limited to the DPP but particularly damaging to it as the party in office); food safety; energy security; sleeping with the enemy; and even the shelf life of eggs.

Hsiao, who is close to the current president as well as the wannabe future one, can’t avoid being associated with the DPP’s failures, such as they are. But she has a strong record as a legislator and political campaigner, and strong ties to the south and east, important factors in a country where the capital and much of the population are in the north. She grew up in Tainan, where her father served as pastor in the Presbyterian church. Between 2012 and 2020 she was the DPP representative in Hualien, on the east coast, once a “deep blue” KMT stronghold. Hsiao is credited with weakening the KMT’s grip there in 2012 and breaking it in 2016, when she won the seat.

In the Chinese press she stands accused of serving American rather than Taiwanese interests: the expression “running dog of the Americans,” so often used in Mao’s time, has been used of her. But in a country with a favourable view of the United States, her native-level English, American heritage and strong performance as Taiwan’s representative in Washington all count in her favour. Her commitment to Taiwan is unassailable. She speaks Taiwanese as well as English and Mandarin.

True to her Presbyterian upbringing (Presbyterian being synonymous with progressivism in Taiwan), she stands for progressive politics. Taiwanese society is socially conservative and in a referendum in 2018 a majority voted against marriage reform. When the legislature nonetheless passed the reform bill, Hsiao didn’t brush over the contradiction but pointed to the responsibility of a government to all its citizens. “We need to take responsibility for the referendum last year,” she declared, “and we need to take responsibility for people who have suffered from incomplete laws or faced discrimination.”

If she is more progressive than the majority of her compatriots on social issues, Hsiao is at one with them on the issue of Taiwanese sovereignty. A majority of people in Taiwan now identify as Taiwanese rather than as hybrid Chinese–Taiwanese and hostility to China is deep-seated among DPP supporters.

It follows that China regards the DPP in general as anathema. As de facto ambassador in the United States, Hsiao was subject to vitriolic attacks in the Chinese media. News of her pending appointment as presidential running mate was criticised as portending a phenomenon of “independence on top of independence” in Taiwanese politics. Ever responsive to signals from China, the KMT called the announcement a recipe for disaster, bringing “troubles at home, perils abroad.”

It is difficult to tell how greatly China features as a factor in the minds of electors. Taiwanese have virtually no appetite for unification under the Chinese Communist Party but they have lived for a long time with the threat of forced unification hanging over their heads. It is impossible not to be struck by a certain sangfroid in the attitudes of people on the street. As they will point out, they have no means of preventing a war. While they wait for the threat either to eventuate or to evaporate, they want to be able to buy fresh eggs, see a doctor when they need to, and house their families if they have them. The birth rate in Taiwan has itself become a political issue, with rival candidates offering rival policies to get women to have more babies (KMT) or get more women to have babies (TPP).

The dangers of provocation posed by the DPP’s leaning towards independence nonetheless make cross-strait relations an obvious issue for opposition parties. Accordingly, KMT campaign posters are running the slogan “We don’t want war; peace on two shores.” Both the KMT and the TPP have promised to resurrect the Cross Straits Services Agreement in the interests both of boosting the economy and easing political tensions. This very agreement inspired a massive protest in 2014 and helped to bring down the KMT government in 2016. During the 2014 student occupation of the Legislative Yuan, Hsiao Bi-khim was one of the legislators who supported the protestors by keeping watch at the premises. But times have changed since then, as everyone knows. One of the leaders of the 2014 protest is now himself running for the TPP.

Hsiao won’t be able to avoid talking about cross-strait relations in the lead-up up to the election. At an international media conference on Thursday she had to field a barrage of questions on exactly this issue. Contrary to statements from China, however, she is not one of the independence diehards of the DPP. To the extent that Lai is regarded as leaning just a bit too far in that direction, Hsiao may help give balance to his campaign and claw back some middle ground. This would be true to her established image as a “cat warrior” who — in contrast to China’s “wolf diplomacy” — treads a delicate line between self-determination and confrontation.

Election campaigns in Taiwan are restricted by law to a period of twenty-eight days counting backwards from the eve of the election day. The pre-campaign has been rumbling on for most of this year, pending the formal registration of candidates on or before Friday 24 November. Lai Ching-te and Hsiao Bi-khim registered on Tuesday.

On Wednesday and Thursday this week it still seemed possible that the KMT and TPP would patch things up, but the chance was faint. TPP presidential candidate Ko Wen-je had said publicly that he hates three things: “mosquitoes, cockroaches, and the KMT.” Granted that he was in a bad temper, it was a difficult statement to unsay. A poll taken in the middle of the week showed, moreover, that the gap between the DPP and KMT had narrowed to less than one percentage point, reducing the KMT’s incentive to seek an alliance.

On Friday morning, all speculation ended when separate TPP and KMT tickets were announced.  Ko Wen-je would team with TPP legislator Wu Hsin-yeh — a woman, as he had promised. The KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih had also said he provisionally favoured a woman as running mate, but in the end he came up with senior party figure, Jaw Shaw-kong. If the mid-week poll is right, the contest will boil down, again, to a two-party race between the DPP’s Lai-Hsiao team and the KMT’s Hou-Jaw.

Seventy-two years old, the son of a KMT soldier and an advocate of unification, Jaw could hardly provide a starker contrast to Hsiao Bi-khim. More clearly than the presidential candidates themselves, the two symbolise the different choices facing the electorate in January. •

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Coming just as candidate registrations opened for the 2024 presidential elections on 16 October, the five–four majority decision of the court created a loophole exempting elected officials from a rule that barred those aged under forty from joining the contest. It was all too convenient for the ambitions of thirty-six-year-old Gibran Rakabuming Raka, who had followed in the footsteps of his father, president Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi), by being elected mayor of their home city of Surakarta in 2020.

In recent months momentum had been gathering behind the idea of Gibran as running mate of defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the controversial former Soeharto henchman now widely seen as the frontrunner in the race to replace Jokowi. The court gave Jokowi, Prabowo and Gibran just the loophole they needed. Legal experts and the broader commentariat were scathing of its poorly reasoned decision, and of the crucial role played by the chief justice — who happens to be the president’s brother-in-law and Gibran’s uncle. Family Court, indeed.

But Jokowi didn’t become Indonesia’s most powerful president since Soeharto by caring much about the intelligentsia’s ideas of propriety. In brushing off criticism of the court’s decision and his son’s candidacy he struck a populist tone, declaring that “the people are the ones who mark a ballot, not we elites.” With approval ratings exceeding 80 per cent, he’s the most popular of any outgoing president in Indonesia; his endorsement provides a strategic advantage to any candidate looking to replace him.

Despite his disingenuous claims to neutrality, Jokowi is now well and truly off the fence in the contest between Prabowo and his main rival, Ganjar Pranowo, who — like Jokowi — is affiliated with the nationalist PDI-P party controlled by former president Megawati Soekarnoputri. The president’s disillusionment with the former Central Java governor — whom he sees as lacking independence from PDI-P and Megawati — has drawn him closer in recent months to Prabowo, who has carefully courted Jokowi’s favour by consulting him on key strategy decisions.

Prabowo and Gibran officially appeared together for the first time as running mates on 25 October, upstaging their rivals with a flashy stadium rally in Jakarta before leading a parade towards the electoral commission to submit their paperwork.

The unveiling of the Prabowo–Widodo alliance has changed the race to succeed Jokowi in important ways yet changed very little. Neither the constitutional court’s controversial ruling nor the nomination of Gibran appears to have had any immediate impact on any candidate’s popularity.

Polls still point to a two-round presidential election, with the likely elimination of former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan after an initial vote on 14 February giving way to a 26 June runoff between Prabowo and Ganjar. Prabowo’s success in the runoff will depend on the support of Anies’s voters, who mostly comprise the determinedly anti-Jokowi, and especially conservative Muslim, part of the electoral coalition Prabowo assembled at the last election in 2019. He’s counting on them voting for him, despite his accommodation with the Widodo family, out of antipathy to PDI-P and its secularist tendencies.

Jokowi’s support for Prabowo flies in the face not only of PDI-P’s preferences but also those of his own electoral base: about 55 per cent of those who voted for his re-election in 2019 tell pollsters they prefer Ganjar, while only 25 per cent have shifted to Prabowo. A key goal of pairing Gibran with Prabowo is to draw more Jokowi voters — largely concentrated in PDI-P’s Central and East Java heartland, where Ganjar has a sizeable lead — into Prabowo’s electoral coalition.

Nor is the vice-presidency the only front in the fight for a Widodo dynasty. In late September Gibran’s twenty-eight-year-old brother Kaesang Pengarep was appointed chairman of PSI, a minor party astroturfed into existence early in Jokowi’s presidency by sympathetic business and political figures, which recently endorsed Prabowo. The hope is that with the Widodo family halo above PSI, it will for the first time win the 4 per cent of the vote required to be awarded seats in the national legislature — and, now it has formally endorsed Prabowo, be rewarded with a share of cabinet seats if he wins. Speculation suggests that Gibran’s elevation to Prabowo’s ticket will be accompanied by his own defection from PDI-P to Golkar, the one-time regime party of Soeharto and another key member of the coalition supporting Prabowo’s campaign.

Take a moment to appreciate the sheer chutzpah Jokowi is showing in all this: putting one of his sons in control of a party whose principal strategy is to steal votes from PDI-P and putting another into a presidential campaign whose strategy involves poaching votes from PDI-P’s candidate — all while he himself is still a card-carrying member of the party.

PDI-P has little choice but to hold its fire. As one analyst puts it, Jokowi and the party are in a “mutual hostage situation” ahead of legislative elections to be held concurrently with the first round of the presidential vote on 14 February. For now, it’s not in PDI-P’s interest to have an acrimonious public split with a president who, even if his relationship with the party is becoming untenable, is still its most popular and influential cadre.

While Gibran’s candidacy has yet to change the state of the electoral horse race, it nonetheless has significant implications for Jokowi’s approach to the elections, and the political significance of their outcome for him.

Even as he became Indonesia’s most powerful post-reformasi head of state, Jokowi’s roots in the country’s political institutions remained quite shallow. His authority has rested not on direct control of a party, a social movement, a large personal fortune or even a particularly coherent band of cronies, but rather on the deterrent effect his huge popularity has on would-be opponents of his policies, and his willingness to use the legal system to coerce elites into cooperating with his political goals.

A key question that loomed over all this was his likely ability to wield influence after losing office. His efforts to engineer a constitutional amendment to delay the election, or allow himself to run for a third term, resulted in a rare defeat. Jokowi now seeks to anchor his post-presidential influence in a political dynasty the likes of which Indonesia has never seen at the national level, succeeding where former presidents Megawati and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono have failed in their efforts to secure presidential or vice-presidential candidacies for their children.

Has Jokowi accurately judged the risks and rewards of this strategy? If Ganjar can eke out a win, Jokowi will surely be exposed to withering revenge from PDI-P for his alliance with Prabowo. But even if Prabowo prevails, Jokowi might prove to have overestimated the payoffs. On paper, a Prabowo presidency would place members of the Widodo clan not only first in succession to a septuagenarian president but also potentially heading a debutante parliamentary party (PSI) and a new power base in an established one (Golkar), both of which are members of the nominating coalition that would have the pick of key cabinet posts.

But the real-world influence of all this is uncertain. Once he has settled in as president, Prabowo would have no compunction about sidelining Jokowi as part of any effort to assert his dominance over the political scene. A likely scenario is that the Widodo clan comes to resemble the Soekarnos or the Yudhoyonos: just one among many factions in a political oligarchy whose collective power, especially under Prabowo, would be checked by the overbearing presidency that Jokowi has given rise to.

It’s also important to set this within the record of Indonesian dynastic politics more generally. While a rising proportion of parliamentarians and local leaders have family ties to other elected officials, these dynasties have remained localised and small-scale, with little of the staying power of those in the Philippines, India or Thailand — or even consolidated liberal democracies like Japan and Taiwan.

The emergence of a Widodo dynasty as part of the national political furniture doesn’t on its own imperil Indonesian democracy. The worry is that Jokowi’s decision to take such a large stake in a Prabowo victory gives him a powerful incentive to use all the levers of incumbency to help bring it about. This could encompass his influence over the bureaucracy, local governments, big business, the police, the military — and if recent events are any guide, perhaps even the constitutional court, which adjudicates legal challenges to the results of elections.

In the end, the hazards for democracy that lie in Jokowi’s dynasty-building might have less to do with the ends than with the means. •

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The centre-right National party — which won 46 per cent of the vote in 2017 but narrowly failed to form government, and managed just 26 per cent in 2020 — secured 39 per cent of the vote and fifty seats in the 121-seat parliament. Its habitual coalition partner, the ACT party, attracted 9 per cent and an additional electorate seat, for a likely total of eleven. Between them, these two parties of the right attracted 47 per cent of the vote, just two seats fewer than their combined result in 2017, giving National leader Christopher Luxon a clear mandate to form government.

This time it’s the turn of Labour, and its relatively new leader Chris Hipkins, to face devastation. The party won just 27 per cent of the vote and lost a number of previously safe seats in Auckland — results that echo its performance in the 2011 and 2014 elections. Polling had suggested a similar defeat in 2017 until Ardern took over the leadership and secured a solid 37 per cent, and government, through a coalition with New Zealand First and a support agreement from the Greens.

Some in the media are blaming the extent of the loss on Ardern’s unfulfilled promise of transformation and the extended lockdowns experienced by Aucklanders. But once the count is finalised (in three weeks or thereabouts) and the split voting patterns analysed, the causes may prove to be more complex.

First, it is important to remember that the 2020 election result was an anomaly. Since New Zealand introduced proportional representation in 1996, no party had won more than half the vote. Labour achieved this, but single-party government came at the expense of support from across the political spectrum.

According to calculations by the political scientist Jack Vowles, the net shift in votes in 2020 was the biggest in over a century. The question that followed from that electoral upheaval was whether New Zealand was witnessing the beginnings of an electoral realignment.

The weekend’s results so far suggest that New Zealand politics has returned to its pre-Covid, pre-Ardern political landscape. Fragmentation has returned on the left and right, with the Greens and Te Pāti Māori (the Māori Party) winning votes and seats from Labour, and the ACT party doing the same to National. NZ First, under the leadership of the veteran politician Winston Peters, is back in parliament after three years, with eight seats and the now-familiar role of kingmaker.

Second, this election featured a resurgence of anti-Māori sentiment built on extremist reactions to initiatives including co-governance of natural resources and infrastructure and the reorganisation of healthcare to better support the needs of Māori communities. Indeed, the politicisation of race relations during this year’s campaign reached a level not seen since former National leader Don Brash’s infamous 2004 “Orewa” speech, in which he attacked “special privileges” accorded to Māori New Zealanders.

The rekindled race debate fuelled opposition to the widely accepted recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi’s significance in fostering strong partnerships between Māori and the Crown to ensure greater equity in policy outcomes. (The constitutionally and culturally significant treaty was signed in 1840 between most Māori tribal leaders and representatives of the British Crown.)

By contrast, the two smaller parties on the left, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori, campaigned on issues identified as the greatest voter concerns: the cost of living, inflation and health, as well as climate change and natural resource governance. They stayed positive in their messaging and quietly garnered an increase in support and ultimately an increase in both party and electorate votes at the expense of Labour.

Te Pāti Māori added three Māori electorates to the one it already held. The Greens also won three electorate seats, holding on to Auckland Central and picking up two central Wellington seats from Labour. High-profile Greens and Te Pāti Māori candidates also stood in several safe Labour seats, resulting in those seats being lost, or only marginally won, by Labour.

Third, turnout appears to have been well down this year, which was always going to be a concern for Labour. While the media coined the term “Jacindamania” even before her star power became evident, Ardern’s elevation in 2017 and her leadership through Covid-19 seem to have mobilised voters.

Part of the explanation for the turnout might also lie in the fact that no headline referendums were held on the weekend. End-of-life legislation and the legalisation of cannabis were both put to a vote in 2020, with the latter believed to have particularly motivated younger voters. As the 2020 New Zealand Election Study revealed, young people were more likely than their elders to favour that legalisation, to seek more information from the Electoral Commission’s referendum website and, as a consequence, to vote. Combined with polls predicting a resounding win for the right, the absence of highly charged referendums may have led some voters on the left to disengage.

The Electoral Commission has estimated that this year’s turnout will be 78.4 per cent of enrolled voters (down from 82.2 per cent in 2020). It would be lower still as a proportion of all those who were eligible to enrol. Research shows that Māori, Pacific islanders, young people and those on lower incomes — groups less likely to vote, historically at least — are more likely to vote Labour.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that only once since 1949 has Labour won three consecutive elections. It was Helen Clark’s Labour government (1999–2008) that achieved this feat, with its third term only possible with the support of NZ First among others.

By contrast, National has never had the experience of being a one-term government. Indeed, it won the most seats — and potentially a fourth term — in 2017 but was unable to win over NZ First. Similar negotiations will need to happen this time round, a process history tells us is likely to be painful and protracted and could yet slow the pace of National’s proposed cuts to taxes and services.

While the smaller parties may have scooped up more of the total vote share than in times past, the make-up of government, and the plight of Labour look like a return to pre-Covid times. •

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Its population was ethnically mixed but with a strong dominance of Ukrainians, who made up 73 per cent of the people. Russians constituted a significant minority of 22 per cent, followed by people identifying as Jews, Belarusians and Moldavians, all making up just under one in a hundred. Other nationalities of the Soviet empire, from Bulgarians and Poles to Azeri, Koreans, Germans, Kyrgyz and Lithuanians, made up the remaining 3 per cent.

Regional differences in political outlook were strong. Although all regions voted in favour of separating from the Soviet Union in the December 1991 referendum, some were more enthusiastic than others. In Lviv, in the west of the country, 95 per cent of the people voted and 97 per cent of them approved the declaration of independence, which had been made in late August in response to the coup attempt in Moscow. In Crimea, an ethnically strongly Russian region at the other extreme, only 68 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls, with 54 per cent of them voting in favour.

Donetsk, an industrial region in the east of the country with strong economic ties to Russia, stood somewhat between these extremes. There, 77 per cent registered their vote and 84 per cent of those people voted for independence.

With the partial exception of the three Baltic republics, all post-Soviet nations have struggled with three interrelated crises: a crisis of democracy, an economic crisis and corruption. Outside the three Baltic outliers (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), the relatively well-performing Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are all resource-exporting economies. Everybody else is struggling.

In terms of wealth per person (measured by GDP per capita), Russia is about at the level of China (US$10,500), while even the rich Baltic countries are nowhere near the United States (US$63,500) or Australia (US$51,800).

The comparative poverty of the region is partly a legacy of the Soviet economy’s poor performance, and partly a hangover from the economic catastrophe of the 1990s. In Ukraine, agriculture continued to be run by the disastrously unproductive collective and state farms until 2000. Other economic reforms were also slow in coming.

Meanwhile, the unravelling of the integrated Soviet imperial economy, the economic burden of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, ageing and inefficient equipment, and dependence on Russian oil and gas were problematic legacies.

Moreover, Ukraine’s state apparatus had controlled no more than 5 per cent of Ukraine’s GDP before 1990 (the rest was under the direct control of Moscow). Officials thus “lacked the experience necessary to take quick and effective control” of the economy, as the writer Marco Bojcun puts it. The quick expansion of the share of the economy controlled by Ukraine’s officials — reaching 40 per cent on the eve of independence — only added to the problems.

Together, these issues combined to create a disaster: between 1991 and 1996, Ukraine’s economy contracted every year by at least 10 per cent and as much as 23 per cent. Overall, it had contracted to 43 per cent of its 1990 level by 1996 — a decline worse than the United States experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The main reason nobody starved after 1991 was similar to Russia’s: the existence of private gardening, a legacy of the Soviet period. “The overwhelming majority of workers have out of town kitchen gardens,” wrote a worker from the Dnipro region in 1996. These were “little patches of land given them by the factory management under an agreement with the agricultural authorities… People work five days in the factories and two days on their plots.” According to official statistics, by 1996 some 80–95 per cent of fruit, vegetables and potatoes came from such plots. Even a quarter of all livestock were raised in private gardens.

Ukraine’s economy has not recovered nearly as much as that of resource-rich Russia, and its economic growth has stagnated since 2009. Russia’s war by proxy in Donbas since 2014 again stunted economic growth: between 2013 and 2015, Ukraine’s GDP halved.

The current war will have catastrophic consequences for this overall picture. In early 2022, the World Bank predicted a contraction of the economy by 45 per cent. In the same year, 47 per cent of surveyed Ukrainians reported that they did not have “enough money even for food” or had money sufficient “only for the most basic items.”

Post-Soviet countries are not only poor, they are also among the world’s most corrupt. Among European countries, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are all known as deeply corrupt societies. Of the 336 politicians whose secret offshore financial accounts were leaked in the “Pandora Papers” of 2021, thirty-eight came from Ukraine, among them president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This was the largest number of any country in the world. Russia’s figure was nineteen.

Over time, however, Ukraine has improved its record. In Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a higher score means less corruption. Ukraine initially improved significantly after 2004. While this progress was undone after a few years, improvement has been steady since 2009. Meanwhile, Russia has stagnated since 2012 and is classified today as more corrupt than its neighbour.

Corruption and economic crisis do little to embed democracy. Maybe unsurprisingly, then, the majority of the societies that succeeded the Soviet Union are ruled by authoritarian regimes. (Nine out of fifteen of them, or 60 per cent, according to the 2021 classification by Freedom House, an organisation that measures democratic performance.) Only the three Baltic states, which are members of both NATO and the European Union, are classified as consolidated democracies. Three others, Ukraine among them, are hybrid regimes, where authoritarian elements compete with democratic ones.

Within this general context, Ukraine is doing relatively well. Between 2017 and 2022 it was classified as “partly free” by Freedom House, its score oscillating between 60 and 62 on a scale out of 100, where the higher number indicates a higher level of civic and political liberty. Such numbers do not indicate that Ukraine is a beacon of democracy, however, either in the region (where Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia stand out as the freest countries, with scores of between 89 and 90) or around the world (the troubled United States scored 83 in 2021, while Australia stood at 97).

But Ukraine contrasts positively with Russia, which has been categorised as “not free” with a score of 20, falling to 19 in 2022. And Vladimir Putin’s state, in turn, still compares favourably with other dictatorships in the region, which are even more repressive: Belarus with 11 and Tajikistan with 8. For comparison, China scored 9 in 2021 and North Korea 3.

To a significant extent, the predominance of authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space is a Soviet legacy. “In all parts of the former Soviet empire,” write two legal scholars who studied this problem in detail, “the socialist party-state structure left a shared legacy of an executive-dominated state.” Change depended on whether a postcolonial or neocolonial mindset won the day.

In other words: did people want to stay in the Russian orbit or not? If not, the obvious choice was an orientation towards Europe, which came with mixed constitutions stressing checks and balances, weakening the executive; if yes, the constitution would be modelled much more closely on Russia’s “crown presidentialism,” further entrenching the centrality of the executive. In Ukraine, the former tendency won out, but not without political struggles.

One rather basic aspect of democracy is that governments are changed peacefully by elections. Ukraine is doing quite well in this regard, particularly if compared with its two autocratic neighbours. In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko has been in power since 1994; in Russia, Putin since 1999. Ukraine, meanwhile, has seen seven presidencies since 1991: of Leonid Kravchuk (1991–94), Leonid Kuchma (1994–2005), Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10), Viktor Yanukovych (2010–14), Oleksandr Turchynov (2014), Petro Poroshenko (2014–19) and now Volodymyr Zelenskyy (since 2019).

The majority of these presidents were elected to office and left when they lost elections or decided not to contest them. Two were removed through revolutions, one peaceful (the Orange Revolution of 2004–05), one violent (the Revolution of Dignity, or Euromaidan, of 2013–14). But both revolutions resulted in elected governments again, not the imposition of revolutionary dictatorships.

Ukraine’s presidents ruled in competition with parliament, at first the one elected under Soviet conditions in 1990, then, since 1994, a post-Soviet one. This competition was formalised in the 1996 constitution, which put the directly elected president next to a one-chamber parliament that limited presidential powers to a much larger extent than in Russia.

Its unusually strong parliament became an issue because of the fragmented party system, however. First, there were too many parties; second, the existing parties were not based around major ideological positions or clearly elaborated political philosophies; third, there were many socially influential groups competing for power. As one observer puts it, this system was based “not on ideological factors, but on the competition of financial and industrial groups and regional elites” interested “in dispersing power in order to control at least a small segment of it.” The result was “political instability.”

Ukraine’s political system, then, constituted something of a unique case, both within the post-Soviet space and in the world at large. Its huge number of parties — more than 120 were officially registered in 2002 — were often internally divided as well. In the words of one observer, this fragmentation was “unprecedented for a modern democratic republic.” For another, it “hindered democratisation” by making it “difficult for the population to orient itself politically.” But the diversity also made it more difficult for would-be autocrats and their networks of clients to consolidate power.

The same can be said for the much-quoted regional fragmentation of Ukraine. On the one hand, regionalism has defined voting behaviour and hence fragmented the political system. In both parliamentary and presidential elections until 2019, voters in the more Russian and Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea voted for one set of parties, while those in the more Ukrainian-speaking western Ukraine preferred a different set. “No party managed to elect candidates across Ukraine,” writes political scientist Paul D’Anieri. Presidential elections show a similar regional pattern.

At their extreme, regional divisions can define conflict lines within Ukraine, including the threat of secessionism and ethno-political conflict. On the other hand, regional identities and political networks also help balance power within the broader political system and prevent any one group of elites from monopolising power. Ukraine’s regional, cultural, religious and economic diversity can be seen as an asset as much as a liability. For historian Serhii Plokhy, it is “one of the main reasons for Ukraine’s success as a democracy.”

Of the three main regional power groups, one is based in Kharkiv in the northeast; the second in the industrial heartland around Donetsk in the east; and the third in Dnipro in central Ukraine, the heart of the Soviet Union’s defence and space industries. These were already part of the political structure of late Soviet times, and they led to a specific form of “patronal democracy” in which clans competed for political power within a republican set-up.

At the same time, winners often tried to replace this competitive structure with a single hierarchy of power. The first attempt came under Leonid Kuchma, who built a “patronal autocracy,” but the Orange Revolution of 2004 destroyed this system and reverted to dual competition between president and parliament on the one hand and multiple power networks on the other.

Yanukovych then tried again, and successfully neutralised competing clans — until ordinary citizens intervened to stop this usurpation of power. The 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity not only undid Yanukovych’s dictatorial slide but also led to an election labelled by two experts as “probably the fairest one in the country’s history.” This transformation of the political system was one-sided, however: while it did constitute a redemocratisation, it didn’t eliminate regional and patronal politics.

It was only with Zelenskyy’s election in 2019 that things began to change in this regard. Zelenskyy was “no chief patron and [had] no patronal pyramid” but instead gathered strong support from the new middle and creative classes, campaigning on an anti-corruption platform. He mostly spoke Russian during his campaign, which helped overcome regional differences between Russian speakers in the east and Ukrainian speakers in the west. He achieved what many thought impossible: his election was the first in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history where voting did not follow regional patterns. •

This is an edited extract from Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story, published this month by Melbourne University Press.

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A cluster of six state elections in Malaysia last Saturday supported neither view. Instead, it showed that two equally competitive coalitions remain engaged in a sharp political contest, and neither can fully meet all its supporters’ diverse and often contradictory expectations.

One side is projecting images of a postcolonial national cleansing that will subjugate Malaysia’s minorities and deliver an Islamic state, sealing Malay Muslim majority dominance forever. The other is slowly working up an argument that only it can deliver a modern economy, social harmony and national repair after years of political upheaval. Locked in battle with each other, neither has been able to stake out the nation’s direction decisively.

Saturday’s elections were all held on the Malay Peninsula: in Selangor, Penang and Negeri Sembilan on the industrialised, multiracial west coast, and in Kedah, Terengganu and Kelantan, purported “Malay heartland” states, in the north and east. All of them returned incumbent governments.

In the west, the states in question are aligned with prime minister Anwar Ibrahim’s federal Pakatan Harapan, or Alliance of Hope. Those in the north and east align with the main rival coalition, former prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s Perikatan Nasional, or National Alliance. While the results produced no major surprises, they provide plenty of insights into the narratives used by the contending forces to frame and conduct their struggle for the national state and its institutions.

That struggle was at its most naked in November last year, when Anwar Ibrahim finally became the nation’s prime minister after twenty-five years’ worth of attempts. In the final days of the campaign, Muhyiddin and his Islamist running mates in the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, or PAS, drew on every racial and religious trope they could find to turn voters away from Anwar’s Pakatan.

They argued that Christians and Jews would use victory as a Trojan Horse to colonise Malaysia. Malaysian TV actor Zul Huzaimy expressed a wish to “slaughter kafir harbi,” or enemy infidels, at a pro-PAS rally in the eastern peninsular state of Terengganu. (The term is borrowed from classical Islamic jurisprudence to anachronistically demonise Malaysian racial and religious minorities for participating in the political life of the modern nation-state.)

Then, when it became clear that Anwar would form a government, PAS supporters used TikTok to call for a “new May 13” — the date in 1969 when a post-election massacre of Chinese Malaysians took place across Kuala Lumpur.

The Perikatan Nasional coalition had hoped to use similar messages and tactics to topple Anwar-aligned state governments on Saturday and trigger the federal government’s self-destruction. The Malaysian and international media pitched in, framing the elections as a “referendum” on the federal government.

PAS, which has the greatest grassroots reach of all the Perikatan parties, had been keeping its supporters in a state of constant mobilisation for exactly this purpose. It has worked hard to frame its aim as a kind of Malay Muslim decolonisation.

In February this year, for instance, a group of PAS youth caused widespread concern when it organised a rally in Terengganu in which a column of Malay Muslim men marched down a main street in white robes, brandishing swords, scimitars and shields that appeared loosely (and badly) modelled on those carried by troops of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman sultan was the caliph of Islam until the caliphate was abolished in 1924 after the Ottoman Empire’s postwar dismemberment and Kemal Ataturk’s rise to power.

PAS’s message is that Anwar’s federal government — which includes members of Malaysia’s Chinese and Indian minorities — is a legacy of colonialism and must be toppled. PAS appears to be drawing on tales of Malay rebels who built an Islamist coalition against colonial rule in 1920s Terengganu, some of whom also wore white robes and raised the Ottoman flag over their uprising against the British. (The similarity makes me wonder if Malaysia’s Islamists have been reading my own historical work on the subject.)

The Ottoman references didn’t stop with Terengganu. Later, in May, the acting PAS chief minister of Kedah, Muhammad Sanusi, compared Penang, a Pakatan stronghold, with Constantinople, and Perikatan with the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (“the Conqueror”), who wrested it from the Byzantine Empire in 1453. The Byzantines collapsed from the impact, allowing the Ottomans to expand their empire into Christian Eastern Europe.

These messages no doubt helped Perikatan shore up its strongholds. Terengganu’s state assembly, for example, is now entirely made up of PAS members; in fact, PAS won 109 of the 127 seats it contested across the six states, slashing the total held by the once-dominant Malay party, UMNO, from forty-one to nineteen.

UMNO’s poor result has further weakened the party that led the winning coalition in every federal election from Malaya’s first, in 1955, until 2018. UMNO ruined its own fortunes so badly with the infamous 1MDB scandal, which began in 2015, that it is hard to imagine it playing a prominent role in any future election. Nationally, it is in the ironic position of being a junior partner in Anwar’s government.

PAS and the other Perikatan parties also made gains in the Pakatan Harapan states, ensuring PAS in particular even more national prominence. Gone are the days when UMNO prime minister Mahathir Muhammad could isolate PAS by associating it with “the Taliban” and promising that only his coalition could deliver development. Mahathir didn’t deliver for the PAS states, though, and people remember that well. Perikatan parties also benefit from Malaysia’s notorious electoral malapportionment, which favours Malay-dominated rural seats.

Anxious not to appear anti-Muslim, Anwar’s Pakatan government has had to pick its battles carefully. It may well have been waiting for these elections to pass before its members risked mounting an overt defence of its policies. But the alliance has nevertheless been using two sets of messages to build momentum for a victory at the next federal election, which is still more than four years away.

First, there is Pakatan’s longstanding message of racial and religious tolerance. During the 2022 election campaign that finally delivered him his victory, Anwar’s team circulated footage showing him defending the rights of minorities at a mosque in Adelaide’s Gilles Plains, where he gave a Friday sermon as a side event to his lecture at the 2013 Adelaide Festival of Ideas. Kuala Lumpur’s Malay-language radio stations reinforced the video’s message in the week after the election, playing a steady stream of commentary on how Muslims have always treated non-Muslims with respect.

One after another, religious experts and authorities discussed Islamic teachings on minority rights, dating back to Islam’s early expansion in Arabia. US-based Turkish scholar Mustafa Akyol issued a statement suggesting that Malaysians should study the Ottoman constitution of 1876, which argued that “all subjects of the empire are called Ottomans without distinction, whatever faith they profess.” Further, “they have the same rights, and owe the same duties towards their country, without prejudice to religion.”

Whatever the details, the moral was the same: there is no excuse for demonising minority groups in contemporary Malaysia, or for using the Ottomans as a means of doing so. This argument has clearly not delivered Pakatan enough protection, however, and in the lead-up to the state elections, Anwar’s federal government made a spectacle of seizing “gay” rainbow Swatch watches from the shops. It also shut down a music festival in Kuala Lumpur after a British rock band, The 1975, performed a same-sex kiss as an onstage statement. (Malaysian LGBTI activists decried the band’s “white saviourism” and ignorance of local political dynamics.)

Pakatan’s leadership must now be calculating that PAS, having done everything it can at this point, will begin to lose momentum. After all, nobody wins elections on TikTok alone, and Ottoman dreams and claims of racial supremacy won’t create new, well-paid jobs in an economy battered by the pandemic and runaway food price inflation.

This is the second of Pakatan’s themes: its focus on jobs and economic development. Deputy investment, trade and industry minister Liew Chin Tong has been urging colleagues to support nation-building measures, including policies to promote new industries that Anwar set out in SCRIPT, or MADANI, a manifesto he recently published. Anwar and his colleagues have also led work on Malaysia’s climate response, and efforts are under way to upgrade the nation’s care economy, a huge employer of underpaid women.

Anwar must also be hoping that some of the lads who love PAS will also be fans of Elon Musk, whom he recently convinced to establish Tesla’s regional headquarters in Selangor. Bringing in Tesla will force a rethink of some of Malaysia’s restrictive business regulations, which tend to protect rent-seekers and prevent economic reforms that could deliver much-needed high-wage jobs.

A fair share of new economic opportunities will also need to be directed into PAS states, one of which, Kelantan, has brown, undrinkable water running out of its taps, a travesty when contrasted with Kuala Lumpur’s fancy spas (some of which, perhaps coincidentally, are modelled on hammams similar to those used by Ottoman courtesans).

As well as pursuing economic reforms, Anwar has positioned himself as someone who can bridge the divide between Islamic State hopefuls and a multiracial Malaysia. He promises that debates about Malaysia’s future will be performed as “polylogues,” reflecting the nation’s diversity and his own ability to code switch between competing political registers.

Liew is also arguing that Perikatan, having pushed so hard on religious race-war rhetoric, won’t be able to win multiracial federal seats at the next election, and that PAS’s strength inside the coalition increasingly marginalises Perikatan’s other parties and denies them a nationalist disguise for its true aims. Perikatan also risks a tussle with Malaysia’s royal families, none of which appreciates Islamist critiques of its members’ lifestyles or their historical accommodations with the colonial state.

Amid the fierce contest over which coalition can best repair Malaysia after years of instability, it’s important to remember that the nation is not, after all, a liberal democracy but an electorally competitive authoritarian regime. Power is centralised in the federal government and the institutions of the national state, which place limits on how far challengers can push. These limits worked for UMNO for decades.

While Anwar and Pakatan are in power now, the underlying structure hasn’t changed, and there is no telling whether or how it will. For the time being, it supports the current federal government.

For PAS, meanwhile, Constantinople still stands. •

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Many saw the election result as a tipping point, signalling that Australia’s longstanding and very stable two-party system was finally on its way out. Its dominance had been gradually eroding and, this time, more than 30 per cent of voters looked elsewhere to cast their primary vote. As it transpired, Labor won government with a majority of seventy-seven seats in the House of Representatives but a lower primary vote than it had achieved in 2019. It optimistically attributed this to “strategic voting” by supporters temporarily shifting their primary votes to non-Labor candidates deemed capable of beating Liberal incumbents. Labor polled exceptionally strongly in Western Australia, winning four seats from the Liberal Party.

While the Coalition parties made much of their primary vote being slightly higher than Labor’s, the Liberal Party also had a historically low primary vote. In other democracies, the Covid-19 pandemic shored up some faith in the “wartime” governments dealing with it, at least initially. By 2022, though, the same incumbency benefit was not enjoyed by the federal government in Australia. Nor did the lowest unemployment rate in almost fifty years save the government from defeat (or the treasurer from losing his own seat in Kooyong). Prime minister Scott Morrison, who had become the most unpopular Liberal leader for more than thirty years, was targeted relentlessly during the campaign. The “miracle” of his 2019 electoral victory, in the face of opinion polling predicting a Labor win, did not occur twice.

The longer-term trend in Western democracies — reinforced by the Australian election result  — is that the major (or traditional) parties can no longer rely on lifelong voters. The success of Australia’s teal independents reflected widespread reaction against major parties perceived to be operating in the interests of the political class and donors, and ignoring substantive policy issues — such as climate change — that mattered to Australians. Political scandals over sexual misconduct contributed to this disenchantment and to the increased salience of gender issues.

If the 2022 election could be seen as a watershed moment for Australian voters, the extraordinary events that transpired between the 2019 and 2022 elections certainly increased the importance of certain policy issues and voters’ critical stance on the government. The Morrison government, like its counterparts across the globe, faced the daunting task of dealing with a global pandemic. Significantly, the 2022 Australian election campaign coincided with a period in which the country had the highest daily infection rates in the world.

Climate change also loomed large in the wake of record-breaking bushfires and floods since the 2019 election. Between September 2019 and March 2020 the Black Summer bushfires burned an unprecedented 18.6 million hectares of bushland. “Once in a century” floods in March 2021 severely affected communities in greater Sydney, the Hunter region and the mid-north coast of New South Wales, and around Queensland’s Gold Coast. These events were repeated a year later, with severe flooding affecting Brisbane, the NSW Northern Rivers and Sydney. The Insurance Council of Australia reported almost 200,000 claims from the 2022 floods, or more than $3.3 billion in insured losses.

Despite the severity of these events, the theme of climate change was not prominent in the campaigns of the major parties, although the prime minister’s apparent lack of empathy with flood and fire victims became part of the negative campaigning against him. The Coalition government was particularly vulnerable on climate change, and its attempts to reframe the issue were singularly unsuccessful. One discursive tactic tried well before the campaign proper was that climate change would “ultimately be solved by ‘can-do’ capitalism, not ‘don’t-do’ government.” This attempt at free-market framing was no more successful than the ubiquitous “freedom” ads of the United Australia Party funded by billionaire Clive Palmer.

Voters were looking for alternatives to the two-party system and they were also engaging in politics in new ways, both online and offline, in the community organising of the “Voices for…” movements. The election campaign moved further online, and citizens creating and sharing memes were as visible as more traditional party efforts. Within this landscape the visual elements of campaigning were more important than ever. Digital disruption and disinformation — so prominent in 2019 — were also a feature, but so were more concerted efforts to deal with them.

Not only did the election bring a change in government; it also saw the lowest primary votes for both major parties and the election of the greatest number of independents to the lower house since the formation of the Australian party system. The success of the teal independents and the Greens, and the appetite voters showed for “doing politics differently” suggested the dominant model of electoral competition might no longer be the two-party system. At the very least, the continued usefulness of the two-party-preferred vote as a way of conceptualising and predicting Australians’ voting behaviour has been cast into serious doubt.

A key outcome of the election was a widening split between the salience for voters and the salience for the major parties of long-term issues such as climate change and transparency in government. “Localised” politics, community campaigning and candidate quality were more prominent than in recent elections, in combination with the changing nature of campaigning in an evolving digital media landscape.

Another issue that unexpectedly took off was the Coalition’s broken promise to introduce a federal integrity commission. Integrity issues were highlighted by the teal independents and the Greens and, along with gender issues, became part of the negative depiction of Morrison that dominated social media. The Coalition unsuccessfully attempted to deflect attention from integrity issues by suggesting they were of no interest to ordinary voters and that the focus should instead be on cost-of-living issues and economic management — their usual electoral strengths.

Along with climate change and integrity issues must be mentioned gender issues, which were more prominent than in any election since 1972. The Morrison government’s seeming incapacity to deal with issues of sexual misconduct in the parliamentary precinct served as a touchstone for women’s disenchantment with the government on a range of issues. Veteran political journalist Paul Kelly was taken by surprise (and won a Gold Ernie Award) for his 2021 prediction that “the women’s movement won’t decide the next election.”

With so many high-profile ministers (and purported future party leaders) falling victim to independents’ campaigns on these issues, the Liberal Party faces the daunting task of rebuilding and — along with the Nationals — re-establishing its relevance with Australian voters, particularly women, socially progressive economic liberals and younger Australians.

The 2022 federal election also marked a profound shift in how the country runs its elections. A record proportion of voters cast their ballot before election day through either early or postal voting. While this trend was no doubt accelerated in 2022 by Covid-19, it builds on an underlying preference for convenience and arguably on disengagement from politics — with voters casting an early ballot to switch off from the long campaign.

With fewer than half of all voters casting their vote on election day, it appears that we have moved from an election day to an election period. This is a trend that is highly unlikely to be reversed, with potentially significant implications for the nature of elections as democratic rituals. It also has implications for small parties and independents because non-incumbent candidates can struggle to staff polling booths for extended periods.

The traditional media were criticised during the campaign for a seeming preoccupation with the performance of leaders and the possibility of missteps, with the hashtag #ThisIsNotJournalism trending on Twitter. In the very first week, Labor leader Anthony Albanese was unable to recall either the unemployment or the cash rates during a press conference. The government and the conservative media seized on the misstep to discredit Albanese’s economic expertise and cast doubt on his leadership abilities. But it also became illustrative of a style of politics that characterised the election: a focus on “gotcha” moments and detail from which bigger policy issues and debates were notably absent.

Having learned from the mistake of campaigning in 2019 on complex reforms (such as overhauling tax policy in areas like imputation credit refunds), the Labor Party focused on a slimmed agenda of manufacturing, wage growth, gender pay parity and housing. The Coalition responded by repeatedly emphasising its record of economic management, leading to what it described as “jobs and growth.” This dynamic left major policy issues prominent in the minds of voters — such as climate change — out of the contest between the major parties and in the hands of the Greens and the teals.

Despite the major parties’ best efforts to keep the campaign focused on preset announcements and policy agendas, significant events occurred during the official campaign period that challenged both leaders to respond in ways that were not scripted. These included the announcement of Solomon Islands’ security pact with China early in the campaign, which made regional security a significant issue, though not in a way favourable to the government.

On 3 May, the Reserve Bank of Australia lifted the official cash rate by 0.25 per cent — the first of eight increases during 2022. This was the first time since the 2007 federal election (when Liberal prime minister John Howard was ousted by Labor’s Kevin Rudd) that such an increase had occurred during a campaign, and it cemented economic management, the cost of living and housing affordability as key campaign issues.

Compared with other recent federal election campaigns, the 2022 election saw a heightened focus on individual candidates and constituencies. While all elections feature scandals involving candidates, the attention given not just to individual seats but also to the competencies of individual candidates was highly unusual. In part this focus can be explained by the momentum behind the localised campaigns of the teal and “Voices for…” independents, but it could have also been a broader consequence of the renewed importance of place and community that was felt so acutely during the Covid lockdowns.

The national media were captivated by the controversial candidate Katherine Deves, who was selected by Morrison to contest the northern Sydney seat of Warringah against independent Zali Steggall. Deves’s vocal stance against the rights of trans Australians was interpreted as a dog whistle to the Liberals’ conservative voter base. In other electorates, meanwhile, the suitability of candidates was being questioned based on geographic representation and appropriate reflection of ethnic diversity.

Labor’s Andrew Charlton and Kristina Keneally — both contesting seats in western Sydney — were caught up in these debates. Charlton — despite his political credentials as a former adviser to prime minister Kevin Rudd — was criticised for not living in the electorate. Former NSW premier and senator Kristina Keneally, also attempting to win a House of Representatives seat, was criticised in a similar way — but the party also faced strong opposition to the fact that it had not fielded a candidate who reflected the diversity of the electorate’s population. Independent and Vietnam-born candidate Dai Le ultimately won the seat of Fowler from Labor.

The victorious Albanese government got to work quickly, embarking at high speed on its election commitments, including preparation for a referendum on a Voice to parliament, legislation to introduce a federal integrity commission, and a jobs and skills summit. Both Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong embarked on international diplomatic visits to the Pacific region, to security summits in Japan and Spain, and to Paris to “reset” Australia’s relationship with France, which deteriorated after the cancellation of a multibillion-dollar defence submarine contract in 2018.

The government itself was more diverse than ever before, with a record number of women — including an Indigenous woman, Linda Burney, holding the Indigenous Australians portfolio.

Doubt continued about the legacy of the Morrison government. In August 2022, it was revealed that Morrison had been secretly sworn into multiple ministerial portfolios, including health, finance, home affairs and industry. He defended these actions as necessary in a time of unprecedented crisis and uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, but his actions were widely criticised as contrary to fundamental principles of collective ministerial responsibility and open and transparent government.

While the implementation of Albanese’s policy agenda began with considerable speed, the economic context created — and will continue to create — significant challenges for the new government. Saddled with its election commitment to proceed with the Stage 3 tax cuts for the wealthy, the government faces an incredibly difficult mix of rising inflation, rising interest rates and falling wages. This will significantly constrain its fiscal policy options and presents a scenario for industrial unrest that could become difficult for Labor to resolve given its voter base and election commitments. •

This is an edited extract from Watershed: The 2022 Australian Federal Election, edited by Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer and Jill Sheppard and published by ANU Press, the latest in a series of detailed post-election analyses dating back to 1975. Contributors to the book — which can be downloaded free of charge — include Carol Johnson, Murray Goot, Marija Taflaga, Glenn Kefford and Stephen Mills, and Anthony Green.

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In Bengaluru, the leaders of twenty-six opposition parties reached a joint agreement to fight next year’s national elections as allies. They even produced a name, an acronym and a slogan.

The name is tortuous — the India National Developmental Inclusive Alliance — but the creators love their acronym: INDIA. And lest anyone think their opponents will ridicule them for displaying such a “colonial mentality” by using the English word “India,” they chose a slogan of Jeetega Bharat — “Bharat will win.” Bharat is the term for the South Asian land mass used in Hindu religious texts and much preferred by the BJP and its spin-offs.

Getting twenty-six different sets of politicians into one place and ready to adopt a united statement required a lot of diplomacy. Desperation helped: there is a feeling that if Modi and the BJP win a third five-year term, BJP dominance, and doctrines of Hindu supremacy (Hindutva) will become irreversibly embedded in the apparatus of the state.

One man near the heart of the conclave was the Congress party’s eighty-one-year-old president, Mallikarjun Kharge. Kharge is a Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) from the southern state of Karnataka. Though he is a long-time devotee of Sonia Gandhi and her family, he is also an experienced warrior, “efficient at soothing ruffled feathers… Nobody can call him a lightweight,” according to an informed journalist.

The multi-party meeting was held in Bengaluru because the Congress party, with Kharge as a key organiser, defeated the BJP state government in Karnataka’s elections in May. Here was a success story that suggested the BJP, which controls only half of India’s twenty-eight state governments, could be beaten.

At the 2019 parliamentary elections, the BJP and its allies won 332 seats out of 543 with 47 per cent of the vote. The twenty-six parties gathered in Bengaluru won 144 seats and 39 per cent of the vote. By competing against each other as well as the BJP, in other words, the INDIA parties split the opposition vote.

This time, the leaders say, only one candidate will run under the INDIA banner in each seat. But this sort of agreement will be hard to achieve in many seats, since a number of the parties are fierce rivals in their states.

The INDIA initiative provoked a more nervous response from the BJP than might have been expected. It summoned a meeting of its own National Democratic Alliance to coincide with the INDIA meeting. This seemed surprisingly defensive, because the thirty-eight allied parties assembled in Delhi offer the BJP little more than a dozen additional seats.

The BJP president took the opportunity to remind audiences that participants in the INDIA alignment revealed “only one unity — that of taking care of their family interests.” He reeled off names of eight INDIA parties led by offspring of long-established politicians. Narendra Modi, on the other hand, has long portrayed himself as single, selfless and dedicated only to the nation.

What is the relevance of 1977 and 1989? In both years, opposition groups were desperate to prevent continued election victories of the Congress party of Indira Gandhi (1977) and Rajiv Gandhi (1989). They made alliances and even formed governments. Yet the 1977 effort crumbled in two years, and by 1980 Indira Gandhi was back as prime minister. The minority government that emerged from the 1989 coalition collapsed within a year, and by 1991 Congress was back in government.

Today, a handful of commentators see cracks in the BJP machine. They point to the problems of managing an organisation claiming 180 million members. As the party extends its grip to every Indian state, they reckon, it is getting caught up in the horse-trading, corruption and disillusion that eroded Congress.

Top-down direction will undermine belief in a party whose members once provided input and could rise from the ranks. Long-time true believers will be alienated by the arrival of drifters and grifters climbing on a bandwagon they hope is also a gravy train. It happened to the Congress party: once the idealism of the national movement was gone, little remained except a weak appeal to a disappointing “socialism.”

Today, there are two big differences. First, India has 900 million broadband subscribers and every party member of the BJP and its affiliates has a smartphone. A party structure based on participation and discipline can be maintained on a daily basis. At the level of the polling booth, BJP “booth captains” are capable of reporting, transmitting and acting. Party members can be held close.

Second, the Hindu-supremacist project of the BJP has a powerfully simple ideology that can constantly renew itself. There will always be another mosque built where a temple should be, an inter-faith marriage that cries out to be rectified, or a Christian plot to convert innocent tribal people to a foreign faith. If the economy goes bad, the reason probably lies with such “foreign” tumours.

The INDIA allies are scheduled to meet in Mumbai in August, ideally with key state leaders like Nitish Kumar, chief minister of Bihar (forty seats in the Lok Sabha, parliament’s lower house), and Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal (forty-two seats), playing leading roles. But the Gandhi family will continue to be central, and Mallikarjun Kharge will need all his feather-smoothing skills if a credible electoral alliance is to take flight. •

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This is just one strange, chillingly undemocratic, dimension to what promises to be a very strange election. The two oldest men ever to run for president are recontesting an election Trump believes was stolen from him in 2020 — a claim he will certainly propagate again if he loses again. Where he is burdened by historic indictments and a raft of legal probes, Biden’s ability to claim a successful term has been hampered by an intractable, do-nothing Congress and a series of US Supreme Court decisions that have rolled back federally enshrined rights.

Republican-controlled states, meanwhile, continue their efforts to gerrymander electoral districts and undermine voting rights. And the same polls that show Americans want neither Trump nor Biden also show they don’t know who they do want to see on the presidential ticket.

Into this scene emerges a little known, putatively bipartisan group enigmatically called No Labels, which claims to have an “insurance policy in the event both major parties put forth presidential candidates the vast majority of Americans don’t want.” The policy? It will put forward a yet-to-be-named bipartisan presidential/vice-presidential ticket. To this end the group is promoting a US$70 million effort to get its ticket on general election ballots across the nation.

Democrats and Never Trumpers are especially fearful that No Labels’s actions will divert support from voters who might otherwise back Biden. (Trump holds on to disaffected Republican voters more tightly than Biden holds disaffected Democratic voters.) Under the first-past-the-post system used in presidential elections, this would increase Trump’s chances of winning.

But Republicans have reason to worry, too. In a poll conducted for No Labels earlier this year, 59 per cent of respondents said they would consider a moderate independent ticket if faced with a Trump–Biden rematch. But, as others have pointed out, without names on the ticket these numbers demonstrate only a yearning for an alternative. To translate that desire into votes, No Labels needs candidates who can win real support from voters of both parties and independents.

Third-party candidates aren’t uncommon in US presidential elections. In some cases they are barely noticed; in others the evidence shows they affected the outcome. Ralph Nader’s candidature in 2000 is often seen as ensuring that George W. Bush won Florida, and hence the election. Jill Stein, the Greens candidate in 2016, received 49,941 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Hillary Clinton lost to Trump by 44,292 votes.

Perhaps the best-known of all, Ross Perot, received 18.9 per cent of the popular vote (the highest percentage of any third-party candidate ever). But he was seen to have pulled votes equally from George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Founded in 2010 by former Democratic operative Nancy Jacobson, No Labels was a response to the rising Tea Party’s attacks on Barack Obama’s legislative agenda. It describes itself as a bipartisan movement for Americans who are “tired of the extremes on the left and the right.” Rather than help Obama, its aim was to support lawmakers willing to meet in the middle, irrespective of their party affiliation. Current co-chairs are former Democratic senator Joe Lieberman, former NAACP executive director Benjamin Chavis, and Larry Hogan, the Republican former governor of Maryland.

Because No Labels is a non-profit organisation rather than a registered political party it needn’t declare its sources of funding. Most donors appear to be wealthy individuals working primarily in the finance sector who have also made big donations to the major parties. No Labels also oversees a number of political action committees, or PACs. Experts in campaign finance law say the organisation has reached the limits of what is permissible under electoral law.

Until recently, No Labels has mostly advocated procedural reforms aimed at limiting the power of the majority party in Congress. In 2017 it helped start the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and later it launched fundraising efforts to support candidates who backed the caucus’s agenda. That agenda is more centre-right than centrist: on healthcare, for example, it has pushed to compensate health insurance companies for the rising costs imposed by the pre-existing conditions that Obamacare requires them to cover, and for the elimination of a medical device tax that was also part of Obamacare.

Notably, the lifespans of No Labels and the Problem Solvers Caucus encompass the very period when Washington politics has become increasingly partisan and nihilistic. But whatever No Label once was, it is now clearly an organisation in transition, intent on a new agenda that would make it a player in the national political arena. Suddenly the “national movement of commonsense Americans pushing our leaders together to solve our country’s biggest problems” is in the business of proposing who voters might choose to be the president and vice-president.

Americans got a glimpse of what this might mean a few days ago, at a town hall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire, when No Labels launched the group’s policy agenda, “Common Sense.” Headlining the event were West Virginia senator and rogue Democrat Joe Manchin, who has hinted at a presidential tilt, and Utah’s former Republican governor Jon Huntsman, who ran for president in 2012.

One think tank has described the policy plan as timid and vague. It is a mish-mash of middle-of-the-road pabulum, dodges tough issues like abortion (it urges “a sustainable abortion compromise most Americans can live with”) and provides no definitive solutions to the problems confronting the nation. Manchin and Huntsman, presumably there as exemplars of the proposed presidential ticket, were equally obtuse on how a bipartisan team might govern. The memo on the No Labels website laying out a third-party presidential plan also dodges crucial issues, including whether and how the campaign would avoid handing the election to Trump.

It is no easy matter to compete against the two major political parties in a presidential election. Just getting names on the ballot papers requires complicated efforts to meet a variety of state-specific filing requirements and timelines. Typically, petitions must have a requisite number of approved signatories.

The group has already gained ballot access in Arizona, Colorado, Alaska and Oregon and signature-gathering efforts are under way in other states. No Labels is providing the names of “placeholder” candidates who will be replaced by the actual presidential and vice-presidential candidates when they are selected. As part of this effort, the organisation has established a number of state affiliates, some with deep Republican roots, which have declared themselves political parties.

Presidential and vice-presidential candidates will be selected between Super Tuesday (5 March) and the No Labels convention, scheduled for April in Dallas, where the candidates will be endorsed. But who will make these decisions and endorsements is never stated.

Realistically, this push for political action is likely to be driven from the top of No Labels by Jacobson and Lieberman, with sidelines support from those, like Manchin, who may see personal opportunities looming — especially as he apparently faces a tough race to retain his senate seat, and buoyed by favourable polling. (No Label’s pollster is HarrisX, owned by Mark Penn, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton who has distanced himself from the Democratic Party and who is married to Jacobsen.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, splits have emerged inside the organisation and reports indicate a toxic work environment. One of the founders, William Galston, has resigned over the presidential push and the Democratic members of the Problem Solvers Caucus are described as being in open revolt.

There does seem to be an element of outsiders’ revenge to what has been characterised as a spoiler intervention that will strengthen Trump’s chances. When challenged on this, Jacobsen has said that No Labels will nominate a ticket only if polling shows a viable path to victory (“if our rigorously gathered data and polling suggest an independent unity ticket can’t win, we will not nominate a ticket”) and that the ticket will be pulled from the ballot if the campaign tilts the race to a competitor, especially to Trump. “We will not spoil for either side. The only reason to do this is to win.” Lieberman told the Atlantic. “The last thing I’d ever want to be part of is bringing Donald Trump back to the Oval Office.”

But these statements only raise more questions. Can Jacobson and Lieberman be trusted to make these decisions? What is the metric they will use? Where do they think the votes to deliver a third-party win will come from?

Only the latter question can be answered here. At a time of hyperpartisanship, centrist and independent voters are, at least theoretically, up for grabs. Biden already occupies much of the centre and Republicans like Trump, Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence are preoccupied with the right. Pew polling shows that while 38 per cent of Americans describe themselves as independents, only 7 per cent identify as an independent leaning towards neither of the two major political parties.

What distinguishes the small share of Americans who are truly independent is their low level of interest in politics, and that makes them hard to engage in the swell of support No Labels needs. Most analysts (including at Third Way and in Politico) agree that No Labels’s hopes of any electoral college votes, let alone the 270 mentioned on their website, are based on flawed premises.

For the time being, though, Democrats and Never Trumpers must worry about No Labels’s intent. Some small reassurance comes in Aaron Blake’s Washington Post analysis of polling by Monmouth. The pollster found that Biden leads Trump by seven points (47–40) in a head-to-head among those who will “definitely” or “probably” vote for either candidate. In contrast to other polls (including HarrisX’s), Monmouth’s shows no significant shift when a third-party ticket is introduced. With a generic third-party ticket, Biden edges ahead by nine points; with Manchin and Huntsman named as candidates, Biden still has a six-point edge.

As Blake observes, while Americans generally like the idea of an independent candidate, what No Labels is offering is not an independent or a third-party ticket but a fusion Republican–Democrat ticket. And he reminds us that third-party tickets almost always poll better than they perform on election day because voters ultimately want to choose between candidates who have a chance of winning. •

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The symbolism lay in the fact that 27 June is the anniversary of the day in 1932 when Thailand promulgated its first-ever constitution. By gesturing towards that milestone, almost as much as in any of its policies, Move Forward demonstrated why it is on a collision course with Thailand’s two most powerful conservative institutions, the military and the monarchy.

The new party is on a mission to reclaim the legacy and promise of the 1932 revolution, which formally ended Thailand’s absolute monarchy but merely marked the beginning of a long struggle between progressives and an alliance of royalists and military officers. That struggle has seen thirteen coups, twenty constitutions, and rule by the military or its proxy parties for seven out of every ten years since 1932.

Move Forward’s quest to end that cycle — in the same way South Korean and Indonesian reformers ended their periods of authoritarian rule — will mean redefining the meaning of “constitutional monarchy” to ensure that the monarchy truly is above politics and below the law, in the same way that constitutional monarchies are in Japan and England. If the party is successful, it will settle a fundamental question unresolved in Thailand to this day: where does sovereignty lie, with the people or the monarchy?

Move Forward’s extraordinary support — a doubling of its vote compared with the 2019 election, when it arrived on the scene as the Future Forward party — indicates its project is increasingly resonating with many ordinary Thais, and especially young people. They wish their country to be “normal,” well governed and prosperous, and their leaders to be modern and accountable, perhaps in the manner of wildly popular Bangkok governor Chadchart Sittipunt, a hardworking politician who has set precedents in transparent and efficient governance.

Since the ascent of Rama X and the rule of military dictator General Prayuth Chan-ocha, Thailand has headed in precisely the opposite direction. Following Prayuth’s 2014 coup and Vajiralongkorn’s 2016 ascent to the throne, signs of absolutist monarchical rule and a wish to erase memory of the 1932 revolution have proliferated. Even the historic plaque commemorating the 1932 revolution disappeared, replaced by another that proclaimed: “Loyalty and love for the Triple Gem [Buddha, Dharma and Sangha], one’s clan and having an honest heart for one’s king is good. These are the tools to make one’s state prosper!”

The new monarch appointed, dismissed and then reappointed a royal consort (the first since the era of Rama V, 1868–1910), seized control of the monarchy’s financing organisation, the powerful Crown Property Bureau, and set about establishing a private army with two personally controlled regiments. Future Forward, which boldly opposed the last of these in 2019, was marked as a potential hotbed of lom chao (those who would overthrow the monarchy) and dissolved by a Thai Constitutional Court in the same year.

Prayuth, for his part, rammed through a new constitution with minimal public debate or consultation. To increase the scope for conservatives to dictate the country’s direction without resorting to coups, it gave 250 junta-appointed senators an equal say in appointing the prime minister, harking back to the “half-baked democracy” of the 1980s when Thai military officers retained seats in parliament. Prayuth refused to swear allegiance even to this illiberal constitution following the 2019 election, reserving his pledge of loyalty for the monarch.

The illiberal constitution and its appointed Senate worked exactly as intended after the election in May this year. Although Move Forward’s leader, young former businessperson Pita Limjaroenrat, assembled a 312-seat coalition — a clear majority of the House of Representatives — his nomination for the prime ministership was denied on 13 July. Senators were able to block Pita simply by abstaining from voting, depriving him of the votes he needed for his coalition of 312 to reach 376, a simple majority of both houses. In the end, a paltry thirteen senators ventured to support him.

The joint sitting was Thai politics in microcosm, showing vividly the divide between those who speak for average Thais and those who place the monarchy above all. On one side was a coalition representing more than twenty-five million voters (out of thirty-eight million) in the party-list count and more than twenty million (also out of thirty-eight million) in the constituency seat count. On the other side stood a group primarily representing the former junta, the military, the monarchy and the business oligarchs who have benefited from the absence of transparency and accountability of a junta-led regime.

The chasm was apparent in the statements made by Pita and his foes. Pita offered a vision based on his party’s campaign promises, with plans to break up the monopolies that stifle the Thai economy, undertake educational reform to end archaic practices like rote learning, and institute political reform to devolve more power to the regions and security reform to look afresh at the bloody two-decade-long conflict in Thailand’s south.

The senators, along with the parties aligned with the military, offered but one reason for their opposition to Pita: his party’s pledge to reform the notoriously draconian and illiberal section of the Thai criminal code law known as section 112. Intended to prohibit lèse-majesté — insults to the monarchy — the section has been used to imprison minors and other Thais “liking” the wrong post on Facebook. Anyone can make a section 112 allegation, trials are held in secret and penalties go as high as fifteen years’ jail. The provision has been used to silence political debate on the monarchy’s role in Thai politics, including its validating of Thailand’s coup-makers.

The joint sitting saw the pro-monarchist minority parties launch a ferocious and at times wildly hyperbolic attack on Move Forward’s claim to the country’s leadership. If section 112 was reformed, one Bhumjaithai party MP ranted, he would introduce a new law allowing people to shoot those who insult the monarchy.

Most of the Senate, in contrast, were coolly indifferent. Some forty-three senators didn’t even attend the session. All of Thailand’s military commanders, granted Senate positions in the 2017 constitution, were indisposed; many Thais wish they would exhibit the same indifference to politics when enjoined to conduct coups.

Of the thirteen senators who crossed the floor to support Pita, none were from the three armed services, despite many retired soldiers making up the Senate. Indoctrinated throughout their military education with the belief that monarchy is sacred, inviolable and indispensable to their country’s security, they are implacably opposed to any notion of monarchical reform, no matter how moderate. If the democratic coalition achieves government, reform of military education will surely be a priority.

In response, speakers from the democracy coalition sought to allay concerns about the section 112 reform proposal. Some pointed out that the section had been amended many times; others noted that the policy belonged only to the Move Forward Party and was not included in the agreement between the eight parties making up the coalition. Their arguments fell on deaf ears, as did Pita’s final plea to the senators, “May your decision reflect the hopes of the people, not of your own fears.”

With characteristic pragmatism and resilience, Move Forward then set out a new roadmap. It would appeal to the Senate once more in a repeat session on Wednesday 19 July and thereafter seek an amendment to section 272 of the constitution, which gives senators a role in selecting the prime minister. If this fails, as it is likely to, they will then move aside to allow the party with the second-greatest number of seats, Pheu Thai, to nominate one of its candidates for the prime minister. [In the event, Pita was suspended from parliament by the constitutional court on 19 July pending a judgement on his alleged holding of shares in a media company, in violation of election law.]

Will Pheu Thai’s nominee gain Senate support? It will be irony indeed if senators endorse the party torn down by coups in 2006 and 2014.

What does seem certain is that the conservative parties, including Prayuth’s United Thai Nation Party and his former deputy and military comrade Prawit Wongsuwan’s Phalang Pracharat, won’t attempt to form a minority government with Senate backing. Prayuth has declared an intention to retire from politics, and such a government would be only theoretically possible, even with Senate support. It could not pass laws or survive a no-confidence vote unless it could quickly pull members across from the democratic coalition, a prospect that seems unlikely.

Many twists and turns remain on the road to a new Thai government. If the constitutional court were to rule that Pita’s alleged shareholding disqualifies all Moving Forward members, a government more palatable to the monarchy and military could yet return. In an era of sophisticated authoritarianism, regimes have many ways of cloaking their authoritarian impulses beneath the trappings of democratic process, with the courts a favoured method of disabling political opponents.

In the meantime, Move Forward won’t retreat from its goal of revitalising the vision of the 1932 revolutionaries against the seeming tide of absolutism. On the eve of the Senate vote, one of its leading figures, MP Rangsiman Rome, advocated that Thailand’s national day should revert to 24 June, the date of the 1932 revolution. While some decried this as inflammatory and tactically wrong-headed, Move Forward knows that younger voters are far less reverent of the monarchy and want their country to modernise. With each election bringing in roughly four million young voters, can Thailand’s conservative elites continue to resist this change?

As the biggest economy in mainland Southeast Asia, Thailand exerts significant influence. All its neighbours are authoritarian regimes well practised in denying their people a real say in governing their countries. Will Thailand continue, along with China, to be an authoritarian centre of gravity, legitimising dictators and sharing authoritarian tools and techniques? Or can it represent something more hopeful? •

The post Thailand’s battle for the future continues appeared first on Inside Story.

As I never tire of pointing out, by-election results tell us nothing about the next election. Because the stakes for electors are so small — nothing as important as who will govern for three years — they can vote on other things. Such as “sending a message.” Candidates can make much more difference at by-elections than at general elections.

So they are not dry runs for the main event, and any “momentum” generated by a result is illusory and short-lived, strictly limited to the reporting bubble.

But by-elections are invested with all sorts of magical properties by the political class, and so they can often matter, a lot, particularly when it comes to the fortunes of political leaders.

The Longman (Queensland, margin 0.8) by-election in July 2018 played a very large role in ending Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership. The result, a 3.7 per cent swing to the opposition, was routine and unexciting; not so Aston, Victoria (margin 2.8) in April this year, which delivered a 6.4 point swing to the government that opposition leader Peter Dutton is still feeling today.

Three years ago this month, at the Eden-Monaro (NSW, margin 0.9 per cent) by-election, Anthony Albanese faced his own first “electoral test” as Labor opposition leader, and it came very close to being a similar disaster.

Triggered by the resignation of the popular member Mike Kelly, it was held in the early months of the Covid pandemic when prime minister Scott Morrison, his summer troubles behind him, was recording the highest approval ratings of his career (in the high 60s). Those voters ended up giving only a small swing to the government, and Labor candidate Kristy McBain won with a 0.4 per cent margin.

Labor was very lucky to hold Eden-Monaro. The electoral commission’s ballot draw alone, with McBain above the Liberals’ Fiona Kotvojs, was probably worth more than 0.4 per cent. So was the decision of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party to advocate (on how-to-vote cards) preferences for McBain before Kotvojs.

McBain’s candidacy itself was a very fine pick; before nominating she was mayor of Bega Valley Shire, which comprises a large chunk of the electorate. Like many political identities, her profile had risen during those disastrous 2019–2020 fires. The booths in that part of Eden-Monaro swung to her, the rest swung against. And Kotvojs, who had run in 2019, was hardly an inspired choice. A much stronger candidate, NSW Liberal MP Andrew Constance — still a rock star because of his criticism of Morrison during the fires — was in the mix for a while but didn’t make the final cut.

Back to this Saturday, though, with the hullabaloo following Dutton’s presiding over the first opposition by-election loss to a government since 1920 still ringing in the ears. The defeat damaged his leadership, and it is a brave person who would predict Dutton will still be leading his party in 2025.

It’s the exact bullet Albanese dodged in Eden-Monaro July 2020.

But all is not lost for the opposition leader, for the Labor Party is offering him a chance at redemption.

Fadden’s margin is 10.6 per cent. No government has contested an opposition-held seat with a margin of that size since Bob Hawke’s Labor ran in Groom (Queensland) in 1988. Its candidate didn’t even make it to the two-candidate-preferred count.

That’s not saying much, because in recent decades governments have been reluctant to run in opposition seats. The Howard government sat on its hands for all six (where margins ranged from 6.4 to 15.1 points). The new Rudd government fielded a candidate in Gippsland (Victoria, margin 5.9) in 2008, copped a nasty 6.1 per cent swing, and ignored the next four (margins ranging from 7.1 to 13.5).

Tony Abbott’s Coalition government ran in Griffith, Queensland, in 2014 (margin 3.0), and got a pretty good 1.3 point swing, but not enough to win it. Under Turnbull the government ran in Braddon, Tasmania (2.2) and the aforementioned Longman.

And Labor thinks it has a chance of a 10.6 point swing this Saturday? Obviously not. Even if it did snatch the seat, it would be lost again at the next general election. (Aston is different: with the benefit of incumbency Labor stands a better-than-even chance in 2025.) Is Albanese high on his own supply, assuming there’ll at least be a decent swing to Labor and the media will coo and fawn again, make life even easier for him and destabilise his opponent?

Or is a longer game afoot? The chances of a second by-election win in a row are astronomically small. A Liberal National victory would revitalise the opposition leader somewhat, and there’s actually a decent chance Fadden will swing substantially his way. And that would stiffen Dutton’s faltering standing. Is that what the prime minister wants? Does he just like having Dutton around?

Albanese seems to take “narrative” nonsense less seriously than most political leaders. The least inspiring opposition leader in memory, he stuck to his guns and refused to placate the commentariat’s demands for shock and awe. Small and steady won the race.

He probably would prefer to face Dutton than any of the likely alternatives (deputy Sussan Ley is the most likely) at the next election. Still, politicians don’t usually take steps like this, no matter how much sense they make in theory. They prefer an easy life in the short term.

Labor is running heavily on robodebt, the Liberal Nats on the cost of living. How will the competing “send a message” messages pan out?

Fadden will be in the headlines on Sunday, though we don’t know the font size yet. Any repercussions for federal leaders will take longer to play out.•

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With its focus on domestic politics, Netflix’s new hit series Wave Makers is a reminder that Taiwan is something more than a flashpoint. It’s a lively democracy dealing with a familiar range of modern problems. The series is a mini West Wing, Taiwan-style, with a #MeToo story at its heart — and, in a remarkable case of art informing life, it has made #MeToo an actual domestic political issue. At a moment of high tensions in the Taiwan Strait, this is the issue making news.

Wave Makers is one of several Taiwanese productions from the Netflix stable available in Australia. Internationally, Taiwanese television drama is less popular than Korean, but this series is rating well. Strong performances from a star-studded cast do credit to a script written by two women (Chien Li-ying and Yen Shih-chi) who have real-life experience of party politics.

The series follows media staffers of an out-of-office political party as they deal with political graft, the status of migrants, marriage equality, the death penalty and other politically sensitive issues through ten months of an election campaign. But the political becomes personal when a #MeToo story emerges, slowly becomes the dominant thread, and changes the course of the election.

Reviewers have remarked on the absence from the series of any mention of cross-strait relations, the elephant in the room of East Asian politics. In fact, this elephant is not easily bypassed. Banned in the People’s Republic of China, “harmonised” (censored, that is) on Douban, the main Chinese website for entertainment and culture, the series has inevitably ended up in the cross-strait space.

As an exercise in soft power, Wave Makers functions like Taiwan’s planned porcupine defence, covering “a large number of small things” instead of one big one. Chat on the mainland microblog site Weibo shows that viewers in China, breaching the great firewall to watch the series, are fascinated by the multifaceted portrayal of a thriving Chinese-speaking democracy.

In Taiwan itself, the series has gone to air at a sensitive time in the political cycle. Campaigning is under way for the presidential election on 13 January next year, and so far it’s a men’s race. The redoubtable President Tsai Ing-wen is coming to the end of her second term of office and (unlike her counterpart in China) is stepping down in accordance with the constitution. Her successor may be vice-president Lai Ching-te, whose election would extend the tenure of the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, into a third term. With Hou Yu-ih, the candidate for the old establishment KMT party, performing poorly in the polls, Lai’s main competitor looks like being a former mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party in 2019.

As if they didn’t have enough to worry about (opinion polls, economic contraction, Chinese fighter jets, Russian frigates), these men are now likely to be reviewing their personal histories.

The #MeToo story in Wave Makers is firmly located in the political world. As early as episode two, rookie staffer Chang Ya-ching is having to deal with the office sleaze. An internal hearing leads nowhere: sexual harassment within the party is too delicate an issue to handle in the course of an election campaign.

As it happens, Ya-ching is also suffering at the hands of her former lover, who is running for election as vice-president on the other party ticket. Handsome, sophisticated and predatory, the aspirational VP has in his possession intimate photos of Ya-ching that he is refusing either to return or to destroy. A sensitive performance by twenty-five-year-old Gingle Wang shows a younger, happier Ya-ching in flashback, falling in love and embarking on a disastrous relationship that blights her job prospects and destroys her peace of mind.

The series reaches its climax with her revelation of the abuse on public television, the inevitable impact on her former lover’s family, and the eventual reverberations for the presidential campaign. Australians who watched Rachelle Miller’s exposé on Four Corners of her treatment at the hands of MP Alan Tudge will be struck by the parallel.

In Taiwan, the series was triggering. Among those who watched it was a former staffer for the DPP. “The first thing that happened,” she later related, was that she had “a good, big cry.” The next was that she went on Facebook to report on her own experience of sexual harassment at work.

Soon afterwards, a second female party worker came forward with an allegation of harassment by a fellow staffer. DPP youth affairs department head Tsai Mu-lin was criticised in both cases; according to the second complainant, he had not only failed to take her accusation seriously but had forced her to apologise.

The DPP moved swiftly to repair its reputation, holding a press conference on the afternoon of 2 June, issuing apologies and forcing resignations, including Tsai Mu-lin’s. But the damage had been done. One website began keeping a running tally of complaints after the style of Covid statistics. In the space of two weeks more than thirty women from various spheres had come forward with complaints. In China, where the DPP is synonymous with abandonment of One China policy, the official media greeted the party’s discomfit with schadenfreude.

What initially looked like a DPP problem quickly turned out to be a general one. A sexual harassment case was already running against a KMT legislator, and incidents involving other party members quickly came to light. Outside the political arena, the entertainment industry has been hit the hardest, with allegations of sexual abuse on the part of actors and television personalities continuing to surface at the time of writing.

Among the accused are Wave Makers star Huang Chien-wei, whose performance as the amiable head of the party’s media department and muddle-headed husband of a long-suffering wife won him hearts all over Taiwan. Prominent political dissidents of the 1989 generation have also been named, including by Wave Makers scriptwriter Chien Li-ying, who alleges that dissident poet Bei Ling groped her during a meeting about a play production.

For political parties, allegations concerning their own party members are hugely embarrassing. On 6 June, President Tsai herself went on Facebook with a strong statement on the duty of society to protect victims. The DPP is currently moving to improve legislation on sexual harassment. In both politics and the entertainment industry, resignations and apologies, and in some cases strong denials, have become frequent.

The impact on the election is hard to predict. On 30 June, at the end of a month’s wall-to-wall coverage of #MeToo, China intensified military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. The following day, Singaporean journalist Woon Wei Jong spoke with seven young Taiwanese about their voting intentions. The conversations were dominated by the cross-strait relationship and the different parties’ stance in relation to the mainland. Is #MeToo at all relevant in this context?

According to mainland emigrant Shangguan Luan, the answer is yes, although the effects are more likely to be seen in an impact on voting patterns than in #MeToo’s becoming an openly debated election issue. Among younger voters, she writes, a sensitivity to gender issues overlaps with the “naturally independent” sensibility characteristic of people born since the 1980s. This generation has grown up in an era when democracy has fostered a sense of self-determination while time has attenuated ancestral links with the mainland. The effect of #MeToo should be to hasten the drift away from the older, more conservative, and essentially more Chinese, attitudes that form the bedrock of the One China policy.

Among mainland viewers, as the same commentator remarks, responses to Wave Makers have varied from sneers about Taiwanese democracy to frank envy. The series’ themes necessarily highlight Taiwan’s political differences from the People’s Republic: the participation of women in political life at the highest levels, a multiparty system, political accountability, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and same-sex marriage (legalised in Taiwan in 2019). The #MeToo movement itself, now surging in Taiwan, has been met in China with arrests of activists instead of perpetrators. A pallid civil rights code introduced in 2022 passes responsibility for infractions ever further down the line of management.

These differences have yielded Taiwan a human rights dividend that is complicating international relations, especially vis-à-vis China. A highly self-conscious Taiwanese series like Wave Makers can hardly avoid being entangled in the resulting complex of issues. The opening scene of the series, a rally on election night, amounts to a call for recognition. The wave makers are warming up the party faithful: “You have voted for hope for Taiwan’s future!” “Let’s change Taiwan’s future together!” The crowd cheers. The name of the candidate flashes up on the screen: “Lin Yueh-chen!” The crowd roars: “Frozen garlic!”

“Frozen garlic” is a pun on the Mandarin word for “elect.” Cheeky and assertive, it captures something about Taiwan at this moment in history. If it joins the lexicon of terms banned by the Chinese government, no one will be surprised. •

The post The Netflix series changing Taiwanese politics appeared first on Inside Story.

A huge domestic market, favourable demographics and vast reserves of newly “critical” minerals mean the fundamentals are there for Indonesia to become one of the world’s five biggest economies by mid-century. Despite its enormous governance and development problems, there’s a sense that the facts of Indonesia’s economic and geopolitical importance are finally catching up with its elites’ pretensions about their status as leaders of a negara besar — a great, important country.

It’s in this feel-good atmosphere that Indonesia is set to choose a replacement for Jokowi, who’s constitutionally limited to two five-year terms, in presidential elections scheduled for February next year.

Spare a thought for the opposition’s candidate, the former Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan. Once a close ally of the president, Anies stoked Muslim grievances to win the 2017 gubernatorial polls in Jakarta after the Chinese-Christian incumbent was accused of blasphemy. Anies’s standing among religious minorities — about an eighth of the national electorate — has been at rock bottom ever since. That’s a big enough problem on its own without the strategic challenges involved in running as a repudiation of a president whose approval ratings are hovering in the high 70s.

Those numbers aren’t the only ones posing a problem for Anies. Indonesia’s electoral laws apply a “presidential threshold” that requires candidates to be nominated by a party or coalition of parties that won either 20 per cent of the popular vote or 25 per cent of seats at the previous legislative elections. Anies has secured the backing of three parties that together meet this threshold, but if he loses just one he’ll be off the ballot.

The one party for which the nominating threshold isn’t a problem is PDI-P, the nationalist party Jokowi is at least officially a member of. Having won just over 20 per cent of the popular vote in 2019, it’s unilaterally put forward its star cadre Ganjar Pranowo, the telegenic governor of Central Java province.

Ganjar has charted a Widodo-like path to national popularity, having used local politics as a platform to build a national profile based mostly on his personal charm, competent administration and avoidance of scandal. Not for nothing have Indonesian pundits been pre-emptively labelling a Ganjar presidency as Jokowi jilid dua — “Jokowi volume two.”

Just like Jokowi, PDI-P is also Ganjar’s biggest liability. The party’s chair, former president Megawati Soekarnoputri, feels that Jokowi hasn’t repaid her with the obedience she considers to be her due given her role in making him president in 2014. Determined not to have another of her cadres assert their independence once in office, Megawati has tested Ganjar’s loyalties by forcing him into taking a high-profile stand against the government while publicly belittling him as a “party functionary.” Ganjar’s poll numbers have stagnated as many voters — not to mention Jokowi — have come to see him as a cipher for Megawati, who remains a polarising figure outside the PDI-P base.

This is all to the advantage of defence minister Prabowo Subianto, the candidate polls suggest would be the favourite if the election were held now. Having fought and lost two brutal presidential campaigns against Jokowi before being co-opted into his second-term cabinet, Prabowo is in the unique position of being able to promise continuity while remaining the lesser of the two evils for Anies’s voters in the event their candidate doesn’t make it on to the ballot or is eliminated in the first round of Indonesia’s two-round voting system.

Eight months out from the election, in short, Jokowi has got all three likely candidates exactly where he wants them: Anies struggling while Ganjar and Prabowo compete for the aura of being the president’s natural successor. Which raises a question: with the opposition weakened and the contest likely to involve two government-linked candidates promising more of the same, is anything at all at stake in this election?

To say these elections are a “test of democracy” might be too much of a cliché, but it’s telling that twenty-five years after the fall of Soeharto every Indonesian national election is still routinely described in those terms. Certainly, despite the resilience of Indonesian democracy in the face of unfriendly odds, Jokowi leaves some of its foundations looking unsteady.

That 2024’s polls are even taking place as scheduled shouldn’t be taken for granted: Jokowi, despite public denials, lent behind-the-scenes support to an unsuccessful push in 2021–22 to extend his term in office via constitutional amendment. And if Anies Baswedan’s candidacy falls over before it can be officially registered in November 2023, it will be an open question whether it was because his coalition lost confidence in his ability to turn around his polling numbers or because his bid was sabotaged by the government sabotage. His nominating parties have been rocked by suspiciously timed corruption investigations and lawsuits, while Anies himself is a potential target of corruption charges relating to financial decisions he made as governor of Jakarta, despite dubious evidence of illegality.

Even if unsuccessful, a president’s efforts to evade term limits and his authorities’ harassing the opposition with legal threats aren’t exactly the hallmarks of a healthy democracy. But underhanded tactics like this are of a piece with Jokowi-era democratic backsliding, wherein the president’s “personal distaste for contentious politics” has dovetailed with the illiberal reflexes of the cops, soldiers, religious leaders and Soekarnoist ideologues who surround him.

One reason to doubt that Ganjar Pranowo would oversee a rehabilitation of democratic norms is that PDI-P looms large within this illiberal milieu. The party has demanded that Ganjar allow it to appoint its cadres to a suite of senior cabinet positions if he is elected. On his watch PDI-P would seek to entrench its influence at the commanding heights of the Indonesian state, continuing to push a “hyper-nationalism” it sees as the antidote to the increasing influence of conservative Islam in society.

Ganjar’s likely response to the threat of being dominated by PDI-P would be to do what Jokowi has done for nine years: counterbalance and dilute its power by co-opting as many parties as he can into his cabinet (with the implicit promise that they can siphon money out of the programs they administer) and cosying up to the police force and military — none of which spells good things for the quality of governance.

The disappointments of the Jokowi years and the dim prospects for democratic renewal under Ganjar provide the backdrop for relitigating the question of whether Prabowo Subianto still represents a unique menace to the system, and whether he ever did.

It helps the cause of Prabowo revisionism that he’s been on his best behaviour since being appointed defence minister. He’s moderated his angry-outsider pose and distanced himself from the Islamic radicals he previously courted, while getting sympathetic press for his efforts to boost Indonesia’s military capability. It might be intuitive to assume that his support is concentrated among older voters nostalgic for the Soeharto era, but Prabowo’s voter base in fact skews young. To many in a generation too young to remember his New Order incarnation, he looks like a worldly, straight-talking patriot beholden to nobody.

Those with longer memories know what lies below the surface: an explosive temper; a penchant for demagoguery, risk-taking and rule-breaking; and, as a former special forces officer in Soeharto’s army, a comfort with the use of violence as an instrument of politics. These features of his character could make Prabowo unpredictable in a domestic or international crisis.

But what Prabowo might do patiently and deliberately could be just as insidious. In the Jokowi years, corruption has become a central talking point for conservatives, who say that the immense cost of running for office in Indonesia encourages politicians to monetise their positions once elected — and for this reason direct elections for local executive positions (and, a few say, the presidency) ought to be limited or abolished.

It’s this context that had me in a suspicious frame of mind when I saw Prabowo say, in a recent interview, that “frankly, we have to study the democracy we’re implementing… the cost of doing politics is too expensive.” He agreed with his interviewer’s observation that this expense was incentivising corruption, saying that “instead, in the end, our political system isn’t making Indonesia a great, advanced and prosperous country, but could wreck it.”

He went on to call for “political parties, social organisations, religious leaders [and] intellectuals” to come together to “study and [consider] what do we want to fix” about the political system. He compared such an effort to the BPUPK, a body set up in the dying days of Japan’s wartime occupation to “prepare” Indonesia for independence, which became a central site for negotiating the constitutional underpinnings of the Indonesian republic proclaimed by Soekarno in 1945: not only between Islamists and secularists, but between democrats and their adversaries.

Prabowo’s offhanded invocation of this formative period in Indonesia’s political history could merely be pretentious — or it could be a hint of the scale of the political changes he imagines himself leading as president. At stake in February’s election, then, is the chance for Indonesia to find out. •

The post Will Prabowo’s patience pay off? appeared first on Inside Story.

Kudos if you said that those countries cap the amount anyone may donate to a political party or candidate. Double the kudos if you know that the entire eastern seaboard in Australia also has such caps, not just for state parties but for state electoral purposes too.

It is forty years since the Hawke government begat the regime that still essentially governs the funding of campaigns for federal elections. That regime still rests on twin pillars: public funding for parties or candidates that attract above 4 per cent of the vote, in return for disclosure requirements whose lack of timeliness is redolent of the paper-and-pen era in which they were hatched.

True, the federal “transparency register” has been widened to include lobby groups that campaign at national elections. But the national electoral laws don’t drill deeply into the financial affairs of parties. Compare Britain, where parties’ audited financial accounts must be published annually — and parties there don’t receive public funding for electoral purposes like their Australian counterparts do.

Whether in an absolute sense, or relative to our usual democratic comparators, the electoral funding and disclosure rules in the Commonwealth Electoral Act remain lax. This state of affairs may align with liberal philosophy in the abstract, but it is not merely passé in terms of developments in the field in the last forty years; it is also corrosive of faith in the integrity and political equality in Australian elections.

With a Labor government ostensibly driven by social democratic norms and an expansive crossbench of Greens and independents committed in principle to more fairness in electoral participation, what are the prospects for renewal? To discuss this, we need to consider the three main dishes on the regulatory menu — disclosure, donation caps, expenditure limits — and then ask if reform is imminent after all these years.

Disclosure is broke: time to fix it

Disclosure at the national level needs to be tighter and more timely. Parties must declare “gifts” — donations earmarked to fund national electioneering — only after the end of each financial year. Their declarations don’t then need to be published by the Australian Electoral Commission, or AEC, until February of the next year. So resources given to parties in the lead-up to the May 2022 federal election need not have been made public until between eight and twenty months after they were received.

In addition, parties need only disclose individual gifts above an indexed threshold that now sits at $15,200 per annum. (Donors are meant to keep tabs on whether a series of gifts exceeds that threshold and, if so, disclose the fact annually.) It gets worse: given our federal structure and history, parties can consist of up to nine registered entities — their national secretariat plus their mainland state and territory divisions. The disclosure threshold applies to each of those entities, not to the party as a whole. So the effective threshold for gifts for national electioneering can be well over $100,000 per party.

You might think, “Well at least this annual ‘disclosure dump’ gives the media a deliberative focus.” It is true that having “real-time” disclosure — say on a weekly basis — and at too low a level could simply snow investigators. The answer to that is to improve the presentation of the data by including tools to easily aggregate and map disclosures across time spans, related parties and entities, and geography.

It is also important to bear in mind the inherent limits of any disclosure system. Disclosure is essentially a kind of freedom-of-information tool that allows the media and rival political players to ask questions. By itself it is no guarantee of integrity, let alone a means to political equality. It can even heighten cynicism or normalise unlovable donation practices. Companies may think they need to keep up with the largesse of competitors seeking to ingratiate influence; party treasurers can hit up donors to a rival party and say, “What about us?”

Regardless of such considerations, the national disclosure system is clearly broken: that much has been known for years. But the major parties have also increasingly driven a truck through the system, and the AEC hasn’t stood in their way.

How? The major parties operate business-oriented fundraising arms under names like the Liberal Party’s Australian Business Network and the Federal Labor Business Forum. These outfits charge huge subscription fees: not to be a member of the party proper, but to belong to a kind of exclusive networking club. To magnify the exclusivity, fees have been tiered across “platinum,” “gold” and “silver.” The fee for the highest tier has reportedly inflated from $110,000 to $150,000 in recent years.

When these fundraising arms organise notionally come-one, come-all dinners (like Labor’s $5000-a-head budget dinner hosted by PwC or a $5000-a-head “boardroom lunch” with treasurer Jim Chalmers), the ticket cost is set below the disclosure threshold. This is an old practice; the scandal today is that these large, tiered subscription fees are not being disclosed.

Under electoral law, a political donation is something given for “inadequate consideration.” But the parties happily encourage subscribers to claim they are receiving more than adequate consideration. Quelle surprise! As Woodside Energy’s CEO explained some years back, this leaves it up to people like him to decide whether to make “voluntary” disclosures.

Despite being armed with significant forensic powers, the AEC has taken such assertions at face value. It told the ABC recently that it leaves it up to the subjective — and conflicted — view of those paying for access to the parties. Donations up to ten times the disclosure threshold can therefore be hidden in plain sight.

All this ignores the objective nature of value in most real-world dealings. Parties are hardly in the events industry. The AEC could demand to be informed of the events held by each forum/network and then commission experts to assign an upper market value to the event-as-an-event (including an allowance for the attendance time of ministers or MPs). The AEC could also inspect the accounts of these fundraising arms to see what surplus they generate, per average subscriber, for the party coffers.

In short, the major parties are nakedly soliciting revenue, with a nod-and-wink as to anonymity, in return for selling premium access — and the regulator is standing by. Selling access corrupts basic public law values: politics as a public trust and the franchise as an emblem of the equal worth of all people. Why on earth would an ordinary person voluntarily join one of the major parties today when they are seen as largely superfluous to the electoral machine? As if rubbing salt in the wound, last year the major parties convinced the courts that any membership rights contained in their own rules are legally unenforceable.

Capping donations

Presently, the only “real” limit on national political donations is a ban on “foreign” donors, a recent development driven by concerns about Chinese money. I put “real” in quotes, since nothing is more fluid than international finances. That means the law is not really enforceable offshore, and so assumes that receipts are careful screened by Australian political actors. While the parties have been willing to twist and stretch disclosure law, the opprobrium for breaching a “foreign” donor ban is probably sufficient for the parties to self-police the source of gifts.

That leaves non-foreign, ridgy-didge Aussie donors: a residual category that ranges from citizens (wherever located) and permanent residents through to businesses incorporated here or simply possessing a principal place of activity here. Unlike in the sample of countries listed at the start of this piece, they face no donation limits. Is this a problem?

It may be, for political integrity and equality. If disclosure requirements were more meaningful, and if the new National Anti-Corruption Commission performs to its potential, we might be right to leave political integrity to those regimes.

What then of political equality? Political donations are partly acts of political association. This means they cannot, constitutionally, be banned outright. But they can be limited — in their size and in who makes them. Generally, we should welcome donations from a wide range of sources to help keep parties connected to a broad social base. Indeed, donations to parties and candidates of up to $1500 per annum are tax-deductible for individuals. On the other hand, big donations, even those made on the basis of mateship or ideology, undermine political equality.

Given this pervasive effect on political equality, why are donation caps not more prevalent in Australia? One clue lies in two countries absent from the list of those with caps: Britain and New Zealand. Like Australia, they have a longstanding Labor Party (albeit they spell it properly, as “Labour”).

“Surely these parties of the ordinary worker would support caps?” you say. Well yes, in principle. But when caps are introduced, the law is confronted by the problem of how to deal with the affiliation fees paid by the trade unions that formed those parties and still prop them up in the lean times of opposition. (Modern Labo(u)r parties do okay from corporate donations when they are in power or on the verge of power, but less well when facing the wilderness, thanks to their pragmatism and that of business donors.)

A second hurdle for caps is whether new political forces may need an injection from a sugar daddy in order to challenge the might of the existing major parties. This is less relevant for an eponymous self-funded party like the former Palmer United Party (now the United Australia Party) but very important for a more genuine movement like the teal independents who were turbocharged last year by Climate 200 support.

The key figure behind Climate 200, a progressive entrepreneur who inherited part of the vast mining and corporate raiding fortune of Australia’s first billionaire, has even written a book celebrating the movement. It may be no coincidence that teal candidates did much better in the 2022 federal election — without caps on donations or expenditure limits — than in this year’s NSW election, where both are capped.

Limiting spending

The third option on the menu is expenditure limits, which constrain how much parties, candidates and lobby groups can spend on certain electioneering costs. These limits are now common for state elections in most of Australia, as this table shows. (Victoria and Western Australia are the odd ones out, Tasmania only has them for its upper house elections, and in South Australia they are nominally “opt-in” as a condition of public funding.)

Limits on expenditure drive the British and New Zealand systems, and are a feature across Europe and the Americas. (They cannot be mandated in the United States, and opt-in spending limits there have fallen by the wayside.)

In principle, expenditure limits do several jobs. They squarely address the “arms race” problem, which Mr Palmer has reignited in Australia. In constraining the parties’ demand for money, these limits free up them and their leaders to focus on genuine public business and may reduce demand for dodgy donations. They may also help deliberation by making campaigns less cacophonous, something that is a turn-off for many electors.

Expenditure limits should also be easier to police than donation limits. While donations are inherently behind-the-scenes, campaigning needs to be public to be effective. That remains the case even with the advent of highly targeted online campaigns, although that development requires transparency from social media companies.

When it comes to expenditure limits, the devil lies in the legislative detail. With no fixed terms for federal parliament, the capped period is not easy to define. (At Westminster, it is up to a year ahead of an election.) Exactly what is covered by “electoral expenditure” also needs careful design and definition. And the coordination of campaigns — between trade unions or corporate groups, for example — needs to be controlled to keep caps from being rorted.

Most vexed of all is the question of what limits should be put on lobby group electioneering — not least with some members of the High Court suggesting, in 2019, that the idea of a level electoral playing field limits differential treatment of parties/candidates and lobby groups. If so, this is an odd heresy. Representative elections are necessarily focused on parties and candidates; parties have ongoing reputations to protect, and party leaders and MPs are publicly accountable in myriad ways that lobby groups are not.

Reforming the morass

Fifteen years have passed since the states began modernising the law of money in electoral politics. Yet substantive change has been absent nationally. If inertia had its way, this dual track of state innovation and national enervation would be unlikely to change.

As we have seen, the national transparency net has widened to rope in electioneering lobby groups but has simultaneously frayed. Observers are optimistic, however, that federal disclosure rules will be tightened to include a lower disclosure threshold and more frequent disclosure obligations. None of this is rocket science. Models exist aplenty, from New York City to Queensland, for something approaching continuous disclosure in the internet era. On the question of which income will need to be disclosed, we must pray that the Greens and crossbenchers lean on Labor to deal with the “business forum” loophole it helped manufacture.

Tasmania is on the verge of becoming the latest (and last) subnational jurisdiction to update its law in the area, and its bill is instructive about what not to do. Across 265 pages it weaves an intricate web of registration and accounting requirements. Yet it does little more than bring in a regular disclosure regime, sweetened with generous public funding for elections and for party administration. The Liberal government wants to set the disclosure threshold at $5000 per annum: pretty high for a small state.

After self-inseminating his party with over $200 million over the past two national elections (mostly via Mineralogy Pty Ltd), Mr Palmer’s recent forays into electoral politics may leave one main legacy: some form of donation cap. To have any effect, it will need to include a suturing of that business forum/network loophole.

Any federal cap is likely, I suspect, to be set at a high level. The major party treasurers — along with otherwise “progressive” electioneering groups like Get Up! and Climate 200 — will baulk at setting donation caps anywhere near as low as some states have. (Victoria is the most parsimonious — just $4320 currently over the four-year term.)

This leaves expenditure limits as the main new item on the menu. Again, the shadow of Mr Palmer looms large; but not just his. Finding himself outspent by a teal rival in a previously blue-riband Sydney seat in 2022, a Liberal MHR complained that his opponent’s spending had been “immoral.” Is it too cheap to note that his party could have swallowed its economically libertarian instincts at any time during its three terms in government and legislated limits? Better late than never! Temperance bandwagons were mostly full of recovering addicts; and, as St Augustine ironically put it, “Lord, make me chaste and celibate, just not yet.”

Federal parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, a multi-party committee with fourteen members, has held public hearings, including on electoral finance reform, over a seven-month period. (MPs, even more than public lawyers, seem fascinated by electoral law.) Its report is due soon enough. The mix of compromise, competing principles and self-interest manifest in its recommendations will make for compelling reading. •

This article first appeared under the title “Money in Australian Electoral Politics: Reforming the Morass” in AusPubLaw.

The post Follow the money appeared first on Inside Story.

Why Hungary, and why now? A tagline revealed that Sheridan, the Australian’s foreign editor, is just back from a week as a visiting fellow at Budapest’s Danube Institute. What the newspaper didn’t tell readers is that this evocatively named organisation is funded by the Hungarian government (via its Batthyány Lajos Foundation) as part of its breathtakingly generous bankrolling — to the tune of billions of dollars in funds, buildings and other assets, according to Foreign Policy magazine’s Ana Luiza Albuquerque — of conservative institutes based in Budapest.

The job of these institutes is to host visiting fellows like Sheridan, often for months at a time, and run seminars, publish reports and periodicals, and generally promote what Orbán calls “illiberal liberalism.” (Orbán has also described Hungary as “the last Christian conservative bastion of the Western world.”) The Danube Institute alone publishes three journals, the European Conservative, the Hungarian Review and the Hungarian Conservative. Other Budapest-based institutes with government links include the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs.

Orbán’s largesse is no doubt part of the reason for the sharp rise in his stocks in recent years among English-speaking conservatives of a more hardline bent. But it is his record of four consecutive election wins since 2010 — however tainted by bribes, crackdowns and electoral tampering — that has become a talisman for those American conservatives who worry that real democracy will never guarantee them the power they want.

Prominent among Orbán’s beneficiaries is the American conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher, who crops up repeatedly in media coverage of Hungary’s cross-Atlantic appeal and has benefited from Danube Institute hospitality. Dreher is the thread running through Foreign Policy’s account of Orbán’s spending on the institutes, and he’s also the larger-than-life centrepiece of a New Yorker article investigating the appeal of Hungary’s authoritarianism for figures on the Republican right.

For Dreher, Orbán’s example is “so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it’s serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness.” He was especially struck when Orbán told a group of visiting conservatives, “We hope you will think of Budapest as your intellectual home.”

Where Sheridan ignores Fidesz’s excesses, Dreher believes “we expect too much of these post-Communist countries if we judge them by Western standards of clean government.” He takes the credit for having persuaded Fox News’s then-presenter Tucker Carlson to broadcast a week’s worth of programs — even less critical of Orbán than Greg Sheridan’s piece — from Budapest in 2021.

But another figure also keeps appearing in the New Yorker piece. One moment he’s lunching in a bistro in Budapest wearing “a pin-striped suit and a tie from Liberty, the London clothier once favoured by Oscar Wilde.” Then he’s in his nearby office, assuring the magazine’s Andrew Marantz that his long wait for permission to attend the Budapest-hosted Conservative Political Action Conference is “merely an oversight.” (It wasn’t; Marantz’s request was eventually refused.) Here he is — with an “Ah, good, you made it!” — when Marantz slips into the conference reception at the five-star Párisi Udvar hotel. And here he is, when a friend of Dreher lends Marantz a spare pass, giving the reporter a friendly slap on the back.

This genial scamp is the eighty-year-old British journalist John O’Sullivan, who has been president of the Danube Institute since its inception in 2013. O’Sullivan has impeccable conservative credentials: he wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s and later helped draft her memoirs; he took over from William F. Buckley as editor of the New York–based National Review in 1990; he was editor-in-chief of United Press International and then executive editor of Radio Free Europe in the early 2000s.

But one job is missing from the New Yorker’s summary. During 2015 and 2016 O’Sullivan was editor of Quadrant — yes, Australia’s Quadrant — and since then he has been the magazine’s international editor. More than that, he appears to have stayed on as president of the Danube Institute throughout his editorship.

It’s strange thought: that decades-old tribune of the Australian right, Quadrant, being edited by an Englishman who also held the most senior position in a Budapest-based think tank funded by the Hungarian government. Did he continue to be paid by the institute? Did he spend much time in the Quadrant office in Sydney?

Quadrant hasn’t been entirely candid about O’Sullivan’s relations with the government of Hungary. When the magazine announced his appointment as editor in February 2015, his work at the Danube Institute was mentioned only in the past tense. I can’t find any instance where the dual role was made clear to readers during his editorship.

Even after he moved to the international editor’s job, his relationship with the institute barely rated a mention — even at the foot of a piece he wrote in September 2021 about Tucker Carlson’s “polite questioning” of Orbán (a good thing, in O’Sullivan’s view) — although he did fleetingly mention his work at the institute in a piece a couple of months later. This year the institute has cropped up a couple of times in O’Sullivan’s articles on general topics, but without any reference to its generous backer.

Other Quadrant contributors admire Hungary too (though not all contributors to O’Sullivan’s old magazine, National Review, do). Former Liberal frontbenchers Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer have all accepted invitations to speak at Danube Institute, and former diplomat (and Abbott adviser) Mark Higgie took up a fellowship there.

Unlike O’Sullivan, Sheridan is worried by one characteristic of Orbán’s Hungary: its hardline enforcement of immigration controls. But for the Australian’s foreign editor, “freedom” (whatever that means in a country fast slipping down the democracy rankings) trumps everything. Freedom, above all, from “coercive and ideological contemporary left-liberalism.”

Surely Australian conservatives haven’t caught the Hungarian disease from the more intemperate of their American counterparts? Maybe not all of them, but there are signs that Greg Sheridan has. Should he have mentioned to readers that the think tank that hosted his visit is funded by foreign minister Németh and his colleagues? I’d say so, but perhaps he sees the battle with left-liberals as so vital, and so unequal, that such niceties must be sacrificed. •

The post Dazzled on the Danube appeared first on Inside Story.

That fact alone sums up the futility of the Thai establishment’s two-decade effort to suppress wishes expressed by Thai voters at elections in 2001, 2005, 2007, 2011 and 2019. Each time, populist parties backed by former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra were the biggest winners thanks largely to the support of voters from Thailand’s populous rural northeast.

Because the opposition Democrat Party couldn’t win elections in this notionally two-party system, conservatives resorted to dissolving Thaksin’s parties in 2007, 2008 and 2019, or staging military coups in 2006 and 2014. They did so because Thaksin’s rapid ascent to power and electoral popularity threatened Thailand’s patrimonial power structures and the establishment’s vested interests and privileges.

Now, though — despite the benefits they gain from an undemocratic post-coup constitution adopted in 2017 — Thailand’s conservatives face a bigger threat than Thaksin ever posed. The biggest winner in this month’s election was not Thaksin’s Pheu Thai party, but newcomer Move Forward, a party contesting only its second election.

Move Forward’s agenda is radical for Thailand. It seeks wholesale democratic reform to limit the military’s role in politics, an end to military conscription, reform of the lèse-majesté law that prohibits criticism of the monarch, and changes to Thailand’s hierarchical and outmoded education system. Its leaders, including prime ministerial hopeful Pita Limjaroenrat, are young, dynamic and often internationally educated, and frequently have a background in business.

Rather than just appealing to young people, Move Forward has attracted support from across different demographics in Thailand’s urban areas. It swept all but one of Bangkok’s thirty-three electorates, gaining 42 per cent of the vote there, and performed strongly in other urban centres — even including traditional Pheu Thai strongholds such as Chiang Mai in the country’s north.

For the establishment, these gains suggest troubling times indeed. The military-backed government, meanwhile, fielded two proxy parties at the election, both of which were trounced.

Yet conservatives still have live options if they wish to prevent Move Forward from taking power. The 2017 constitution allows 250 military-appointed senators to vote on the prime minister, meaning that any coalition will need a super-majority of 376 votes in the lower house to ensure their preferred candidate gets the job. So far, the Move Forward–Pheu Thai coalition has secured around 315 votes for Pita, a strong majority in any normal democracy but perhaps not enough in Thailand.

If Pita does secure sufficient support, perhaps from more independent-minded senators, he still risks being banned from politics or having his party dissolved. Thailand’s referee institutions — the Constitutional Court, Election Commission and National Anti-Corruption Commission — have a history of acting against popular politicians.

Either of these options would only be a temporary fix for the political establishment. The dissolution of Move Forward’s predecessor party in 2020 led to protracted youth-led protests on Bangkok’s streets, many of which attracted tens of thousands of demonstrators. This time, sympathy for the military is even thinner on the ground. Heavy-handed steps against Move Forward are likely to attract a significant backlash.

Perhaps more importantly, Thailand’s big businesses and corporate conglomerates wouldn’t necessarily support the military. The Thai Chamber of Commerce, for example, has already said that a transition to a younger generation of leaders isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and that political stability was important.

They are undoubtedly concerned by the state of the economy. Over nearly a decade, prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has failed to lead any meaningful economic reform. Thailand has lagged Vietnam and other neighbours in attracting investment. It hasn’t participated in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and other trade deals. Long-term challenges, including an underperforming education system and an ageing society, haven’t been tackled in any meaningful way.

Move Forward’s and Pheu Thai’s leaders say they want to do things differently. Their leaders include successful figures who understand the need for Thailand to adapt to the changing global and regional economy. Pita is one of them — he is a former executive director of technology business Grab Thailand — and his predecessor as party leader was vice-president of Thailand’s largest automotive parts business. Pheu Thai’s Srettha Thavisin was a real estate mogul before entering politics.

Another area where Move Forward could quickly make a mark is the crisis in neighbouring Myanmar. Since a coup there in 2021, the country has slid ever more deeply into civil war. With close ties between the two countries’ militaries, Thailand has been reluctant to criticise the Myanmar junta or support tougher action within ASEAN. Thailand has even undermined ASEAN unity on this issue by giving the junta a platform at sub-regional diplomatic dialogues and meetings.

Move Forward has already flagged that it would approach Myanmar differently. Following the election, Pita foreshadowed a humanitarian corridor to provide assistance to the people of Myanmar. A Move Forward government also seems likely to engage with opposition groups in the country, as advocated by Indonesia and other countries in the region.

Relations with the United States would probably also improve. Although dealings have long been normalised since the 2014 coup, little love has been lost between the two notional treaty allies. The Biden administration’s framing of the world as democracies versus autocracies was always going to sit uncomfortably for a Thai government that had its roots in a military coup. By contrast, Move Forward and the Harvard-educated Pita are likely to see Washington as broadly sympathetic to their aims.

If Thailand’s establishment decides not to respect the result of this election, the future for the country will look very different. In this scenario, Pheu Thai might decide to ditch Move Forward and join forces with smaller conservative parties, but the resulting coalition would have little ideological or policy coherence. As has happened under the outgoing government, each party would seek lucrative ministries in order to dispense largesse to would-be voters.

Even if the country didn’t face international isolation for this sub-democratic outcome, the absence of impetus for domestic reform or regional leadership would make Thailand increasingly irrelevant to its international partners.

Pheu Thai itself would likely be punished by voters in future elections. (One of the reasons for its electoral underperformance in 2023 may have been the rumour that it would join forces with the military.) Support for Move Forward would grow stronger and Thai politics would become even more polarised. The risk of political conflict and violence would rise.

While the battle between Thailand’s popular and establishment forces is far from over, this election looks to be an inflection point. If the establishment can recognise the futility of its efforts to subvert democracy and allow this one to stand, Thailand may finally move a step closer to the stable democratic system its people deserve. But if they choose once again to intervene and confound the outcome, the country risks a political impasse more intractable than any it has faced before. •

The post Thailand’s watershed election appeared first on Inside Story.

Karnataka is the eighth most populous state of the Indian federation. It has the largest per capita GDP of all the major states, and Bengaluru, India’s swinging IT centre, is its capital. It is the only southern state where the BJP has managed to win government.

This time the party lost forty seats and was reduced to sixty-six seats in a 224-seat house. The rival Congress party took 43 per cent of the vote, won 135 seats, and will form the next state government.

Turnout was strong, at 73 per cent of the fifty-three million eligible voters. (Only 260,000 took advantage of an endearing feature of Indian elections: every ballot paper has the option to vote for NOTA — None of the Above.)

The BJP threw everything into the campaign to retain its foothold in the south. The endlessly energised Narendra Modi, seventy-two, spent ten prime ministerial days campaigning in Karnataka and did a five-hour, twenty-five-kilometre road rally through the streets of Bengaluru and its suburbs. That may have paid off: the BJP gained seats in Bengaluru even as it was being clobbered in the rural areas around the big city.

The loss was not a complete surprise. Karnataka hasn’t returned an incumbent government for nearly forty years, and the outgoing administration was widely seen as corrupt and incompetent.

But the extent of the defeat may have surprised even the Congress party. The BJP ran a well-financed campaign fuelled by predictable attempts to keep Hindu antagonism towards Muslims on the boil. But the party pinned its hopes on what is now referred to as “the Modi magic.” It may have helped in Bengaluru, but not elsewhere.

Rahul Gandhi, the weary fifty-two-year-old national leader of the Congress party, campaigned in the state and did a walking tour a few months before the election, but his presence counted for much less than competent local leadership, a canny sense of caste configurations, and motivated party workers.

To an Australian observer, accustomed to hand-counting of ballots and Senate results sometimes taking weeks to determine, the administration of these elections was remarkably fast, efficient and fair. Voting was done on standalone voting machines, with one control unit for each of the 58,500 polling stations. Counting began Saturday morning, two days after polls closed, and the results were clear by lunchtime. The system — single ballot, first-past-the-post — makes the process simple, but the Election Commission of India continues to provide a model for the world.

National elections are due next year, and Modi and the BJP look strong favourites to win a third term. Yet the current political map of the federation seems at odds with such domination of the national parliament. The BJP controls only eight of India’s state governments and is in coalition in six others. The other fourteen states, comprising more than half the population, are ruled by local parties or the Congress.

The map of the federation now shows a chunk of saffron BJP states stretching from western Gujarat to the vast Uttar Pradesh. There’s also saffron in the less densely populated northeast, which is a complex mix of eight smaller states. The fringes of the map — the south, east and west — have non-BJP governments.

Will the centre hold? India’s electoral map following the Karnataka result. Courtesy of Scroll.in

On the same weekend the Congress won the Karnataka election, a new political party won a parliamentary seat for the first time in a by-election. The candidate of the Aam Aadmi Party (common man’s party), founded in 2012, which already rules Punjab state, defeated the Congress, the BJP and a Sikh-based party in the industrial town of Jalandhar in Punjab.

The AAP has already won two elections for the government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, but the BJP central government, which controls the police and appoints the lieutenant-governor, has gone out of its way to hobble it. The upstart party, however, got another win in the same week when the Indian supreme court ruled that the elected government of Delhi had the right to run Delhi without having constantly to clear decisions with the lieutenant-governor.

With national elections due next year, some analysts speculate that a coalition of the Congress and parties like the AAP could win a majority. The chances of such unity, however, seem slight. Even if it were stitched together, similar experiments in 1977 and 1989 suggest it would soon fall apart in government.

And Narendra Modi’s big orange bus has plenty of spare tyres, skilful mechanics and financial fuel. It also has a well-tried capacity to find dangerous Muslims, “urban Naxalites” (revolutionaries), “presstitutes” (journalists) and decultured pseudo-intellectuals. One of its goals, its leaders have said, is a “Congress-mukt Bharat” — a “Congress-free India” — and old BJP ideologues have hankered after a single strong central government.

The BJP and its associates may, however, run the risk of appearing to be too much of a Hindi-speaking operation, based in north India and promoting a doctrinaire version of what a proper Hindu should be. Such a conformist version of Hindu beliefs may appeal to Hindi-speaking Hindus in northern states, but it may alienate speakers of Bengali, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi and Malayalam.

India’s remarkable seventy-five-year survival as a single unit has depended on its flexible federation and its democratic capacity to let regions do many things as they please, and even for the central government to carve out new states when demands are irresistible.

But the big saffron bus carrying BJP ambitions will be back on the road in a wink: there are elections in three more states due by December. •

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This time last year that particular cookware-coating descriptor would have been the last to come to mind in describing the Labor leader. Halfway through the election campaign, “charisma bypass” might have been more appropriate for an uninspiring, somewhat blundering opposition leader whose demeanour contrasted with the incumbent’s energetic confidence. Whatever you thought of Scott Morrison, everyone agreed, he remained a formidable campaigner, while Albo, even within the famed “small target” paradigm, erred on the side of saying as little as possible. And his campaign, to put it mildly, was not blemish-free.

The published opinion polls from March 2022 to the election did put Labor comfortably ahead after preferences but found nothing to celebrate in Albanese’s approval ratings. Were they better than Bill Shorten’s had been three years earlier? Arguably, but you had to look closely to see it. They might have been similar to Tony Abbott’s during the last change-of-government campaign in 2013, but even the much-deflated Morrison usually bested him as preferred/better prime minister.

But when the election result became clear at approximately 8pm AEST on 21 May 2022, Albanese went from zero to hero. If observers had previously struggled to imagine him as prime minister, their perspective changed the moment he became one, or at least one-elect. Suddenly it all made sense.

Had he been a good opposition leader? He won, didn’t he, so he must have been.

Now we are used to Albanese as calm and capable PM. From the highest office in the land he pulls the levers of state with ease and aplomb, authority oozing from his pores, journalists hanging off his words. One day he is hobnobbing with the international great and good, the next munching a white-bread sausage sanger at the footy with the hoi polloi. Is there nothing this everyman can’t do?

And because, despite all the accoutrements of high office, he still decidedly lacks personal magnetism, some close politics watchers judge that — you guessed it — his very ordinariness, his unthreatening lack of eloquence, these are the secrets to his success. So he is more a John Howard than a Kevin Rudd.

On the other side, Scott Morrison quickly became an embarrassing, somewhat demented punchline. And the less said about the federal opposition, led by the faintly ridiculous figure of leader Peter Dutton, stripped of his powerful portfolios, the better. Did this clown show really run the country for eight and a half years?

Elections are routinely followed by shifts in public perceptions of leaders and parties, and the most dramatic come after a change of government and/or a result that has turned out to be different from what was widely anticipated. (Some Newspoll examples are here.) In Albanese’s case, this graph from Essential nicely illustrates his huge leap in stature.

The shape of the graph shows the total reinvention, in the public mind, of the persona of one Anthony Norman Albanese.

The moral of this long-winded introduction? If you want to measure public perceptions of Albanese as an opposition leader you should survey them when he is doing that job. Ideally, you do that as close as possible to when people vote, but certainly before 6pm Saturday eastern time, when votes start to be tallied and the how-and-why tales start to unfold.

And that’s exactly what the regular public polls — Newspoll, Essential, Resolve, Ipsos et al. — did during the campaign.

There is, however, one election survey, much used in academia and often cited in the media, that attempts to measure voters’ attitudes to leaders — along with a host of other factors that influence votes — but collects its data after the election. And not just a few days after, but weeks and in many cases months afterwards. That’s the Australian Election Study, or AES.

Run out of the Australian National University, the AES began at the 1987 election, in some ways as a successor to the Australian National Political Attitudes Surveys. Its counterparts overseas include British and American surveys.

These days the AES is mostly done online. It contains a large number of political questions and a veritable census of demographic ones, most of which are usefully repeated at each election, allowing for comparisons over time. Its sample sizes (2508 in 2023) are a bit on the low side for analysis of some of the cohorts, but its strength is in its breadth of content and repetition across the decades.

Late last year, as after every election, the AES team released a report, some datasets and various accessories. Its trends paper, in particular, has fascinating graphs showing (in some cases) dramatic changes in attitudes on immigration, abortion, the republic, attitudes towards democracy and other topics.

But its huge weakness, all but fatal, lies in the fact that, as its website puts it, the AES is conducted “post-election.” Respondents completed the 2022 survey, for example, between 24 May and 30 September, an average of thirty-two days after the election.

Among the findings given in the forty-page 2022 report is one that received substantial media coverage: “Anthony Albanese was evaluated more favourably than any political party leader since Kevin Rudd in 2007, scoring 5.3 on a zero to ten popularity scale.” This is the relevant graph:

But we know that’s not really how Australians saw the opposition leader at the time of the election, and nor is it what the publicly released polling said. The most popular leader on either side since 2007? You only have to go back to the surveys from the 2019 campaign to find a party leader more popular than Albanese: Scott Morrison. Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 was also rated more highly, even scoring a few net positive results (approval greater than disapproval) during the campaign (something Albanese never did). Julia Gillard in 2010 provides another counter-example.

And the AES’s report itself, in a summary of the Morrison government’s final term, describes the Labor leader entering the campaign in a “not exceptionally popular or inspiring” way.

Beneath the report’s headline, “popular” turns out to mean how much the leader is liked, as in “using a scale from zero to ten, please show how much you like or dislike the party leaders.” That’s a slightly different question from satisfaction and approval; so might that be true of Albanese? Contemporaneous data on this specific question are much scarcer, but what I could find also jarringly contradict the AES.

A Newspoll of “leaders’ character traits” published in March 2022, around ten weeks before the election, had 51 per cent finding Albanese “likeable.” According to Newspoll’s chart, which went back to 2015, that was a much lower proportion than the 68 per cent who said the same about Malcolm Turnbull six weeks before the 2016 poll. Even Bill Shorten managed a higher score in May 2016 of 57 per cent.

Yet in the AES graph above, Turnbull (2016) languishes five spots below Albanese (2022). Could Turnbull have become so much less liked between late May and 2 July? Could Albanese have dramatically grown in likeability during his campaign? Anything is theoretically possible, but the best evidence — satisfaction/approval ratings taken during the campaigns — didn’t show a dramatic rise or fall for either man.

The much more likely reason for Turnbull’s low spot on the AES’s graph is, again, the fact that the survey was conducted after — an average of thirty-eight days after — the last person voted. The 2016 election result, which was significantly worse for Turnbull’s government than was widely expected, provoked a rather bitter election-night speech about Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign. It also set the Liberal leadership hares running, generated universal adverse press coverage and had some in the wider Liberal movement (think Sky After Dark) calling for his head. From then until his demise a little over two years later Turnbull was under pressure — and behaved like it.

This was the prime minister respondents were scoring — just as Albanese’s relatively high “like” score can’t be disentangled from his election success and subsequent popularity in office.

The AES’s retrospectivity affects not just leaders’ ratings but also many other questions probing respondents’ attitudes to issues that might help explain the election outcome. It even includes a question about when respondents made up their minds whom to vote for.

I believe the timing pollutes the responses, rendering much of the AES’s data all but unusable. It’s such a shame given the expertise and expense and skill of the people involved, and the hours they put in. But as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, no one associated with the study believes the timing matters. And nor, presumably, do most of the dozens of academics who analyse the data and present these findings at conferences and in refereed papers in journals.

The sheer length of the questionnaire presents challenges. It skews the sample to people who are willing to go through the arduous process — namely, those who are particularly interested in politics. Attitudes to elite institutions (like the university whose name appears on the survey) might influence people’s decision to participate: only 2.1 per cent of 2022’s respondents said they voted for One Nation or the United Australia Party, for example, which is less than a quarter of the actual 9.1 per cent at the election.

This is probably unavoidable for a long-form survey like this, and in theory weighting (which they do, using actual election results as one of the ingredients, and provide in a separate field) should ameliorate much of it. But the regular pollsters, with a less demanding workload for respondents, probably obtain more representative raw data.

Then there are two long-term, corporate habits of presentation in the various AES reports that are at least in theory fixable.

One is the definitiveness with which the findings are presented. The very first in last year’s report provides a perfect illustration. It reads: “A majority of voters (53 per cent) cast their ballots based on policy issues, down from 66 per cent in 2019” and “just 11 per cent did so based on the party leaders.”

Now, call me difficult, call me pedantic, but deriving such firmly stated conclusions about voters’ intentions from their multiple-choice responses to the question “In deciding how you would vote in the election, which was most important to you?” (available answers: “The party leaders,” “The policy issues,” “The candidates in your electorate” or “The parties taken as a whole”) is absurd, even leaving aside the timing issue.

Many people like to think they’re rationally deciding their vote on policy matters but are actually driven by emotion, tribal loyalty, resentment or just the vibe. We can probably all agree that a healthy economy is, all things being equal, more conducive to re-election than an unhealthy one. On the other hand, longevity can prove an insurmountable obstacle for any incumbent. Neither of these dynamics can be captured in that question. We’ve all met people who always vote for a particular party but justify it by referencing something else. The campaigners, if they’re doing their jobs right, are influencing voters in fleeting, subliminal ways.

And what about those who just reckoned that after nearly nine years of this government it wouldn’t hurt to give the other side a go? Humans are deeply fallible when it comes to understanding, let alone elucidating, their own motivations. There’s a reason why many pollsters have psychology degrees.

So, the AES reckons that in 2022 most people’s votes were largely driven by the parties’ and candidates’ policies. The believability of that might depend on what we mean by “policies.” Does it, for example, include perceptions of the fruits of past policies, such as those of Labor’s last stint in office, 2007–13?

Now, asking the question itself is not without value. The relevant 1996–2022 graph in the trends paper is worth a look — the “policy” line is ridiculously high, but the interest is in the fluctuations. (The two peaks are at the 1998 “GST election” and 2019.)

Changing the wording to “a majority of voters… claimed…” and moving the finding down the list to deprioritise its significance would have been much less misleading. And in the second finding, in fact — “The most important issues in the election identified by voters included…” — the words I’ve italicised make the statement much more defensible.

My complaint here isn’t about a few missing words in one finding. This mode of presentation is a key feature of the AES across its thirty-five years, and comes from an ingrained inability to acknowledge human complexity, both individual and collective. It flows through all the AES reports and associated papers. (Political scientist Murray Goot covered a lot of this in a strongly worded review of a book based on AES findings a decade ago.)

It even turns out, according to the AES, that you can use its data to calculate the value of various drivers of the election outcome. An example from 2019 is that “[b]ased on… voter responses, it is estimated that the net effect of leadership [Morrison versus Shorten] on the vote was 4 per cent against Labor.” This is calculated by taking the proportion who nominated “The party leaders” as the key factor in the question mentioned above, splitting them up by whom they said they voted for, and applying them to the actual election results.

The arithmetic was not repeated in 2022, and giving it a go myself I could see why: it gives Labor an advantage that rounds to zero, which is surprising if you’re dealing with a face-off between the most and least popular leaders since 2007. The closest we get is “With Anthony Albanese as party leader, Labor attracted more votes based on leadership than in the 2016 and 2019 elections.”

I don’t believe it is possible to quantify leaders’ influence on votes. (Should we try, for example, to account for the fact that any other leader might not have made Shorten’s decision to take a big policy suite to the 2019 election?) But if there is a way, this ain’t it. And across the decades calculations of this nature abound.

The other bad habit of the AES is a tendency to write for media headlines.

Political journalists and commentators have an awful tendency to cast (a) the latest election result and (b) the latest opinion poll as representing the new normal, as how voters henceforth will behave. You can observe it today, fuelled by the Aston by-election; these voting snapshots are assumed to showcase patterns as they will always be, and the prognosis for whichever side lost the last (by-)election (and is trailing in the polls) is dire.

Last year’s general election, the first Labor has won in more than a decade (and since 2007 if we’re talking about majority wins), suddenly became evidence of the Coalition’s inability to ever again form government — and here, says the AES, are the reasons. That’s despite the fact that these supposedly fatal electoral drivers didn’t prevent the Coalition from winning the previous three contests.

This Sydney Morning Herald article, headlined “Young Coalition Voters an Endangered Species,” could’ve been published today but is in fact dated September 2009, when the Rudd government was still riding high. AES data back then showed that the Coalition faced intractable demographic hurdles, namely a lack of support among young voters. This was a popular theme at the time, but we know what happened soon after, beginning with 2010’s tied election. Those seemingly insurmountable demographic changes were somehow surmounted, and then it was Labor that faced an existential challenge, due to (other) demographic developments.

In 2023 we’re back with the Coalition at death’s door — because of young people again, and this time specifically “millennials” (voters born between 1981 and 1996). In some cases the individuals singing from this song sheet were only two years ago administering last rites for Labor.

We expect data nerds and academics to be constrained and sober in their analysis, not to be permanently trapped in the present and not to succumb to the hot take. But sadly it ain’t always so.

The 2022 AES report makes quite a big deal of the Coalition’s deteriorating support among young people. “Between 2016 and 2022, millennials record a large decline in Coalition support, falling from 38 per cent to 25 per cent in just two election cycles,” it reports. “Changes of this magnitude and this pace are rare in Australian electoral history.”

I’ve reproduced its graphs below, and you can see that the starting point of 2016 for millennials (middle bottom) wasn’t chosen at random. It was a year the AES found to be exceptionally good for the Coalition among this age group, better than at any time since 2004.

Now, these rather gimmicky age cohorts are no doubt used for popular digestibility. In particular, millennials’ membership has not been constant over the graph; those born in 1996, for example, didn’t join the electoral roll until 2014. And the sub-samples are rather small — just 251 people aged twenty-five to forty-one participated in last year’s survey, implying about a 6 per cent error margin. But let us accept that these figures truly reflect the relevant component of the full electorate.

That 2016 election did exhibit some unusual swings, with the Labor opposition doing very well in low- to middle-income urban electorates, even snatching the hitherto bellwether seat of Lindsay, while the Liberals shored up their wealthy safe electorates. The persona of the ultra-rich, urbane and progressive prime minister Turnbull must have played a part, and perhaps millennials disproportionately warmed to him. That’s interesting, for sure. But to present these figures as a neutral point in the data is simply cherrypicking.

Further down, less sensationally, the report notes that “millennials entered the electorate in the early 2000s with about 35 per cent of this generation supporting the Coalition, a level which has now fallen to 25 per cent.” Is that a big drop? The “Coalition’s historic low levels of support among younger voters” in 2022 can’t be interpreted meaningfully on its own. There are two crucial pieces of context that should be taken into account.

The first is the Coalition’s rock-bottom primary vote in 2022. That 35.7 per cent was the smallest since the formation of the Liberal Party in 1944. Record low support in the aggregate should be expected to translate to low support across most cohorts; there should really only be a sub-headline when one group of people deviates significantly from that shift. Does the AES show a bigger drop among millennials than among the rest of the electorate since 2001?

It does a bit. The ten-point decline since 2001 sits within an overall drop of 7.2 per cent in the Coalition primary vote, from 42.9. A 2.5 to 3 per cent difference (we are subtracting a rounded number from an unrounded one, and giving “2.8 per cent” as the outcome does go against my grain) is still worthy of note. (A trend line over those dots produces something a bit smaller, around 2 per cent.) So, on this evidence, the last two decades have seen an outsized drop in Coalition support among young people. But what happens if the Liberals choose another Turnbull-like leader?

The second missing piece in the gloom and woe about the Coalition’s irretrievably dire situation is that in 2022 Labor’s national primary vote was also historically tiny; at 32.6 per cent it was even smaller than the Coalition’s (it was this fact which made the “net effect of leadership” calculation unpublishable) and was Labor’s nadir since at least the 1930s. Surely if we insist on using primary votes as indicators of electability, this can’t be ignored.

Under our federal compulsory (full) preferential voting system, preferences from other candidates produced a two-party-preferred Labor win of 52.1 to 47.9. The Coalition’s 47.9 was not by past measures spectacularly bad; not as low as in the last three elections (2007, 1983 and 1972) that turfed them out of office. But its current lower-house presence is proportionally smaller than at any time since (again) the Liberal Party came into being, and that’s because nine of the electorates in which it defeated Labor in two-party-preferred terms were won by an independent or minor party instead. That’s a function of its low primary vote. But Labor also missed out on seats in this way — seven, in fact — and that’s because of its low primary vote.

That the AES deals only with primary votes is increasingly problematic, although it’s not clear how to fix the issue. But Labor’s historically small primary vote must, by definition, also translate to splash-friendly depths in some cohorts. On the AES age numbers one could craft a terrifying tale about “boomers” and the “greatest generation,” and to an extent generation X drifting away from Labor. (The more popular one until last year had to do with lack of support among a shrinking working class.) Except, of course, Labor formed government, and so analysis like this doesn’t fit the narrative.

The big story about Australian electoral behaviour is, or should be, the continuing decline of primary votes for both major parties. It’s the two-party system that is under existential pressure, not just whoever happens to be in opposition today, and the record-sized crossbench is the most obvious symptom.

Labor is currently in office. One day it won’t be. One day also Peter Dutton won’t be Liberal leader, and the opinion polls might start to look more competitive. Commentators, finding themselves on the other side of the fishbowl, will simply internalise and recite the current vibe. Academics, I hope, won’t.

Analysing election results is serious stuff. When we write and say things, we should really mean them.  It’s better to remain silent than announce a conclusion from a piece of work that ticks all the statistics boxes but rests on hopelessly flawed assumptions.

The individuals involved in the AES are smart, well-credentialled and statistically literate. Most of the data they collect, which don’t purport to deal with the hows and whys of the election results, make for excellent observation and, in their comprehensiveness and multi-decade extent, are unique. The problems lie in some institutional practices

The AES isn’t alone in the academic world in producing statistics-based work in this glib genre. But it does run a big, important poll, widely used, whose post-election aspect is a big flaw. If its personnel found a way to have their surveys completed before election night the value of their data would increase immensely. Not claiming to quantify the unquantifiable with simplistic calculations, and avoiding playing to the media zeitgeist, would improve their reports. •

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The elections for local councils didn’t cover the whole of Britain. There were no contests in London, Wales or Scotland. But the elections were sufficiently widespread for a clear picture to emerge of the country’s mood six months after Sunak became PM and tried to steady a ship of state that had almost run aground under his two predecessors, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The picture is of the Conservatives heading for defeat at the next general election, likely to be held late next year.

The results showed something else too. Britain’s anti-Conservative majority is divided. Smart targeting by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and tactical voting by savvy citizens can help to overcome this; but it remains touch-and-go whether the next general election will produce a clear Labour victory or a hung parliament, a minority Labour government and a second election within a year or so.

Australian readers will recognise the issue — and, for progressive voters, the solution. If Britain replaced its age-old first-past-the-post system with Australia’s preferential system, the Conservatives would be heading for opposition with no early chance or reprieve.

Let’s fill the picture in. More than 8000 councillors were elected on Thursday. The Conservatives, defending 3500 seats, lost more than 1000. But the gains were spread around the Tories’ opponents: Labour gained 500 in round numbers, the Liberal Democrats 400, the Greens 250.

In a general election, fragmentation would be less. Right now, the Greens have only one member of Britain’s 650-seat parliament; at the most they might gain one or two extra next year. More likely is that they will win a million-plus votes in seats that they will come nowhere near winning. In closely fought seats between the Conservatives and Labour, or between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, these Greens votes could save a Tory from defeat, by denying the local Labour or Lib Dem challenger the few extra votes they need to win.

Britain’s parties, and some but not all voters, understand this. On Thursday, tactical voting was widespread. That is, many Labour supporters were happy to vote Lib Dem where this was the best way to defeat the Conservatives locally — and Lib Dem supporters returned the compliment in tight Conservative–Labour contests. In a way, many British voters applied the principle of preferential voting to a first-past-the-post electoral system.

But many didn’t — and many would stick to their preferred progressive party in a general election even if this meant local victory for the Conservatives. To the extent that this happens, the Tories will continue to reap the benefit of having a near monopoly of the right-of-centre vote, while the left-of-centre vote continues to be divided.

To this we must add a further complicating factor. Half a century ago, Britain’s elections were essentially simple. Blue-collar manual workers voted Labour, while white-collar office workers and professionals voted Conservative. Not everyone, of course: politics is never that simple. But it was a pretty good approximation of Britain’s electorate. As in much of the industrialised world, all that has changed. Economies have changed, education has changed, jobs have changed — and party loyalties have changed.

Social class is no longer an indicator of how Britons vote. Age and education now matter more than anything else. Voters under thirty with a degree seldom vote Conservative these days. People over sixty who left school at sixteen seldom vote anything else.

The 2016 Brexit referendum, when Britain voted to leave the European Union, accelerated this process. Many lifelong working-class Labour supporters voted for Brexit and then, in 2019, switched to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives to “get Brexit done” — that is, complete the withdrawal negotiations with the European Union. That, and the fact that Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, an uncompromising, lifelong and utterly unelectable enemy of capitalism, ensured the biggest Conservative victory in 2019 since Margaret Thatcher’s heyday back in the 1980s.

Labour turned to Keir Starmer as its leader — a decent, public-spirited man with strong progressive values but light on ideology. He has asserted his leadership by, among other things, expelling Corbyn from Labour’s parliamentary ranks, following evidence of Corbyn’s anti-Semitism (a charge, it must be said, that Corbyn rejects). Whatever else happens, the man who led Labour to catastrophic defeat at the last election won’t be able to stand as a candidate for the party at the next one.

But Starmer’s larger problem remains: how to reunite the two blocks of voters that have combined to give Labour its past election victories: manual workers on average and below-average incomes; and liberal-minded graduates committed to progressive reform. In the Brexit referendum, the former group voted strongly to leave the European Union, while the latter group voted even more strongly to remain.

These issues are part of a wider and deeper debate about the future of Britain and the social basis of political loyalties. But Labour doesn’t have the luxury of waiting five or ten years for this debate to be settled. It must decide before the next election where it stands on a range of issues, of which the trickiest is Britain’s relations with the European Union.

Most (though not all) people now agree that (a) Brexit was a mistake, and has been bad for Britain’s economy, but (b) there is no realistic prospect of rejoining the EU anytime soon. So what should Labour do? In particular, is there some way it can win back the keen Leavers who used to be such a large part of its electoral base, while holding on to the pro-European graduates who never wanted Brexit in the first place?

Starmer’s answer has been to be as vague and say as little as possible, beyond making nebulous promises of a more constructive relationship between London and Brussels. His hope is that pro-Brexit ex-Labour voters will be happy enough with this to return to their old political home, while the younger, radical graduates will be so determined to see the back of the Tories that they will hold their pro-European noses and vote Labour wherever this will help remove Tory MPs.

Which brings us back to Thursday’s results and the fragmentation of the anti-Conservative vote. Part of the reason for the gains made by the Liberal Democrats and Greens is that they are now more clearly pro-European than Labour. Maybe Starmer is right to believe that pro-Europe Britons will vote Labour where it matters in a general election. But not all of them will.

The warning for Labour from the local elections is that in just enough seats (and in the absence of preferential voting), just enough anti-Brexit anti-Tories will withhold their support from Labour to enable the Conservatives to retain a number of seats they would otherwise lose. This is why the Conservatives may not win the next election at all, but Labour may struggle to win it outright.

As newly crowned King and constitutional monarch, Charles III must be relieved that this issue is, to invert the old saying, below his pay grade. •

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The first of those inquiries, the royal commission into the former federal government’s “amateurish, rushed, disastrous and ethically indefensible” robodebt scheme, is undoubtedly the more consequential of the two. The scheme involved large sums of money, affected significant numbers of vulnerable people with sometimes fatal consequences and — despite politicians’ efforts to lay the blame on public service advisers — left an ineradicable taint of corruption on all of those involved.

The second inquiry, the Operation Daintree probe by the Victorian Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission, or IBAC, concerned the Andrews government’s awarding of a $1.2 million training contract to an entity controlled by the Health Workers Union not long before the 2018 state election. Compared with robodebt, it appears small beer; indeed, premier Daniel Andrews has shrugged off the inquiry’s recent report as a merely “educational” account covering long-ago events and containing “no findings against anyone.”

Integrity experts think otherwise. Griffith University’s A.J. Brown described the premier’s response as a “serious mischaracterisation” of the report, while a former judge, Stephen Charles, KC, declared that the facts found by IBAC “amount on Transparency International’s definition to findings of clear corruption.”

In its present form, IBAC can’t make such findings. The corruption body is constrained by the necessity of identifying an indictable criminal offence or narrowly defined common law crimes such as bribery, perverting the course of justice, and misconduct in public office. It is precisely this higher bar that allowed Andrews to spin the narrative on this occasion, as he also did in relation to the “red shirts” scandal and other instances of “grey corruption.” His success in so doing is reflected in one of the nicknames he has acquired, Teflon Dan.

For IBAC, the evident breach of standards reflected the centralisation of power under the premier’s watch and a “significant erosion” of ministerial accountability, a conclusion equally relevant to the robodebt fiasco. The two scandals might be different in scale and seriousness, but I’d argue they were similar in kind — and were fuelled by similar changes within the parties, similar changes in what is expected of leaders, and a similar spread and intensification of partisan advisory structures now evident in every state and territory.

The class and community coalitions and party loyalties that once sustained the major political parties evaporated in the late twentieth century. The smaller, professionalised party organisations that emerged in their place relied instead on their leader to articulate a message, often mediated by polling, focus groups and marketing research, to “win the vote.”

Leaders have been given more resources — including partisan staff in their private office — with corresponding high expectations of their performance. If the party base, a now-small group of true believers whose views increasingly diverge from the mainstream, isn’t satisfied, then conflict is likely within the party room. If the message doesn’t “play” (by building broad polling support or arresting decline) and colleagues become convinced that the leader can’t capture popular support, they are likely to attack.

Leaders who have failed to sell the message and resolve these contradictory demands have repeatedly been torn down in recent times. What can we learn from Morrison’s and Andrews’s contrasting experiences?

Morrison took office in precisely the circumstances I’ve described. The incumbent leader, Malcolm Turnbull, was challenged when he failed to contain the battles within the party room after trying to introduce a National Energy Guarantee. Peter Dutton triggered the challenge, but Morrison came through the middle and seized the leadership. He was able to contain early division by winning the vote at the 2019 election, not by proposing policy innovation but by negating everything Labor proposed under Bill Shorten. It was a highly successful exercise in communication and marketing.

Having won that miracle election, Morrison set about gaining control of the public service and amplifying the centrality of his prime ministerial office. But once he neutered the public service and ensured ministerial minders could interfere wherever they chose, he struggled to find larger objectives, save for the AUKUS deal in which, arguably, he was not the lead player.

He sought instead to manage the perception of events, thus exercising power without purpose. Dutton later conceded that the party had not “stood for any substantive policy formulation” during Morrison’s prime ministership. Since Tony Abbott was removed, he argued, “we allowed ourselves to be defined by our opponents.”

But Morrison’s preoccupation with control led him to entertain the remarkable delusion that the media and the opposition held him responsible for “every single thing that was going on, every drop of rain, every strain of the virus, everything that occurred over that period of time.” During the pandemic he secretly took on the additional portfolios he thought necessary to meet those expectations.

In doing this, Morrison displayed an extraordinary misunderstanding of his role, and of the necessity of distributed leadership imposed by cabinet conventions and responsible government. His view of his role helped explain the mindset that led to the Coalition’s defeat in 2022, with the “Morrison brand” tagged as a decisive negative factor and former Liberal leader John Howard admitting that “the absence of a program for the future… the absence of some kind of manifesto, hurt us very badly.”

Daniel Andrews has also been a controlling leader, but of a different stripe. Unlike Morrison, he was a policy activist from the first, with big projects in mind and always ready to front the press to insist on how and why they needed to be done.

Political scientist Paul Strangio has astutely summarised the characteristics that have enabled Andrews to succeed: a kind of electoral genius; a series of giant infrastructure projects that have reshaped the state and its economy; progressive and in some instances trailblazing social policy; and an ability to withstand the torrents of conservative criticism. The last of those skills bewilders and incenses his opponents but leaves them unable to lay a glove on him. Strangio also acknowledges that Andrews’s grip on the government and tactics for evading scrutiny and accountability have created a democratic deficit.

Where Morrison was the wannabe strong leader, hungry for power but with no strong sense of what to do with it, Andrews is the real thing. He believes his role is to make the tough decisions and he is ruthless in pursuing his objectives. Anyone who fails to fall into line is brutally excised from his executive and politically marginalised, with the late Jane Garrett, once seen as a possible future leader, the standout but far from only example.

If this is how Andrews deals with able colleagues, how likely are public servants to resist his or his staff’s impositions? The capacity of the Victorian premier’s office to intrude on conventional practice has been amplified by its growth under Andrews to something approaching four times the size he inherited when he took office.

Which brings us back to what Andrews has dismissed as relatively inconsequential: the recent IBAC report. Its findings of undue centralisation of power, improper process, inappropriate influence over and intimidation of public servants by the premier’s staff, and a significant erosion of ministerial responsibility drew on the testimony of former ministers Jill Hennessy and Jenny Mikakos, with the latter describing how Andrews’s office had “its tentacles everywhere.” Ministerial responsibility is meaningless, Hennessy observed, when “ministers are directed by the premier’s office about how to manage their departments.”

As political scientist Patrick Weller found in Don’t Tell the Prime Minister, his pioneering study of just such an episode during Howard’s time, staffers knew what the boss wanted and did whatever it took to make it happen — while carefully avoiding letting him know the inconvenient details. Thus, confronted with assertions about intimidation by premier’s office staff, Andrews can safely say that he was unaware of any pressure applied.

These are two different cases, but each of them involved a concentration of power and each was criticised during formal reviews in similar ways. Collective cabinet decision-making and ministerial responsibility had been overridden or subverted, due process and transparency had suffered, and accountability was unattainable.

It might be said that Morrison’s failure shows that the public notices when a democratic deficit emerges, and reacts accordingly. But what of Andrews’s longevity? Does his endurance show that the public is willing to forgive a lot if a leader does what is promised, notwithstanding dodgy deals on the margins? And could bigger problems flow from small democratic deficits?

The Liberal Party’s Victorian branch is heavily factionalised, torn between moderates, keen to adopt positions more attuned to demographic change and public opinion, and conservatives demanding a harder right-wing line. It has repeatedly been unable to persuade most Victorians that it is fit to govern. With no effective opposition, no one — aside from the hapless journalists Andrews has faced down for twelve years — is asking the hard questions.

The bigger danger for Victoria, as Paul Strangio has also intimated, is that Andrews, in bending the state to his will, might unwittingly be paving the way for what would effectively be a one-party state. The Westminster system assumes parties of government will be held to account by parties in opposition — and its breakdown would serve none of us well. •

The post What the leader wants appeared first on Inside Story.

As ever in Timor-Leste’s proportional system, a large number of parties — seventeen this time — are jostling for votes. The key contest will be between Fretilin and Xanana Gusmão’s CNRT, but whichever has the opportunity to assemble a majority is likely to need the help of one or more small parties. Following José Ramos-Horta’s election as president with CNRT backing last year, the elections are the chance for Gusmão’s party to return to government.

Since 2020 Timor-Leste has been governed by three parties — Fretilin, the smaller People’s Liberation Party, or PLP, and the youth-oriented KHUNTO — despite the latter two having formed part of CNRT’s winning coalition at the 2018 poll. That coalition collapsed in 2020, partly because the former president, Fretilin’s Francisco “Lú-Olo” Guterres, refused to install a number of CNRT ministers.

As part of a failed effort to force an early election in 2020, CNRT opposed its own coalition government’s budget. When the move backfired, Fretilin combined with the PLP and KHUNTO, allowing the PLP’s Taur Matan Ruak to continue as prime minister and forcing Gusmão’s CNRT into opposition.

Last year’s presidential election was widely seen as Gusmão’s first step back to power, with CNRT strongly supporting the successful campaign of Ramos-Horta, who won the run-off election easily with 62 per cent of the vote. That resounding victory certainly bodes well for CNRT, though some caution should be applied in equating the two campaigns.

The current government parties are running separately this year but recently announced a willingness to form a post-electoral coalition. With Fretilin’s vote around the 30 per cent mark in recent elections, the renewed combination would certainly be competitive. But the momentum from the 2022 presidential elections suggests CNRT’s support may be substantial, with such polls as do exist backing the sense of a mood for change after a difficult few years of pandemic, floods and economic contraction.

CNRT may need a comprehensive win at the polls, though, as it isn’t entirely clear who it might align with apart from the Democratic Party. (The minor party’s vote remains resilient, backed by solid district structures.) But victory has a way of bringing unexpected allies into the fold in proportional systems, attracted by the offer of ministries and influence. With seventeen parties registered and many new voters, unexpected entrants into parliament might be coaxed into a post-electoral alliance.

The lack of pre-electoral coalitions is one notable feature of this election. While Fretilin has always maintained that the most-voted party should be given the first chance to form government — a position that fostered pre-election coalitions while Fretilin’s Lú-Olo was president — Ramos-Horta made it clear in his first term as president (2007–12) that he will accept any post-electoral coalition that controls a majority in the parliament. The real horse-trading this year will thus take place after the poll.

Ramos-Horta’s election has moderated political tensions, with his middle-way style of leadership and inclination to consensus reducing the heat of political stand-offs. Despite the desire of his CNRT backers for an early election, he chose not to dissolve the current parliament before its full term was up. His second tenure as president has been marked, even more than his first, by a throwing open of the doors of the presidency to the wider public. This direct, personal touch demonstrably endears him to the people.

The 21 May election will be closely watched, and not only in Timor-Leste. At stake is nothing less than the young democracy’s economic future. Warnings of a looming “fiscal cliff” have intensified as the national Petroleum Fund approaches what could well be its final decade of solvency unless new funds from the Greater Sunrise oil and gas field start to flow in.

With the government’s annual budgets having exceeded sustainable calls on the fund for some years, everyone understands that Timor-Leste must diversify economically to promote new job-creating industries before the crunch hits. As prime minister, Gusmão championed the Tasi Mane oil and gas processing megaproject on Timor’s south coast as the solution, rejecting the alternative of sending the raw product to existing facilities in Darwin. Tasi Mane would mean greater returns to the nation, he argued, despite the intimidating upfront capital costs.

Though the current government acknowledges the need for economic diversification and developed a Covid recovery plan based partly on promoting new job-creating industries, it has not articulated a comprehensive plan for Greater Sunrise. It changed the leadership of key petroleum agencies and stalled on any major investment in the project, effectively putting it on the backburner, but offered no clear alternative to Gusmão’s Tasi Mane vision.

In part, this is a testimony to Gusmão’s charismatic legitimacy. It also reflects his success in tying the successful maritime boundary dispute with Australia to the separate issue of how the remaining oil wealth should best be managed. The nationalist enthusiasm associated with the victory over Australia has made outright challenges to the Tasi Mane megaproject politically difficult for his opponents.

The other noteworthy features of the 2023 election are generational. While the birthrate has slowed and Timor-Leste’s median age has risen from eighteen to twenty-one in recent years, a large percentage of the electorate will be voting for the first time next month, making the results less predictable than they might be. Parties will be at pains to offer a suite of youth policies, including new job and training opportunities for each year’s large number of school graduates, whose share of the population is far greater than in countries like Australia (where the median age is thirty-eight).

Linked to the pressing need for job opportunities is rising concern at the scale and activities of Timor-Leste’s martial arts groups. Open conflicts on Dili’s streets have become an increasing feature of news bulletins. With KHUNTO’s strong base among group members, and another party with similar links, Os Verdes (the Greens), entering this year’s election fray, local NGOs are worried by their rising political influence. Their capacity to cause social unrest is strongly dependent on national economic performance, with youth unemployment a key driver of martial arts activity.

At the other end of the demographic spectrum, and even more significantly, next month’s election is also likely to be the last to feature the key leaders of the 1975 generation, which has dominated politics since the restoration of independence in 2002. Gusmão will turn eighty in 2026, and other major figures of that generation are not far behind him. As most observers have noted, the transition to a new generation of leaders will have to be well managed to maintain political stability.

As the campaigning commences, the implications of a possible CNRT victory in May are clear: the Tasi Mane megaproject would again be front and centre, with implications for the relationship with Australia, which continues to argue that the decision lies with still-sceptical commercial joint venture partners. Meanwhile, recent political developments in Australia have made the option of processing in Darwin a more vexed one.

With final election of the 1975 generation dawning, the links between economic sustainability, the “youth bulge” and Timor-Leste’s long-term political stability are clear, making this election — and the government that follows — highly significant for the country’s future. •

The post Timor-Leste’s once-in-a-generation election appeared first on Inside Story.

As the party’s former assistant state secretary, Tony Barry, put it ruefully on Saturday night: “The Victorian Liberal Party is where hope goes to die.” Decades of infighting and election failure have hollowed out its membership, leaving it open to branch stackers and reactionary nutters. The Coalition as a whole has less than a third of the seats in the Legislative Assembly and barely a quarter of Victorian seats in the House of Reps.

Unquestionably, Victoria has become a stronghold of the left. But these days, so is Western Australia, and so is South Australia. Federally, so is Tasmania. Labor is back in power in New South Wales — and don’t mention the ACT.

In fact, if you look at voting over recent federal elections, Victoria, along with New South Wales and South Australia, is among the three states closest to the centre of the Australian political spectrum. The odd state out isn’t Victoria. It is Peter Dutton’s home state of Queensland.

Australian Electoral Commission figures

At last year’s federal election, the Coalition won 70 per cent of Queensland’s lower house seats but just 30 per cent of seats across the rest of Australia. Peter Dutton doesn’t need to go to Melbourne to be in alien territory; he’s in it as soon as he leaves his home state.

The Coalition is now down to ten federal seats in Victoria, but it also has just five in Western Australia, three in South Australia, two in Tasmania and none in the ACT or the Northern Territory. Even in New South Wales it is down to sixteen seats, or one in three.

The Coalition’s problem is not Victoria, it is Australia — or at least Australia minus Queensland. To write off a loss like this as due to being in hostile territory would be a huge, self-indulgent blunder that could only damage the Coalition. As the election results showed clearly, it has lost support in every other mainland state.

Yes, it would help if it could fix up the problems of the Victorian Liberal Party. But that can happen only if the federal and state Liberals use their time in opposition to rethink their policies — constructively, to ensure they are “sound and progressive,” as Sir Robert Menzies urged long ago.

This is renovation time. Both the Coalition parties need to remodel themselves into the kind of party that sound and progressive Victorians would want to be part of: the Victorian Nationals have shown the way. And that would similarly reinvigorate both parties in the rest of Australia. The Queensland LNP can’t be allowed to have a veto on federal Liberal and National policies.

Maybe only a Queenslander can explain one puzzling aspect of that state’s electoral behaviour. In Victoria and most other states, people tend to vote the same way at federal and state elections. But a lot of Queenslanders clearly vote different ways.

The Coalition has won a majority of Queensland’s lower house seats at nine of the last ten federal elections. At state level, though, it has won only two of the last ten. In the past thirty years, Labor has  spent more time governing Queensland than it has governing Victoria.

Labor has won all three of Queensland’s most recent state elections, averaging 51.8 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote. Yet it has won only a handful of seats at federal elections, and just 44.5 per cent of the votes.

And that’s not new: it’s been a recurring theme in Queensland’s history, including during Labor’s long twenty-five-year reign from 1934 to 1957. Some Queenslander, please explain. •

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If so, he should have been playing on his home ground in Aston.  These were the outer suburbs of a generation or two ago, in Melbourne’s respectable southeast. Today it’s middle-income by Melbourne standards, but with fewer young university graduates than in the rest of town, and more older married couples.

Aston has more Anglo- and Chinese-Australians than in most of Melbourne — yet fewer migrants in total: 40 per cent of Astonians have two Australian-born parents. The 2021 census found 37.5 per cent of its residents are aged fifty or over, compared with 32 per cent in the rest of Melbourne.

Yet this normally safe Liberal seat, against expectations, rejected Dutton’s party and became the first seat in a hundred years to use a by-election to swing from opposition to government.

Dutton had flown down for the Libs’ election party on Saturday night, presumably because he expected the Liberals to win the seat. Albanese stayed away from Labor’s party, presumably because he expected Labor to lose it. So did I in my preview, and so did the bookies.

Other Liberals have privately raised their concerns over Dutton’s outer-suburban strategy. The Coalition now needs to win back nineteen seats to regain a majority in the House. There simply aren’t enough Labor outer-suburban seats within cooee of being winnable. The emphatic rejection of the party by Aston voters surely underlines the absurdity of its leaders continuing with business as usual rather than coming to terms with how the Australian mainstream has irrevocably shifted course.

Aston wasn’t a defeat, it was a rout. Every single polling booth swung to Labor. In 2019, the seat had the highest Liberal vote in Melbourne. This weekend, the Liberals won just three of the thirty-two suburban booths, one pre-poll centre and (very marginally) the postal vote. With just a residue of postal votes to come, the swing was 6.4 per cent. Combining it with last year’s election, the swing against the Liberals since 2019 will end up being around 13.5 per cent.

It was no show of support for Dutton’s strategy of defeating Labor by taking back the outer suburbs.

Dutton has taken responsibility, as he should, but also implicitly blamed the new moderate state Liberal leader John Pesutto, who during the campaign tried to expel far-right MP Moira Deeming from the state parliamentary party after she figured prominently in an anti-transgender protest attended by a masked group who gave the Nazi salute outside Parliament House. Internal party opposition forced Pesutto to water down Deeming’s penalty to a nine-month suspension, but was Dutton implying that his state counterpart should have just ignored the issue?

Yes, Victoria is difficult for the Liberals: the party has been moving right while Victorians, like most Australians, have moved left. When John Howard won power in 1996, the party held nineteen of Victoria’s seats in the House of Reps. Now it holds just seven.

The Howard and post-Howard generations have seen a steady loss of Liberal seats at federal level and what seems to be permanent opposition at state level. In Melbourne and provincial centres, it has ceased to be a party most Victorians recognise as theirs.

Even Howard’s 1996 victory saw the party lose Bruce and Isaacs, never to return. Bendigo went to Labor in 1998 and Ballarat in 2001. McEwen went when Fran Bailey retired in 2010, and Indi when Cathy McGowan pulled off one of the iconic victories in modern electioneering, running as a community independent against Liberal frontbencher Sophie Mirabella.

Yet the Liberals still had fourteen seats going into the 2019 election. Four years later, half of them have gone. Labor won Corangamite and Dunkley in 2019, and the 2022 wipe-out saw Goldstein and Kooyong fall to independents Zoe Daniel and Monique Ryan, while Labor took Chisholm and Higgins. And now Aston.

(In every one of those seven seats, it’s worth noting, the new MPs are women, as were most of their Liberal opponents. You think there is equal opportunity for men seeking selection as Labor, Greens or teal candidates for winnable seats in Victoria? I’d like to believe it, but the evidence suggests otherwise.)

The Liberals now hold virtually no territory within fifteen kilometres of the city. Their seven remaining seats are made up of five in outer Melbourne (Casey, Menzies, Deakin, La Trobe and Flinders) and two in the bush (the southwest Gippsland seat of Monash, formerly McMillan, and the Western District seat of Wannon). And all but La Trobe and Flinders are now very marginal.

A quick diversion: we need to call out some widely circulating fake news, spread by Labor supporters, which has been reported as fact by the ABC and the Age. The source is the Australian Electoral Commission, no less. You’ve probably heard or read it: the Liberals now hold only two seats in Melbourne — because only two Liberal seats are classified by the AEC as “metropolitan.”

We’re entitled to assume that the AEC knows what it’s talking about, and usually it does. That’s why it’s inexplicable that its electoral classifications are so wrong as to be ridiculous.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics, not the AEC, defines our urban boundaries. Five seats whose territory and people are wholly or overwhelmingly in greater Melbourne, as defined by the ABS, are defined by the AEC as “rural” or “provincial.” Three of them are held by Liberals.

Readers who know Melbourne can judge. These are the five seats, with their AEC definition, and their main voting centres:

Casey (AEC: rural): Lilydale, Chirnside Park, Healesville.

Flinders (AEC: rural): Rosebud, Mornington, Hastings.

Hawke (AEC: provincial): Melton, Sunbury, Bacchus Marsh.

La Trobe (AEC: provincial): Pakenham, Berwick.

McEwen (AEC: rural): Wandong, Doreen, Mernda, Wallan, Diamond Creek.

Yet other “rural” seats in Victoria are real rural seats: Gippsland, Indi, Mallee and so on. The other provincial seats are real provincial seats, covering Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong.

Do the AEC, the ABC and the Age really believe that places like Lilydale, Mornington, Melton, Pakenham and Wandong are not part of Melbourne, but belong in country Victoria? Get real, folks.

“Our brand has suffered terribly in Victoria,” Peter Dutton told reporters on Saturday night, and he is not wrong. The last time the Coalition won a majority of federal seats in Victoria was in 1996. Labor and Greens have won a majority in Victoria at the last nine federal elections. In that time the Coalition has gone from holding 55 per cent of Victorian seats to barely 25 per cent. To state the obvious, it cannot win back power without making big gains in Victoria.

But how? Dutton’s approach seems to be that there’s no need for him or the Coalition to change its brand; they just have to wait for Victorians to come around to their point of view. Last year’s election loss was a golden opportunity for him, as leader of the Liberal right, to unite the Coalition in facing up to all the key policy failures that cost it office: climate change, integrity, alienation of women, and a wide range of social justice issues.

The election of David Littleproud as Nationals leader gave him a potential partner for such an exercise, which would have been beyond Barnaby Joyce. And yet, on every significant issue that has come before parliament, or is about to, Dutton has chosen to be the voice of reaction: he doesn’t want to tackle climate change seriously, doesn’t want an integrity commission, doesn’t want a step forward on Aboriginal issues, and so on. He doesn’t want the Liberals and Nationals to move back into the Australian mainstream.

The Liberals like to call themselves the party of Menzies. After their federal election loss last year, the great man’s daughter, Heather Henderson, suggested in the Canberra Times that the party’s current leaders should study what her father actually said and wrote. I suspect she had passages like this in mind, from the Canberra convention which re-formed the Liberal Party in October 1944:

We have, partly by our own fault, and partly by some extremely clever propaganda by the Labour Party, been put in the position of appearing to resist political and economic progress. In other words, on far too many questions we have found our role to be simply that of the man who says “no”…

There is no room in Australia for a party of reaction. There is no useful place for a policy of negation.

In similar vein, Menzies wrote in retirement that while some, including close colleagues such as Arthur Fadden, believed “the duty of an opposition is to oppose”:

I do not share that simple belief. The duty of an opposition… [is] to oppose selectively. No government is always wrong on everything… To attack indiscriminately is to risk public opinion, which has a reserve of fairness not always understood.

An opposition must always remember that it is the alternative government… a quick debating point scored in parliament against some government measure will be a barren victory unless you are confident that, in office, you would not be compelled to do, substantially, what the government is doing.

I found that opposition provided… an obligation to rethink policies, to look forward, to devise a body of ideas at once sound and progressive… All of this, essentially work for the study [at the desk, that is], had to be done while the normal duties of active and campaigning politics were performed. It was not easy, and never will be. But it has to be done…

The duty of an opposition which wants to move over to the Treasury benches is to be constructive, judicious and different.

In another memoir, he explained why he and his colleagues decided not to name the new party the Conservative party, as in Britain:

We took the name “Liberal” because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights, his enterprise, and rejecting the Socialist panacea.

That is what Menzies meant the Liberal Party to be — and what it was, more or less, for a long time. But the Liberal Party of today has become the “party of reaction” Menzies warned against.

We keep reading that Peter Dutton in private is not the blunt hardliner he appears to be in public. If so, as Menzies said, opposition is a wonderful opportunity to sit down in your study, rethink policies, look forward to the challenges Australia will have to face, and devise “sound and progressive” ways to deal with them. Just as Richard Nixon (one of Menzies’s greatest fans, incidentally) was able to break with longstanding US policy and recognise China precisely because he was a right-wing Republican.

This defeat is Peter Dutton’s opportunity, his moment to define himself to Australians. As Menzies said, it’s not easy, particularly while he is juggling the issues of each day and each hour. But it must be done.

We could remind him that there is another record in Australian politics that has lasted a hundred years. The last person who became opposition leader after his party lost office and then led the party back into office was Andrew Fisher, in 1914. And Fisher himself was the outgoing prime minister, and had lost office by just one seat.

Too many opposition leaders have failed because they ignored Menzies’s advice and become simply “the man who says ‘no.’” Peter Dutton is the latest. In that position, he is unelectable, and either he or his colleagues are going to have to do something about it.

Finally, a postscript on the NSW election. Since counting stopped on polling night, the two-party-preferred vote in the sixteen closest Labor vs Liberal seats has shifted the Liberals’ way by an astonishing 1.5 per cent. Terrigal and Ryde, two seats the ABC called as Labor wins on polling night, are now certain or probable Liberal wins. Miranda has gone from a narrow Labor lead to a comfortable Liberal hold. And the biggest swing of all has been in Kiama, where ex-Liberal independent Gareth Ward has come from 48.1 per cent on polling night to 51.4 per cent now.

This reflects a growing tendency for Liberal voters to skip the booths on election day and vote pre-poll or postal. The democracy sausage is primarily an icon of the left. The overall swing to Labor will end up closer to 5 per cent than the 6.5 per cent swing estimated on polling night. And that’s why Labor won’t have a majority in the new Assembly.

The Coalition will probably have thirty-six seats in the Assembly, down ten seats from before the election. That was a defeat, not a rout. It will start this term with a base strong enough to plan realistically for a return to office in 2027, should Labor fall short of what the public expects of it. •

The post Aston: the implications appeared first on Inside Story.

The conundrum? They flatly disagree on whether the country will have a Labour government with a clear majority within the next two years, or whether it could be heading for a closely fought contest — or even a fifth consecutive Conservative victory for the first time in British history.

The May ritual I’m referring to is the annual round of local government elections. Not every British voter will be able to take part — there are no local elections this year in Scotland, Wales or London — but most will have a chance to decide who runs 230 cities, towns and local districts across much of England. On Friday 5 May, while much of the country prepares for King Charles to be crowned the following day in Westminster Abbey, party strategists and media pundits will be paying less attention to the coronation than to the local elections’ impact on another historic building, just across the road from the Abbey, the Houses of Parliament.

In a way, this is all rather odd. Voters will be choosing who should run their local services — schools, public housing, parks, social care, libraries, refuse collection and so on. The 8000 councillors they elect will have no say on income tax, immigration, energy prices, Brexit, help for Ukraine or any of the other great national issues that decide the fates of governments. And yet decades of experience show that most people consider not the qualities of the particular candidates standing in their neighbourhoods but the rival merits of the national parties they represent.

Not everyone: thankfully for the cause of democracy, outstanding local candidates can defy national trends. And some parties — notably the Liberal Democrats — win more votes in local than national elections. But, overall, when all the votes around the country are added up, the national picture is what matters.

Older readers may recall the Falklands war in 1982. Before the war, Thatcher’s government was deeply unpopular. Unemployment had trebled in three years from one to three million; the polls said the Conservatives were doomed to lose the following election. Yet Thatcher’s party triumphed in that May’s local elections because British troops were heading to the South Atlantic and most of Britain’s voters backed Thatcher’s quest to reclaim the islands from Argentina. Not a single local council in Britain had anything to do with any of this. Yet it was national sentiment, not local judgements, that decided which party should run each town and city.

Given all that, we shouldn’t be surprised that the national picture will be what really matters when this year’s local votes are counted. What gives the results added significance this time, though, are the disputes among pollsters. They agree that Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour Party is ahead but they disagree by how much. Some give Labour a lead of around 25 per cent, others nearer 15 per cent.

To be sure, both are big leads. (They might sound very big to Australian readers, but remember: Britain uses a first-past-the-post system and Labour’s votes are geographically concentrated, so the national vote translates into seats quite differently.) Repeated in a general election, Labour would be back in power. But there are two reasons why a big Labour victory is by no means certain.

First, governments over the past six decades or more have consistently lost support in the middle of each parliament, only to recover, at least to some extent, as the next general election approaches.

Second, changes in the relationship between votes and seats mean that Labour needs a bigger lead than in the past if it is to win outright. In 2005 — the last time Britain elected a Labour government — the party secured a comfortable majority with a lead in the popular vote of just 3 per cent (Labour 36 per cent, Conservatives 33 per cent). Today, a 3 per cent lead would leave Labour well short of a parliamentary majority; it might not even be the largest party in the House of Commons. Depending on a variety of factors, Labour will need a lead of at least 8 per cent, and might need a lead of as much as 13 per cent, to win outright. That was the margin by which Tony Blair led Labour to a landslide 179-seat majority in 1997. A repeat of those nationwide figures would mean a far closer outcome in terms of seats, and possibly a wafer-thin majority that could make it hard for Labour to remain in office for a full five-year term.

Given all that, a 15 per cent lead today would mean that even a modest Conservative recovery could jeopardise Labour’s chances of a clear victory. On the other hand, if Labour really is 25 per cent ahead, then it has a cushion against a Conservative recovery.

(A note for nerds: a narrow Labour lead in national votes at the next election is unlikely to mean the Conservatives stay in office. A more likely outcome is a hung parliament, in which neither Labour nor Conservative commands an overall majority. In those circumstances a minority Labour government is more likely than a minority Conservative government, because the great majority of smaller-party MPs, mainly Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party MPs, are viscerally anti-Conservative. But a minority Labour government would be limited in what it could do, and would probably hold another general election within a year or two. Britain’s longer-term future would effectively be on hold.)

Given all that, what will the pundits and parties be looking for on 5 May? Above all, they will want to see the BBC’s estimates of how the local vote maps nationally, taking account of the fact that parts of Britain won’t be voting at all. Assuming the Liberal Democrats repeat their usual trick of doing better in local than national elections, and Labour worse, a good rule of thumb is to add eight to ten percentage points to Labour’s lead.

So, if the national vote share in the local elections shows Labour fifteen or more points ahead of the Conservatives, this suggests a “true” Labour lead of around 25 per cent. Pollsters showing the bigger Labour leads will be vindicated and the Conservatives will have reason to be dejected. But if Labour’s lead is below 10 per cent then its “true” lead would be in line with polls reporting smaller leads just now. And any significant Conservative recovery would jeopardise Labour’s hopes of outright victory at the next general election.

Doubtless the television cameras will show us the expressions on the faces of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer as they enter Westminster Abbey for the coronation the following day. They will do their professional best to look positive; but experts in facial expressions might be able to detect their true feelings as they absorb the news of the local election results. •

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Some opinionistas believe by-elections don’t just measure the electoral temperature but also influence the future. So, for example, the Financial Review’s Philip Coorey writes that the July 2001 by-election in the same electorate — which the Liberals retained after a modest swing to the opposition — didn’t simply show that the Howard government was still competitive but also “created a momentum swing” all the way to the November general election.

It’s because the political class obsesses so much over these electoral events that they can actually influence the future — at the political level. Just ask Malcolm Turnbull, whose prime ministership was fatally damaged after a — wait for it — 3.8 per cent two-party-preferred swing to the opposition in Longman in July 2018. And it was the current Liberal leader who led the charge against him.

But even here the political bubble can’t get its story straight. It made a massive fuss about Longman but found little to see in the larger, 4.8 per cent swing in Bennelong seven months earlier. (Is there an irony in the fact that Labor won Bennelong but not Longman when it took office last year?)

By-elections are like massive surveys with non-random samples, except we don’t really know the question being asked. It’s certainly not “which party would you vote for at a general election?” And because nothing as important as who will govern is at stake, electors are liberated to cast their votes based on other matters. Candidates can make more of a difference in by-elections, as can mini-scandals. Voters can send a message to one side or the other. And a lot of other things we can’t identify also play their parts. For elaboration of the meaninglessness of by-election results, see my piece before Eden-Monaro in 2020.

Now, it’s true that very unpopular governments tend to suffer big by-election swings. But the intuitive extension — that well-regarded ones, as the Albanese government can reasonably be characterised, can expect to do well — is not borne out by the statistics. (Blogger Kevin Bonham has found “a reasonable correlation between federal government polling and by-election results” — see Twitter thread starting here — but his line derives all its power from the unpopular government sub-sample. The left side of his graph, containing data points with governments performing well in national opinion polls, has rather random by-election swing outcomes.)

One hundred and fifty-eight federal by-elections have been held since Federation, with another two vacancies uncontested. (These include supplementary elections and re-elections — in fact, any House of Representatives vote held apart from a general election.) It makes sense to identify a two-party-preferred swing in eighty-nine of those held since the introduction of preferential voting in 1918. (Only in those eighty-nine were Labor and the Coalition or its predecessors left in the final count for both the by-election and the previous general election.)

The swings in these seats range from 13.4 percentage points towards the government in the Australian Capital Territory in 1970 to 20.1 points in the other direction in Wakefield, South Australia, in 1938. Both were triggered by deaths, both were under Coalition governments and neither portended much about the next general election. (“Coalition” here means the various versions of the anti-Labor major parties. Pre-1983 two-party-preferred figures are often estimates.)

The average swing across all eighty-nine is 4.6 per cent to the federal opposition. But if we disaggregate between government-held and opposition-held, and between resignations and deaths, the subset in which Aston sits — resignation in an opposition-held seat — has an average swing of 2.3 percentage points to the opposition.

(My table is here. I categorise resignations due to section 44 of the Constitution separately: they shouldn’t produce the level of resentment a normal resignation does, nor the loss of the sitting MP’s personal vote, and including them only changes it to 2.2 points overall.)

In recent decades, governments have waxed and waned in their tendency to contest opposition-held electorates at by-elections. The Hawke–Keating governments (1983–96) ran in its first six, then from 1989 sat out the remaining six. The Howard government (1996–2007) ran in none out of six. Rudd Labor threw its hat into the Gippsland ring in 2008, got a hefty 6.1 point movement against it for its trouble, and stayed out of the next four. The Abbott government ran in Griffith after Rudd’s retirement and managed a decent 1.2 point swing, but not enough to take it. It declined to contest Batman, Perth and Fremantle, but weighed into Braddon and the aforementioned Longman.

Of course, some by-elections are just more winnable than others. It made sense for the Morrison government to contest Eden-Monaro near the height of its Covid-fuelled popularity in 2020. Once again it managed a small swing, though not quite enough. (Eden-Monaro was declared a “test” for opposition leader Anthony Albanese. Apparently he “passed” because the swing was less than the 0.86 points required to change hands.)

Labor’s decision to run this weekend in Aston is fair enough: it’s a possible, if unlikely, win. The seat has been redistributed by a notional 2.3 points towards Labor since the 2010, when Tudge replaced Chris Pearce, scraping home with just 0.5 points. But 2010 was a very strong year for Labor in that state, indeed its second-best Victorian two-party-preferred vote in the history of preferential voting. If Tudge had retired at the 2022 election it would’ve been up for grabs.

The evidence suggests that Tudge built up a very big personal vote, peaking in 2019, but deflating somewhat in 2022 for reasons anyone not living under a rock would be aware of. Had he not attracted that odium, the on-paper margin today would be bigger than 2.8 per cent, and perhaps Labor wouldn’t be tempted. (And, of course, Tudge might not be pulling up stumps.)

But it must also be said that neighbouring seats also swung quite solidly to Labor last time. Most have substantial Chinese-Australian populations, and in Sydney and Melbourne this cohort seems to have particularly swung to the Liberals in 2019 (turned off by Labor’s economic policies) and back to Labor in 2022 (absence of said policies, plus the Morrison government’s thunderous drum-beating on China.)

And/or: perhaps Labor ran a brilliant campaign in the seat in 2022. In 2023 it is running the same candidate, Mary Doyle.

This time, sightings of “Test for Peter Dutton!” claims have been much more prevalent than for the prime minister, but a big swing to the Liberals would transform the chatter. The Albanese government’s mooted superannuation changes aren’t particularly tailored to inflict pain on Aston (the wealthier Victorian seats these days are held by teals and, in the case of Higgins, Labor), but details aren’t always important. The “one in ten” (in thirty years’ time) statistic that the Coalition–News Corp tag team came up with a few weeks ago is potentially effective.

As well as dominating the coverage, New South Wales also seems to have soaked up media organisations’ polling budgets, and so far they have published no surveyed voting-intention figures whatsoever for Aston. In terms of the next general election, tomorrow’s result will only matter insofar as whoever is the sitting member in 2025 will enjoy an advantage. But interpretations of the swing can mean a lot for leaders’ fortunes, of course. And because, unlike in Longman in 2018, the opposition is behind in the national polls, it’s Dutton who will most be sweating on the result. •

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Only once has a federal government won an opposition seat at a by-election, and that was in most unusual circumstances. In 1920, during the Irish war of independence, Irish emigrant and Labor MP Hugh Mahon delivered a speech denouncing the British Empire as “this bloody and accursed despotism.” The Nationalists (forerunner of the Liberals) used their majority to expel him from parliament — a unique event in federal politics. That forced a by-election in his marginal seat of Kalgoorlie, which the Nationalists then narrowly won.

That was more than a hundred years ago. Since then, opposition parties and independents have won seventeen seats from governments at by-elections, Bass (1975), Wills (1992), Canberra (1995), Ryan (2001) and Wentworth (2018) being among the more memorable of them. And, of fifty-eight by-elections in opposition-held seats in that time, none has been won by the government. Not one.

Some were close: in 1939 a young Menzies government failed by just eight votes to win the marginal Labor seat of Griffith. In 1960 an ageing Menzies government came just 0.2 per cent short of taking an ultra-marginal Labor seat, Bendigo. And in 2020, during the early months of Covid, the Morrison government fell just 0.4 per cent short of winning another lineball seat, Eden-Monaro.

Even new governments enjoying an electoral honeymoon, like Albanese’s, have failed. In 1983 the Hawke government was at the peak of its popularity when former leading Liberals Billy Snedden and James Killen retired from very marginal seats: yet the Liberals retained both seats with swings their way. In 2008 the Rudd government had a similar experience in Gippsland. In 2014, when Kevin Rudd quit, the new Abbott government lost out in his by-then-marginal seat of Griffith.

On top of that, Aston is not a natural Labor seat. At the 2019 election it was the safest Liberal seat in Melbourne: Alan Tudge’s winning margin was more than 10 per cent. Last year Labor came within 2.8 per cent of victory, but that was in reaction to Tudge’s personal and ministerial humbug. In the seven previous elections, the Coalition’s average winning margin was 7.6 per cent.

If Labor wins on Saturday, the Coalition is in even deeper trouble than we thought.

Independents or Greens have broken through to win one-in-ten by-elections in the past thirty or so years. Phil Cleary set the trend by taking Wills from Labor when Bob Hawke retired. The Greens won their first seat in the House when Michael Organ briefly took Cunningham from Labor in 2001. Rob Oakeshott, then an independent state MP, smashed the Nationals to win Lyne when Mark Vaile retired in 2008. And of course, Kerryn Phelps won a famous, if short-lived, victory in Wentworth after Malcolm Turnbull was dumped as prime minister in 2018.

But the third party in Aston will be the Greens. And while last May they scored a personal best by ending up with 15.3 per cent of the Aston vote before dropping out, this is far from being their territory. If the Greens win on Saturday, both Labor and Liberals are in even deeper trouble than we thought. •

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While the votes recorded a hefty swing away from the government to Labor and independents alike, the actual damage was relatively restrained, as if mimicking an election campaign and a polling night finale conducted with a friendly cordiality that you wish all politicians could adopt.

This was a change of government, but no wipeout. After ruling New South Wales for fifty-one of the seventy years between 1941 and 2011, Labor will resume control in 2023 with an agenda that has generated little excitement or alarm. Its leader Chris Minns, like Anthony Albanese, made himself a small target and let the anti-Coalition wave sweeping Australia do the rest.

At the end of the night, Antony Green estimated Labor had won 54.3 per cent of the two-party preferred vote — a swing of 6.3 per cent — declaring it has secured a majority in the new Assembly. While that is the most likely result, it was a bit premature, and yesterday the ABC withdrew it, and Green revised his numbers to list fourteen of the ninety-three Assembly seats as still in doubt.

My own list is a bit shorter. On my count, Labor has won forty-five seats — just two short of a majority — and leads in another four seats too close to call. The Coalition has won twenty-eight seats, and leads in another four that it will probably retain.

The Greens have held on to their three (Balmain, only just), the three ex-Shooters MPs easily held their seats as independents — despite a nasty campaign by Clubs NSW against Murray MP Helen Dalton, who has spearheaded the push for gambling reform — as did three others elected as independents in 2019. And teal independents hold narrow leads over Coalition MPs in two seats.

But we are only at half-time in the counting. In a reform we should probably welcome, the NSW Electoral Commission ordered that counting end at 10.30 pm on polling night, recognising that its staff had been working all day beforehand. And yesterday was free of counting. On the ABC’s estimate, the votes counted for so far amount to just 50.2 per cent of enrolled voters.

About 90 per cent usually vote, which means 40 per cent of the votes are still to be counted. And the votes to come include the vast bulk of some 888,000 pre-poll votes, and up to 540,000 postal votes. As a rule, they usually lift the votes of the Coalition and Greens at the expense of Labor and independents — and sometimes that changes results.

Antony Green’s pendulum showed the Coalition going into the election with forty-six seats, Labor thirty-eight, with six independents and three Greens. So far the Coalition has lost eight seats, and ten others remain in doubt. Labor has relieved it of seven seats — Camden, East Hills, Monaro, Parramatta, Penrith, Riverstone and South Coast — while the mayor of Northern Beaches, Michael Regan, won the blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Wakehurst as an independent with a phenomenal swing of 27 per cent.

My list of seats in doubt includes three in which Labor leads the Liberals — Terrigal (with 51.27 per cent of the two-party vote), Ryde (50.67) and Miranda (50.35) — and three where the Liberals lead Labor: Holsworthy (50.80), Oatley (50.40) and Goulburn (50.33).

There is also the strange case of Kiama, where MP Gareth Ward, who is legally blind and albino, has been suspended from parliament and thrown out of the Liberal party after being charged with separate counts of sexual assault and indecent assault, both against other men. He stood as an independent, and Kiama Liberals ignored their official candidate and rallied behind him. The official two-party figures show him trailing Labor (51.90), but later first-preference figures suggest he’s gone ahead.

Independents lead the Liberals in Wollondilly (51.73) and Pittwater (50.06), while the Liberals lead in Willoughby (50.69). My best guess is that postal votes will help the Liberals hang on to most of these ten seats, but Labor will win enough to end up with a majority of about three seats, similar to Anthony Albanese’s majority in the House of Representatives.

The actual votes in the first half of counting were: Labor 37.1 per cent, Coalition 34.8, Greens 10.1, independents 8.8 and others 9.2. The high vote for others is worth noting, because unlike the federal and Victorian elections, there weren’t that many “other” candidates. Yet instead of the 2 or 3 per cent they polled in those elections, this time the minor candidates kept polling 5 to 10 per cent, sometimes more.

Preferences are optional in New South Wales, so they matter less — and both the Coalition and One Nation made a point of urging their voters to “just vote 1.” Suit yourselves, guys, but preferences do help to win seats. If Labor wins a majority, it will certainly be due to preferences from Greens voters and others.

It’s far too early to call the final outcome in the Legislative Council, but on the votes counted on Saturday night, the swing was big enough to give Labor a chance of being able to cobble together a majority of left-wing parties, including the Greens, Legalise Cannabis and Animal Justice, on key issues. But it’s more likely that the new Council will be evenly split between left and right.

In my view, this is not a result that calls for a lot of analysis. Democratic governments the world over tend to have a limited life span. As former Victorian premier Dick Hamer put it, “Every decision you make, you make an enemy. And some will remain enemies until the day you die.” Eventually, more than 50 per cent of voters will be persuaded that it is worth giving the other side a turn, and the government is out.

New South Wales has been generally a Labor state in our lifetimes. The turning point came two days after Australia entered the second world war: Labor MPs ganged up to overthrow the dictatorial demagogue Jack Lang and install the cautious, efficient and likeable Bill (later Sir William) McKell as their leader. McKell led them to a landslide win in 1941, and they stayed in power until 1965. Labor governments in Sydney tended to follow his example: play safe, sometimes play favourites and, above all, keep the voters on side. They are rarely radical.

Since 1941 the Coalition has had just three spells in power, of which this was the longest. The outgoing government stood out for its massive public works program, especially in Sydney, encompassing both roads and public transport, but also for the borrowings that funded it and for the relatively high turnover of leaders and ministers as a result of minor but damaging problems with the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

But it was a government of reformers. While its Coalition partners in Canberra failed to tackle climate change seriously, it was out front in leading the transition to a renewables economy. In recent months, its advocacy of a cashless gaming card — enabling problem gamblers to set a limit on their losses — had the potential to be the most important gambling reform Australia has seen. Unfortunately, Labor is under the thumb of the clubs lobby and plans to run only a token trial applying the card to 500 of the 90,000 poker machines in the state.

This was a government open to ideas and reform — very different from the federal Coalition under John Howard and since, which, with its media partner Murdoch, has specialised in manufacturing issues it could use to try to wedge Labor (of which the phenomenally expensive nuclear submarines will be perhaps the most damaging long-term consequence).

All that said, the fall of the Perrottet government is a huge blow to the Coalition nationally. It’s clear that the Liberal brand name has suffered from the miserable record of its nine years in federal office. Tasmania is now the only government left on its side, with Labor controlling every other government bigger than a local council. I covered this in some detail in an earlier article and won’t repeat the argument here.

But its conclusion must be underlined. Since Daniel Andrews was elected as premier of Victoria in 2014, we have been in a pro-Labor cycle that has changed almost every government in the country, and shows no signs of slowing. The Victorian election, which should at least have given a start to the next pro-Coalition cycle, instead revealed a Liberal Party lost in the doldrums. Now a government that was arguably the best the Coalition has produced in this century has been thrown out of office.

This could just be cyclical, but I don’t think so. The Liberals’ federal leadership requires a bold reformer, a young Menzies or Whitlam, to bring it back into the mainstream of Australia’s changing values. Instead it has Peter Dutton, a business-as-usual leader who has done nothing to reposition the party, and sees no need to.

Apart from households becoming poorer as prices grow so much faster than wages, no one issue dominated this election. The swing was erratic from seat to seat, but more or less statewide, although stronger in Sydney than in the bush. Even in the classic two-party contests, massive swings from the Coalition were recorded in some seats: 15 per cent in Parramatta and South Coast (two of Labor’s gains) and in Miranda (one of those it hopes to win) and 18 per cent in Kogarah, the southern Sydney seat of incoming premier Chris Minns. In the seven seats Labor has clearly gained, the average swing was 10.8 per cent.

Yet some seats, mostly in the bush, swung the other way. And the Coalition looks like retaining six of its eight most marginal seats. Upper Hunter (where Labor needed a swing of only 0.5 per cent) swung to the Nationals. Goulburn (3.1), Willoughby (3.3), Tweed (5.0), Winston Hills (5.7) and Holsworthy (6.0) all look likely to end up staying with their present owners, if only just.

There were some interesting outcomes in the count:

• The teal independents just missed out. The federal election saw them win four seats in New South Wales and come close in several others. But while Judy Hannan (a former Liberal candidate who insists she’s not a teal) looks well-placed in Wollondilly, the other four Climate 200 candidates in Sydney look likely to fall just short.

This reflects the real differences between state and federal Liberals on climate action and integrity watchdogs, as well as state laws that restrict funding for electoral newcomers. But it follows a similar outcome in Victoria, suggesting that some voters feel the teals are needed less in state parliaments than federally.

• The Greens also missed out. They seem to have held their three existing seats — although Antony Green still classes Balmain as in doubt — but didn’t come remotely close to winning any others. Their upper house vote was just 9.1 per cent, enough for two seats of the twenty-one, but crushing their hopes of winning a third. In only two state seats in Sydney are the Greens genuine contenders, compared with nine in Melbourne.

• The southeast of the state, which voted en bloc for the Coalition in 2019, went almost entirely against it this time. The Liberals lost Bega last year at a by-election after Andrew Constance stepped down to run for the federal seat of Gilmore (and lose narrowly). Now they have lost South Coast and Kiama along the coast, while inland, the Nationals lost Monaro and the Liberals are trailing in Wollondilly.

Monaro could be a microcosm of the Coalition’s years in office. Most of its voters live in and around Queanbeyan, across the border from Canberra. At the 2011 election, energetic young National John Barilaro wrested it from popular Labor minister Steve Whan. In 2015 Whan tried to come back, but lost narrowly. In 2019, without Whan to compete with, deputy premier Barilaro had a massive victory. But then he tried to move to Canberra, met strong resistance, declared war on koalas, publicly admitted he was struggling with mental health issues, and ultimately quit politics. On Saturday Whan returned to win the seat in a 15 per cent swing.

• Speaking of the war on koalas, one of the most unusual contests was in Port Macquarie, a hot spot in the battle for lebensraum between developers and koalas. In 2020 the town’s MP Leslie Williams quit the Nationals over Barilaro’s “reckless and unreasonable behaviour” and defected to the Liberals.

On Saturday the two Coalition partners faced off, and the Port Macquarie voters unambiguously chose their pro-koala MP over her National Party challenger. Let’s hope that war is now over. •

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Together with his companies and a number of his senior White House staff, Trump is facing an unprecedented array of state and federal legal investigations and lawsuits. He will have to navigate every one of them, and associated financial and reputational costs, during his campaign to secure the Republican presidential nomination for 2024.

Perhaps the most serious charges are those likely to emerge from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump’s role in inciting the 6 January riots and attempting to overturn the 2020 election result, and his obstruction of efforts to locate classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

In the case of the Mar-a-Lago documents, the improper handling of federal records and obstruction of a federal investigation could be the basis of charges under the Espionage Act. The 6 January case is more complex: it is looking at how Trump spent money raised purportedly to help pay for legal challenges to the election; at efforts to have his own slates of state electors file fraudulent official certificates; and at who organised and funded the 6 January rallies. It could result in charges that Trump and others engaged in a conspiracy to defraud the United States and/or obstruct official government proceedings.

In Georgia, a criminal investigation is looking at Trump’s attempt to persuade state officials to overturn Joe Biden’s win in their state. In a post-election call, Trump told Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, that he wanted “to find 11,780 votes” (Biden won the state by 11,779 votes). It is a federal felony to knowingly attempt “to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process” through “the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.”

A grand jury convened to make a preliminary investigation has concluded that multiple indictments are warranted for Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the Georgia results. The decision whether to proceed will be made by the Fulton County’s district attorney, Fani Willis.

Trump also faces a raft of civil charges. These include a joint lawsuit from a number of members of Congress and Capitol police officers contending that Trump’s fiery speech incited the 6 January attack on the Capitol, and claiming damages, and two separate New York investigations into the Trump Organization and Trump’s web of related businesses. Both the New York probes are examining allegations that Trump misrepresented his companies’ finances in order to obtain bank loans or to reduce taxes.

This brings us back to the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation into the money paid to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about a tryst with Trump. Daniels was given US$130,000 in the closing days of the 2016 campaign by Trump lawyer and long-time “fixer” Michael Cohen, who was later reimbursed by Trump. Cohen confessed to violating New York State election law and served jail time in 2018.

In January this year, district attorney Alvin Bragg empanelled a grand jury to hear evidence about Trump’s role in the payment. Kellyanne Conway, who held a senior advisory position on the Trump presidential campaign and later became a White House counsellor, has given evidence, though it’s not clear whether she appeared before the grand jury or simply met with prosecutors. It was Conway who Cohen notified when the payment had been made, and who presumably then notified Trump.

To make this case a felony (a more serious crime punishable by a prison sentence of more than a year), prosecutors will have to show that Trump was involved in the falsification of business records. (The Trump Organization labelled the US$130,000 as legal expenses.)

As the shape of the 2024 presidential campaign starts to emerge, these proceedings will become political dynamite. Special Counsel Smith’s pace has quickened in recent weeks, signifying to observers that he is working to present his charges before the presidential primary debate season begins in August. Charging decisions in the Georgia inquiry are expected in the (northern) spring or summer.

These unusual and complex probes have turned some of Trump’s many current and former lawyers and senior presidential aides into witnesses or even potential targets of investigation. In recent weeks the special counsel has issued a flurry of grand jury subpoenas to high-profile witnesses including former vice-president Mike Pence and Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with strict deadlines for responses. These have triggered multiple, closed-door legal battles that could delay proceedings for some months and may well be part of Trump’s management strategy.

Trump lawyers have asked a federal judge to block the subpoena for Pence to testify, citing executive privilege. Pence himself has said he is prepared to fight his subpoena “as far as it needs to go.” While he is obviously looking to protect himself and his own possible presidential bid, this might also be a feint to protect himself against attacks from Trump, who has already accused him of disloyalty.

Trump’s push for all-encompassing executive privilege is an ongoing attempt to enable him (and by extension his aides) to withhold information from the Congress, the courts and the public. But this presidential power may not reach as far as he hopes: the constitution gives presidents immunity from being sued only over their official actions, and the US Supreme Court has never held that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution. The question, then, is whether Trump’s 6 January speech and efforts to overturn the election result fell within his official job responsibilities.

A judge of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia ruled last year that the case brought by the members of Congress and the Capitol Police could proceed because Trump’s various communications before and on 6 January amounted to a “call to action.” Trump’s lawyers appealed that ruling to the District of Columbia Circuit Court, which then asked for the justice department’s opinion.

In a friend-of-the-court brief, the civil division of the justice department said that if Trump’s speech incited the 6 January riot — the contention found credible by the District Court — then he was not shielded by immunity. Urging the appeals court to allow the suit to proceed, the department’s lawyers wrote that the “traditional function [of public speaking] is one of public communication. It does not include incitement of imminent private violence of the sort the District Court found that the plaintiffs’ complaints have plausibly alleged here.” If the justice department says this about a civil case, it should hold the same position in a criminal case.

This is not the only pending case that tests the limits of when Trump was acting in his capacity as president. A separate District of Columbia Court is weighing whether he was acting in his official capacity when he spoke disparagingly of writer E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in the 1990s and is suing him for defamation. In this case the justice department agreed with Trump’s lawyers that he made these remarks while answering reporters’ questions and was acting in his official capacity. This case against Trump looks likely to be dismissed.

Some of Trump’s lawyers are using another blocking tactic, asserting lawyer–client privilege. This argument can be overcome under the “crime–fraud exception” if prosecutors can show that Trump’s lawyers’ actions are part of a criminal scheme. Federal prosecutors are attempting to use the exception to compel further testimony in relation to the advice from lawyer Evan Corcoran used by Trump to obstruct the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation.

Legal jousting has been a way of doing business for Trump for decades. A USATODAY analysis in 2016 found that he and his businesses had been involved in at least 3500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the previous three decades. Even as he claimed the Oval Office he faced seventy-five active lawsuits.

Trump adopted his litigious nature early, after his family company was sued by the justice department in 1973 on grounds that its rental housing policy violated the Fair Housing Act. He and his father used the notorious and famously combative lawyer Roy Cohn to counter-sue, claiming defamation. There was no real victory, but his biographers see this episode as driving home the key lessons he learned from Cohn: deny, deflect, delay and don’t put anything in writing. Perhaps this last dictate explains why Trump doesn’t use email.

Trump has carried these lessons through five decades of lawsuits, tax challenges and business failures, two impeachments and more legal investigations than any other president. As one biographer, a former federal prosecutor, wrote, “[Trump] sued at the drop of a hat. He sued for sport; he sued to achieve control; and he sued to make a point. He sued as a means of destroying or silencing those who crossed him. He became a plaintiff in chief.”

Trump might often threaten to sue, but he rarely follows through and almost always loses when he does. This is partly a result of poor legal advice: infighting has always been rife in a legal team whose personnel has changed dramatically over the years.

More recently he has used many curiously incompetent, and sometimes fraudulent, legal advisers. These include Rudy Giuliani (now in legal jeopardy over his false claims about the 2020 election), Sidney Powell (the subject of a petition brought by the State Bar of Texas Commission for Lawyer Discipline alleging that she violated legal ethics rules in working to overturn the 2020 election) and Jenna Ellis (who recently admitted to making false statements about the 2020 election).

Guided by these figures, Trump’s legal failures accumulated in the months immediately after November 2020. He and his allies filed more than sixty lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results, all of which — including direct petitions to the US Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-appointed justices — failed for lack of evidence. Some were dismissed because of errors in filings and other procedural lapses.

Trump has a reputation for not paying his lawyers, and these days he is increasingly conducting his legal nastiness using other people’s money. The Republican Party has paid millions for Trump’s legal bills. Recently the chair of the Republican National Committee announced that the committee will no longer do so because Trump is running for the party’s presidential nomination. During 2021 and 2022, when many Republican candidates struggled with election finances, Trump spent more than US$16 million from his political action committee, Save America, on legal payments, including US$10 million on his own legal fees.

The House select committee that investigated the 6 January insurrection found that much of the money accumulated by Save America came from a Trump fundraising drive that took US$250 million in donations from supporters specifically to cover legal challenges to the 2020 presidential election results. The fund was never actually created, and the money was instead used mostly to cover Trump’s own legal fees and for payments to several pro-Trump organisations headed by former Trump administration officials.

Trump could be defending himself in as many as four criminal cases as he runs for the Republican presidential candidature next year. He believes, perhaps accurately, that an indictment would increase his poll numbers. He insists that he is a victim of political enmity and corrupt prosecutors, and that the investigations are an effort to silence his supporters. He refuses to acknowledge that his legal problems are entirely a result of his own actions.

When asked if he would stay in the 2024 race if indicted, he responded that he “wouldn’t even think about dropping out of the race.” It was a bold declamation, but one that may not be his to make. No president or former president has ever been indicted. (Richard Nixon was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, “for all offenses against the United States” that he “committed or may have committed” during his presidency.) But Donald Trump is in growing legal and political peril. •

The post Before the deluge appeared first on Inside Story.

Although the Murdochs strongly supported Trump during his presidency, and although the audience for their American media tended to be pro-Republican, they were ready to face facts after the election-night count. Fox News’s chief political correspondent, Bret Baier, saw “no evidence of fraud. None.” Murdoch’s New York Post urged Trump to accept the result. His “baseless” stolen-election rhetoric “undermines faith in democracy and faith in the nation,” said the paper.

Along with the Associated Press, the network had made an early call for Biden in the crucial state of Arizona on election night. It proved to be the right call, but it infuriated the Trump camp as premature, if not wilfully wrong.

As we now know from internal documents obtained by Dominion Voting Systems as part of its legal action against Fox News, key Fox figures were already railing against what they saw as an audience-alienating decision on election night. “We worked really hard to build what we have,” high-profile anchor Tucker Carlson wrote on 5 November. “Those fuckers” — senior editor Bill Sammon and reporter Chris Stirewalt, who had decided to call Arizona for Biden — “are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”

“The audience feels like we crapped on [them],” wrote Scott, “and we have damaged their trust and belief in us… We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.” Sammon and Stirewalt were soon forced out of Fox, not for making a professional error but for their “arrogance” and for damaging the “brand.”

The clashes continued. On the night of 12 November, Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted that “top election infrastructure officials” had found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” An indignant Tucker Carlson wrote to his colleagues: “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck? … It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Again, Scott took the same line. Heinrich “has serious nerve doing this,” she wrote, “and if this gets picked up viewers are going to be further disgusted.” By morning Heinrich had deleted the tweet. (The New York Times later reported: “While she removed a tweet in which Mr. Trump had tagged her colleagues Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, she posted the same fact check in response to a different tweet from Mr Trump that made the same false claim but did not tag her colleagues.”)

Fox’s White House correspondent Kristin Fisher got similarly short shrift when she fact-checked fraud claims by lawyer Sidney Powell and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. She was immediately told by phone that higher-ups were unhappy and she needed to do a better job of “respecting our audience.”

Respect was suddenly Fox’s word of the moment, Fox’s prime-time anchor Sean Hannity was arguing that “respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical. Fox has spent the last month spitting at them.” For outsiders, though, nurturing the audience’s delusions and punishing staff who behave professionally might seem a strange sort of respect.

In the early days after the election, when Fox seemed ready to accept the result, the network’s rating began declining. It was “getting creamed by CNN!” wrote Murdoch, but much more troubling was the number of viewers who were switching — with Trump’s encouragement — to upstart rivals on their right, Newsmax and One America News.

On 9 November Trump retweeted a series of stories from Newsmax claiming election fraud. Three days later his attacks on Fox escalated in a flurry of tweets encouraging viewers to switch to other networks. By the end of that day, Fox stocks were down 6 per cent; by mid November the network’s daytime audience had fallen from a pre-election 2.4 million to just 1.6 million, and its prime-time audience from 5.3 million to 3.5 million. Newsmax’s viewer numbers increased sixfold, from 57,000 to 329,000.

Fox News had become prisoner of the monster it had created. An audience fed on fantasies couldn’t face the new reality. “To be honest,” one producer said, “our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition.” A network executive conceded that “conspiratorial reporting might be exactly what the disgruntled viewer is looking for.” Commercial profitability and professional integrity were pulling in opposite directions.

This was the moment when management announced its dramatic pivot. Scott called 9 November, six days after the election, “Day One” and committed the network to pushing “narratives that would entice their audience back.” She was, she said, “trying to get everyone to comprehend we are on a war footing.” Two themes figured prominently in subsequent Fox News internal communications: “brand” and “respecting the audience.” Both would override accuracy and other professional scruples.

The on-air results of Scott’s directive were dramatic: by the end of the second week after Fox News had called the election for Biden, it had “questioned the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it at least 774 times,” according to Media Matters for America. Off-air, Fox News’s chief financial officer reported on 8 December that Fox’s “ratings momentum has been extraordinary [and] it is feeding absolutely into advertising strength.” Scott was rewarded with a multi-year extension to her contract.

Newly focused on promoting claims of electoral fraud, the network’s primary targets were Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, the two companies that provided electronic voting equipment for the election. Powell and Giuliani were the Trump associates most vigorously accusing the companies of having conspired to alter the election results.

Powell asserted that Trump had won not just by hundreds of thousands but by millions of votes shifted in Biden’s favour by Dominion’s software. “It’s really the most massive and historical egregious fraud the world has ever seen,” she said. Her dramatic claims had audience appeal. When research showed that viewers were switching to Newsmax specifically to watch her as a guest, Hannity brought Powell onto his program.

Giuliani was equally emphatic: Dominion’s machine “was developed to steal elections.” Dominion was “an organised criminal enterprise… started in Venezuela with Cuban money.” The intemperance of his language was no barrier to repeated appearances on Fox.

Of the several Fox presenters who took up the theme, the most extreme was Lou Dobbs. “Read all about Dominion and Smartmatic voting companies and you’ll soon understand how pervasive this Democrat electoral fraud is,” he tweeted, “and there’s no way in the world the 2020 presidential election was either free or fair.” It was “an electoral 9/11 against the United States, with the cooperation and collusion of the media and the Democrat Party and China.” “It is a cyber Pearl Harbor,” he added. “We have technical presentations that prove there is an embedded controller in every Dominion machine.”

Even the Trump campaign distanced itself from the seemingly unhinged Powell and Giuliani. Trump ally Chris Christie called Powell a “national embarrassment” and Trump’s legal team thought Giuliani was “deranged.” Although the Trump campaign disavowed Powell on 22 November, she and Giuliani continued to appear on Fox for several more weeks.

Even after the 6 January attacks on the Capitol, Fox continued to host guests who claimed the election was stolen. On 26 January Carlson interviewed My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell after he was banned from Twitter for promoting lies about Dominion and the election. Lindell repeated those lies without any challenge from Carlson. Not coincidentally, Lindell is one of Fox News’s biggest sponsors. According to Murdoch’s deposition in the Dominion case, Lindell “pays us a lot of money.” “It is not red or blue, it is green” — it is about money rather than politics — he agreed when questioned by Dominion’s lawyers.

Given the frequency and severity of the attacks on Dominion, the company’s decision to sue Fox News came as no surprise. Dominion also sued Newsmax and its three most prominent accusers, Powell, Giuliani and Lindell. (The other voting machine company, Smartmatic, has also sued Fox News.) The fallout has already been spectacular. Dominion has gained access to thousands of internal Fox News documents revealing extraordinary cynicism and hypocrisy among executives and producers.

A media organisation can’t successfully be sued for defamation by a public figure in America unless malice can be shown, and any effort to do that usually relies on inferences and indirect evidence. Not in this case: “I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”

The contrast between what the Fox News personnel were saying to each other and what they were saying on air was stark. Disparaging descriptions of Powell, Giuliani and other fraud-pushers — “mind-blowingly nuts,” “totally off the rails,” “crazy,” “absurd” and “shockingly reckless” — figure frequently in their internal communications, but didn’t stop “really crazy stuff” (in Murdoch’s words) being put to air. Commenting on one program, Fox president Jay Wallace observed that “the North Koreans do a more nuanced show.”

Not a single Fox witness testified that they believed the allegations about the voting-machine company to be true, according to Dominion’s account of the deposition evidence. Fox’s internal fact-checking department, the Brainroom, also said the claims against Dominion were wrong.

“Sidney Powell is lying; she is a complete nut,” Carlson told his fellow prime-time anchor Laura Ingraham. “No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” “Nut” seems close to the mark: in an email to Maria Bartiromo, whose show she had appeared on several times, Powell said her source of information on Dominion was a person who described herself as “internally decapitated,” capable of “time travel in a semi-conscious state” and able to speak to “the Wind” as “a ghost.” Apparently this raised no red flags at Fox.

These internal communications provide excellent ammunition for Dominion, and there are further reasons why the company is likely to receive extremely high damages. Most defamation cases involve a single article or a short series by a small number of individual journalists, whereas this one involves a blizzard of segments over several months.

Dominion’s suit focuses on twenty statements across six Fox programs. It argues that “literally dozens of people with editorial responsibility — from the top of the organisation to the producers of specific shows to the hosts themselves — acted with actual malice.”

Likely to add to the damages is the fact that Dominion communicated 3600 times with Fox during the broadcasting of the contentious segments in order to correct facts. Most importantly, it sent an email titled “Setting the Record Straight,” and a series of updates, to more than ninety of Fox’s reporters, producers and anchors.

Nineteen of the twenty statements were made after Dominion alerted Fox that they were lies and pointed the network to the correct information. But Fox kept defaming Dominion and failed to respond to demands for retractions. “To this day,” says the company, “Fox has never retracted the false statements it broadcast about Dominion.”

While most defamation cases focus on damage to the plaintiff’s general reputation, Fox’s claims went further, undermining Dominion’s very existence as a commercial entity. The company’s business relies on a bipartisan acceptance of its integrity and reliability. Since the Fox News onslaught, several of its contracts have been challenged by Trump Republicans. All Fox’s claims about its audience size and influence are now being used as evidence of the damage done to Dominion.

“As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved,” says Dominion, pointing to threats to its employees and the extra security it has been forced to employ.

Fox also showed a corresponding lack of interest in reporting developments counter to the narrative pushed by Trump and his allies. Unmentioned went the fact that Dominion machines are used in twenty-eight states — including battleground states Florida and Ohio, which Biden lost. On 11 November, for instance, Sean Hannity told his audience that the hand recount in Georgia would help resolve questions about Dominion. When the count was completed later that month and the governor of Georgia declared the voting machines had been accurate, Hannity was silent.

The Dominion lawsuit has also ushered in a new phase in the Donald Trump–Rupert Murdoch relationship. The mutually convenient bromance of 2016–20 is long gone. Murdoch’s American newspapers have consistently editorialised against Trump’s claims of a rigged election. The Wall Street Journal declared the charges against Dominion baseless. After the midterm Congressional elections, in which the candidates Trump most closely embraced performed poorly, the Journal called him an electoral liability. The New York Post was much cheekier, with a front-page caricature of Trump as Humpty Dumpty under the headline “Trumpty Dumpty.”

The initial cache of documents released by Dominion late last month showed that Murdoch thought Trump’s claims of fraud were baseless and that he strongly disapproved of them. Ironically, of course, it was one of his organisations, Fox News, that did most to give those baseless claims political currency. In mid December Fox reported a poll saying 70 per cent of Republicans thought the election was rigged because of voter fraud. Without Fox’s intense coverage, we can only guess how much lower that percentage might have been.

The revelation that Murdoch disapproved of Fox’s coverage in principle but encouraged it in practice shows him to be a hypocrite. But the stark contrast between on-air and off-air views also raises crucial questions about how other Fox personnel saw their responsibility. At one stage, Carlson texted Ingraham: “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” It is as if Carlson thought he had to be a passive cipher for Powell and Giuliani’s views, however mistaken. When Maria Bartiromo’s producer was asked “If someone says something untrue on one of your shows, do you think that it’s important to correct it?” she simply replied “No.”

As a result of Murdoch’s deposition in the Dominion case, Trump discovered that after the 6 January Capitol riot Fox News’s owner aimed to make Trump a “non-person.” His response was characteristic:

If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged and Stollen, then he and his group of MAGA Hating Globalist RINOS [Republicans in name only] should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding and abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS.

Much more will emerge when the court case begins in Delaware on 17 April. Apart from the huge sums of money involved, the case raises fundamental issues about the health of American democracy and the responsibilities of the media. “These lies did not simply harm Dominion,” the voting-technology company argues. “They harmed democracy. They harmed the idea of credible elections. They harmed a once-unshakeable faith in democratic transfers of power.”

Fox News was a crucial ally of Trump in his attempt to reject the election outcome, and many of the radicals who stormed the Capitol on 6 January would have viewed the claims of electoral fraud broadcast repeatedly on the network. It is this association that Crikey’s Bernard Keane probably had in mind when he attributed to the Murdochs part of the blame for the riots, an assertion that prompted Lachlan Murdoch to sue under Australian defamation laws.

Never has a court case in Delaware been more keenly watched in two Sydney law chambers than Dominion’s will be. •

The post Damaging the brand appeared first on Inside Story.

In the early 1980s John Howard — Liberal treasurer at the time — expressed interest in a consumption tax but was warned off by prime minister Malcolm Fraser. Howard’s successor at Treasury, Labor’s Paul Keating, energetically spruiked one in 1985, inside the party and in public, but he too was eventually rolled by his leader. Then, early in the next decade, Keating betrayed not a skerrick of embarrassment as prime minister as he employed his substantial rhetorical skills to help bury John Hewson’s Fightback! package, which had a GST at its centre.

A couple of years later, in 1995, opposition leader Howard was forced to promise “never ever” after some loose-lipped equivocations to a business audience. Then, in his first term as PM, he announced he’d changed his mind and would seek an electoral mandate for a GST at the next election.

Did he earn popular kudos for promising to run the plan past voters first? A bit, but not much: his personal ratings and party voting intentions immediately dropped. Claiming it wasn’t a broken promise didn’t wash.

The 1998 election vote outcome was not very different from that earlier “GST election” in 1993 — Labor won both — but this time the Coalition retained a comfortable majority of seats. When the GST started operating in July 2000 it was not without teething problems, but also not the cataclysm most voters had expected. (Read this tasty excerpt from an exchange between Labor’s Mark Latham and his party’s former pollster Rod Cameron on Lateline at the time.) At the next election the Kim Beazley–­led Labor opposition, rather than promising to unscramble that complex GST egg, offered something called “rollback” — a bit of tinkering around the edges. The Howard government was re-elected.

Since then the GST has sat securely in the policy infrastructure. Econocrats regularly urge a broadening and a lift in the rate (with compensation for people on low incomes) but that’s a no-go politically, something that each side of politics routinely forces the other to rule out.

How about the Gillard government’s “carbon tax”? Like the GST, it involved revenue gathered with one of the government’s hands and then returned through spending and direct tax cuts with the other — though, at around a fifth of the dollars, it was much smaller than the earlier tax. The “tax” was announced in March 2011, was immediately branded a broken promise (in reality it was a price rather than a tax, and not really a busted pledge), was legislated later that year and came into operation in July the next.

Folks with memories uncluttered by post-hoc projection will recall a stark difference between the sixteen months before its introduction — endless headlines, rallies, and fear and loathing of what this “big new tax” would do to people’s budgets and the economy — and the time after. With no new items on payslips, a few price rises and a bit of compensation, it largely subsided as a salient issue. In fact, polling for the unpopular Gillard government marginally improved. (Things turned south again the following year.)

Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s longstanding promise to repeal the carbon price got some mentions in the 2013 election campaign, but like all politicians he preferred to emphasise his opponents’ crimes rather than spell out his own plans. And when the Abbott government got rid of the price the next year, the enthusiasm in the electorate was underwhelming.

What is the point of these frolics down memory lane? Most importantly, to hammer home the big difference between the electorate’s fear of change before it happens, and the relative ease with which voters tend to adapt to the new reality.

Going even further back, most of the still-ballyhooed Hawke–Keating changes were sprung on voters midterm and — importantly, vitally — put in place well before the next appointment at the polling station. By then the bite had turned out to be infinitely less painful than the bark for the vast majority, and the opposition, having warned of Armageddon, had to decide whether to promise to repeal.

(In the 1980s and early 1990s the Coalition generally did put its money where its mouth was by promising to undo policies it had opposed. It remained in opposition until its successful 1996 campaign, at which “small target” entered our political lexicon.)

This week the Albanese government flagged a new twist on tax reform. Its superannuation changes are a small-ticket item, not remotely in the same league as the GST or the carbon price, and not even like opposition leader Bill Shorten’s franking credits; for one thing, the Coalition and News Corp will find it impossible to dig up lovable old codgers of meagre means who will affected by it.

But Anthony Albanese has broken a basic rule of the politics of reform: the changes, if legislated, won’t happen until after the next election. In that way, on a much smaller scale, it’s more like Howard’s GST, which nearly cost him the 1998 election.

A policy bedded down before voting day becomes part of the status quo, and if the opposition says they’ll undo it, it’s they who are proposing change. And that makes them susceptible to questions about how it will work, where the money will come from, whether the sums add up, and what the unforeseen consequences are.

Now it’s true that, all else being equal, if you’re taking a new policy to an election you’d rather be the government than the opposition. Governments are known quantities, and the risk factor doesn’t  attach so easily to their plans. But as Howard found in 1998, the policy itself, or imaginings of its repercussions, can still generate a great fear of the unknown.

Albanese evidently believes his strategy will enable him to claim he’s not breaking a promise — that there was always a subliminal “in the first term” asterisk when he talked about tax during the 2022 campaign. (From memory, this caveat was uttered during the campaign, but only once or twice. It’s a rather dangerous thing to say, because individual voters can’t be sure that if the new government proposes something obnoxious, other voters will deny them a second term.) So he’s running it past the electorate first. Yes, he’ll get a few points for holding off until after the election, but that won’t negate the “broken promise” charge.

I’m not saying first-term governments shouldn’t break campaign undertakings. Most of the time it’s inevitable.

Abbott’s prime ministership is the oft-cited cautionary tale about breaching trust in this way. But Abbott’s unpopularity had many causes, and the biggest problem with most of his 2014 budget nasties was that, thanks to the Senate, they never even became law, let alone begin operating. They just floated around, discussed ad nauseam, creating a greater and greater stench. He got the worst of both worlds.

Albanese is generating a similar interplanetary configuration. If the super changes were coming into effect this July or next, they would quickly more or less cease to be a topic of interest. As it is, he’s being seen as an election promise breaker but will go to the 2025 contest with no pay-off, no added authority from making us eat our greens.

Unlike Kevin Rudd and his rhetorically woeful treasurer Wayne Swan, the current government has not slouched in the important task of burying the legacy of its predecessor. Treasurer Jim Chalmers in particular never misses an opportunity to repeat the “trillion dollars in Coalition debt” line. The government even leads the opposition in surveyed perceptions of economic competence, something I don’t believe was ever achieved under Rudd (or Gillard).

(For various reasons Scott Morrison’s government is an inherently juicier punching bag than Howard’s.)

But if a first-term government is going to renege on a promise (as all of them, including — or especially — the successful ones, do) it should be done sooner rather than later, accompanied by heartfelt regret that its abominable predecessors, still fresh in voters’ minds, left no other option. And the new measure needs to be operating well before the next election.

It’s natural that a newish prime minister still enjoying sky-high ratings and an easy life with the media will be reluctant to rock the boat. But the good times will be over one day. As Kevin Rudd learned, a determination to postpone the inevitable can be fatal: the honeymoon has to end eventually, and when his ended in 2010 he had few difficult decisions to show for it.

True, this isn’t the GST, or anything like it. But if Albanese thought this week’s announcement would stop the hubbub then he already knows he was wrong. Sweet-talking journalists into describing something as a political masterstroke won’t make it one. One of them is already speculating that the government, having “found a way not to breach voters’ faith,” might attempt “an overhaul of negative gearing and capital gains tax” by the same method: legislation that doesn’t kick in until the next term.

Now that would make the next election very interesting indeed. We would truly be closer to GST territory.

Labor supporters should hope this tactic is a one-off. It is not a habit Albanese should get into. •

The post Not-so-super strategy appeared first on Inside Story.

Now, in early 2023, a government that began in an atmosphere of hope and enthusiasm but was reduced to minority status at the 2019 and 2021 elections is displaying nearly all the features of a midlife crisis. Talented figures are exhausted and moving on. Ethics violations are piling up. Ex-ministers have written angry books about their experiences. And the pundit class is full of unsolicited advice about the need for new ideas and directions. Sunny ways are long gone.

But one thing that shows no sign of slowing down is Justin Trudeau. The prime minister has given no indication of being ready to give up the job; nor does his party seem to want him to. He mightn’t have quite the cocky glow of 2015, but he still appears committed and all-in.

The parallels between Justin Trudeau’s career and that of his father Pierre continue to be uncanny. Both rose quickly to the Liberal leadership and won transformational elections. Each was knocked down to minority status after four years. Both came back two years later with a more stable regime (a majority government for Pierre; a written agreement with the opposition New Democrats for Justin).

If history continues to repeat itself, Canada is currently in the Trudeau mid-career trough. This was the 1970s low point of Pierre Trudeau’s government for many of the same reasons we see today: an ageing government facing a muddled policy environment of inflation, foreign crises, and an apparent sagging of public confidence and optimism.

But a trough is not a downward spiral. Pierre Trudeau only narrowly lost the 1979 election after eleven years in power, and roared back with a majority victory in 1980 to achieve the constitutional triumphs that became his greatest legacy. Justin Trudeau’s future is unknown — as is his legacy project. But even if he doesn’t repeat his father’s grand finale, he remains the leading political force in Canada.

Justin Trudeau’s 2023 is a mixed bag so far. His greatest boosts are a successful healthcare deal with the provincial governments and a judicial inquiry’s vindication of his decision to invoke the Emergencies Act in response to the “trucker convoy” protests that clogged downtown Ottawa for three weeks last year. But his legislative agenda is bogged down. Initiatives on gun control, online regulation and expanded medically assisted dying are all stalled or being rethought. And polls regularly put his Liberals in second place behind the Conservatives.

Assessments of the problem are familiar for this stage in a government’s life: an overly controlling prime minister’s office and an administration better at day-to-day tactical politics than serious policy thinking. While progressives nurse multiple hurts and betrayals, the government is clearly more on the left than the right; for a certain part of the pundit class, indeed, the problem is that the Trudeau Liberals are far more interested in redistributing wealth than generating it. A recent book by former finance minister Bill Morneau, who was forced out of the cabinet in 2020, says all of the above, though it has had limited impact since it doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know.

Arguably the main force driving the government is its agreement with the left-wing New Democrats, who promised parliamentary support until 2025 in return for a new dental insurance program and other progressive policies. While the Conservatives insist on calling this “the Liberal–NDP coalition” at every opportunity, it isn’t a formal alliance. It is the latest in a long history of arrangements that almost always end up favouring the Liberals. Indeed, the deal has squeezed the NDP into uncomfortable positions, limiting its ability to assault the government from the left.

Over on the hard right, opposition remains deeply personalised against Trudeau himself, exactly as it was fifty years ago against his father. It was people with these views who occupied downtown Ottawa and two Canada–US border crossings last year, motivated nominally by vaccine mandates but more deeply by a visceral dislike of Justin Trudeau. “Fuck Trudeau” is the ubiquitous slogan of the Canadian populist right these days; a Vancouver man, Australian by origin, was recently denied his online citizenship ceremony because he refused to take down a sign with those two words displayed behind him.

Further up the conservative hierarchy, the governments in Alberta and Saskatchewan are in open conflict with the federal government, primarily over the perennial issue of energy and natural resources policies. Both have introduced bills to expressly negate federal policies within their provinces. The Alberta Sovereignty and Saskatchewan First acts, both constitutionally nonsensical, embody just how alienated those jurisdictions are from the federal government.

All this leaves the moderate centre right unsure of where it stands — unhappy with the Trudeau government’s direction but wary of the populists at the gates. That’s partly why the federal Conservatives have yet another leader facing off against Trudeau, Pierre Poilievre; but more on him in a minute.

Another way of viewing the Trudeau government is from the perspective of Quebec. Though rooted in that province’s largest city, Montreal, the Trudeaus have a long, fractious history with Quebec nationalists. All Quebec governments are prickly over jurisdictional issues, but the current government, led by François Legault, has been particularly aggressive. Its uncompromising secularist agenda, of little interest to the rest of Canada, includes banning some public servants, including teachers, from wearing the hijab and other “religious” symbols.

Trudeau and other federal politicians have dragged their heels on directly confronting policies like these. But conflict continues to be fuelled by moves like Legault’s recent, unsuccessful demand for the resignation of the prime minister’s new special adviser on Islamophobia, Amira Elghawaby, over her past comments that anti-Muslim sentiment was widespread in Quebec.

Finally, in international affairs, Trudeau’s own celebrity brand may still be strong but Canada’s is not. The country struggles to demonstrate weight and credibility in the challenging new global environment. The election of Joe Biden in the United States was greeted with sighs of relief in Ottawa, but now Canada struggles not to be blindsided by the Biden administration’s restrictions on non-US goods.

The recent appearance of balloon-like objects over North America gave Trudeau an opportunity to act decisively by ordering them shot down, but an American F-22 was responsible for the only successful take-down over Canadian territory. Although that action was part of the NORAD mutual protection arrangement, it was seized on by critics as evidence of Liberal neglect of national defence.

On China, the government has slowly become more outspoken. But recent revelations suggest that Beijing actively intervened in the 2021 election with the goal of propping up the Liberal minority against the more aggressive Conservatives, an outrage the government is anxious not to dwell on.

In all, people around the country may not be entirely happy with Trudeau and his mixed policy record, but for different and conflicting reasons. It is these circumstances, and his deal with the New Democrats, that allow him to retain power, if not necessarily momentum, during his government’s midlife crisis.

Pierre Poilievre, meanwhile, is the opposition Conservatives’ third elected leader (along with two interim leaders) since Stephen Harper’s departure in 2015. The amiable Andrew Scheer took the party into the 2019 election and held the Liberals to a minority, but this was deemed insufficient and the party soon turned on a man who had been a compromise candidate from the start.

Scheer’s successor, Erin O’Toole, was too clever by half, winning the party leadership by campaigning as a scrappy upstart from the right but then pivoting to the moderate centre. This craftiness might have worked if not for the 2022 trucker convoy: O’Toole fatally equivocated and was thrown out as leader by his caucus, an unusual occurrence in Canada.

Poilievre, by contrast, is perhaps the most on-message politician in Canadian history. He has been a combative partisan since he was first elected in 2004, at twenty-five, and was a loyal junior soldier in the Harper government, eventually rising to mid-level cabinet posts.

Now forty-three, he displays remarkable discipline. He always speaks in complete sentences, never musing out loud, fumbling for words or needing to issue later retractions or clarifications. He is relentlessly partisan and hypercritical of the government. But he is not a random bomb-thrower: his words are precise and carefully chosen, though often leaving room for interpretation.

Poilievre is a model opposition leader, at least in the cynical sense. He is quick to jump on every government failing as evidence of gross incompetence, and he rarely concedes anything. His messages are carefully calibrated to undermine the government while widening and solidifying his own support. Unlike his predecessor, O’Toole, but much like Stephen Harper, Poilievre tends first and foremost to his party base, building its trust and never moving too far out in front. And it’s all done with an air of grave urgency and selfless concern for the country’s wellbeing.

Poilievre exemplifies the new type of conservative leadership: trying to ride the populist tiger without being eaten by it. He does a masterful job of handling the xenophobia of the, er, “Fuck Trudeau” crowd, issuing endless affirmations and validations of their frustrations without descending into their incoherent rage. Like most Canadian conservative elites, he avoids getting bogged down in social conservative issues like abortion, affirms LGBT rights, if not very loudly, and generally embraces rather than rejects immigration and racial diversity, though with little interest in systemic issues.

The one social divide Poilievre is happy to exploit is class. The current inflationary environment and concerns about the cost of living give him many opportunities to contrast himself with Trudeau’s elitist image and life experience; and his most provocative pledge while running for the leadership came when he vowed to fire the head of the Bank of Canada for insufficiently controlling inflation.

Poilievre also has a gift for driving media and intellectual elites bananas with provocative statements. The president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, long a favourite target of conservatives, recently fell into his trap. Poilievre has vowed to “defund” the CBC, and the frustrated CBC president pushed back, saying, “There is a lot of CBC-bashing going on — somewhat stoked by the Leader of the Opposition… I think they feel the CBC is a mouthpiece for the Liberal government.” Poilievre seized on this as further evidence of CBC bias against Conservatives.

And not just the CBC: Poilievre openly disdains the mainstream media in general, refused to take questions from the parliamentary press gallery for the first three months of his leadership, and prefers to communicate through social media and more friendly outlets.

With all this, Poilievre enjoys rockstar popularity within much of his party, while dissenters quietly fall into line. What remains unknown is his potential for growth. The downside of being a great opposition leader is that the country might feel no need to give you the bigger job. Poilievre has high unfavourability ratings, and is far less popular among women than men (the opposite of Trudeau). And we know little about his governing philosophy and what kind of prime minister he would be. He was not prominent enough in the Harper government to leave a clear track record, and his disciplined and relentlessly partisan personality gives few glimpses of how he may have grown over his two decades in politics.

Among the other opposition parties, Trudeau has little to fear from the New Democratic Party, though this is not necessarily the NDP’s fault. It has a perennial strategic problem: with the Liberals sucking up much of the oxygen on the progressive left, the party is left to choose between going hard left or extracting policy concessions. Current leader Jagmeet Singh chose the second route with the parliamentary deal, but once again the party is feeling it somehow got scammed as the Liberals bask in their secure minority.

The Bloc Québécois is a sharper opponent but may pose a greater threat to the Conservatives by stemming Tory growth in Quebec; as a general rule, the two parties fight for rural and small-town ridings while the Liberals maintain their Montreal base. And the Green Party of Canada, briefly a rising force, is in poor shape, riven by internal crises and at risk of returning to oblivion.

Trudeau himself remains in firm control of his party. Publicly his colleagues show nothing but undying loyalty to the family name that led the party out of third-place wilderness to the Promised Land. If anything different is happening in private, it is well hidden. This is a first for the modern Liberal Party of Canada, which was racked for decades by open tensions between leaders and overly eager heirs apparent, going back to John Turner’s rivalry with Pierre Trudeau, then Jean Chrétien’s with Turner, and then Paul Martin’s with Chrétien.

A brand-name leader leaves limited space for others to build their own political momentum. But perhaps precisely because little room exists for traditional politicking, Trudeau has been successful at building a team of credible successors, mainly women, noted for their ministerial competence.

Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister and minister of finance, is the government’s ubiquitous fixer after previous assignments in global affairs and international trade. But she risks the stereotypical gender trap: the woman sent in to do the dirty jobs and absorb the political mud while others take the credit. Mélanie Joly, the foreign minister, doesn’t have the same track record, but boasts deeper party roots and networks.

Newcomer Anita Anand, elected only in 2019, is considered the one to watch, having deftly handled vaccine procurements during the pandemic and now cleaning up a sexual-harassment mess in national defence. François-Philippe Champagne, the industry minister, demonstrates an eager competence, and is sitting on approving a telecom merger as he tries to figure out how to win credit for reducing Canadians’ phone bills.

(A fifth, non-government possibility is Mark Carney, the Canadian former head of the Bank of England, who has returned to Ottawa and is widely assumed to be interested in the job of prime minister, though he has yet to run for a parliamentary seat.)

But none of these figures remotely challenges Justin Trudeau’s pre-eminence; instead they keep his government going. He may still have many years in office. If he does suddenly choose political retirement, it will be a huge surprise to all. But it is unclear how his remaining years might unfold. Pierre Trudeau’s focus on constitutional issues was never in doubt, and his final term was all about completing unfinished business. Justin Trudeau has no obvious obsession or legacy project. But he does clearly like being prime minister. •

The post Trudeau’s challenge appeared first on Inside Story.

He would say that, wouldn’t he? But what was dismissed at the time as political hype is looking less improbable these days. In the dazzle of the seven teals storming home in previously safe Liberal seats in last year’s election, the Greens’ achievement in increasing their numbers by six — from one to four in the lower house and from nine to twelve in the Senate — has tended to be overlooked.

Representation in the Senate fell to eleven this week with the defection of Lidia Thorpe, the first Aboriginal senator from Victoria and the Greens’ First Nations spokesperson, over her advocacy of a No vote in this year’s referendum. But the loss of her Senate spot has the upside of ending a damaging internal split over the Voice.

In Victoria, although the party’s predictions of a “greenslide” in November’s election didn’t eventuate, its representation rose from three to four in the Legislative Assembly and from one to four in the Legislative Council. In a long and continuing journey, the Greens have not so much stormed the barricades as crept up on opponents who have habitually underestimated them.

Not so long ago, winning seats in lower houses was considered a hurdle too high for independents or minor parties. The Labor and Liberal parties simply had too much of a head start when it came to exceeding 50 per cent of the two-party vote.

Not anymore. Labor is in power in Canberra with less than a third of the first-preference vote — below its losing result under Bill Shorten in 2019 — while the Coalition parties did only slightly better on primaries (but a lot worse on preferences). Increasingly it is Labor and Liberal preferences that are being distributed to independents and smaller parties rather than the other way around.

It is thirty-three years since the Greens first won a place in the Senate, where proportional representation lowers the barrier for election to 14.3 per cent in a typical half-Senate election. That was with the election of Western Australia’s Jo Vallentine, who had previously represented the Nuclear Disarmament Party in the Senate.

In 1990, the Greens’ lower house vote was just 1.4 per cent; even though environmental issues were prominent that year, it was the Australian Democrats, with 11.3 per cent in the lower house, who benefited, together with the Hawke government, courtesy of Democrat preferences.

When Brown entered the Senate in 1996, he and Dee Margetts from Western Australia were the party’s sole representatives. At the following election the party’s national vote was still only 2.6 per cent in the lower house and 2.7 per cent in the Senate. Since then, the party has been on a mainly upward trajectory, though not without fluctuations and setbacks.

A significant shift upwards started in 2001, and by the 2010 election, when climate change policy was prominent, the Greens vote reached 11.8 per cent in the House and 13 per cent in the Senate. That was the year the party broke through in the lower house, with the election of Adam Bandt in the previously safe Labor seat of Melbourne. (Michael Organ had won a lower house seat for the Greens in a by-election the Liberals didn’t contest in the NSW seat of Cunningham in 2002 but was defeated in the general election in 2004.)

Twenty-ten was also the year the Greens had their first taste of real power — and its consequences — at the federal level. Their alliance with Julia Gillard’s minority government produced an agreement on climate change measures, but the association with her increasingly unpopular administration, defeated at the hands of a rampaging Tony Abbott in 2013, rubbed off. The Greens lost more than a quarter of their 2010 vote. But they resumed their upward trajectory in the next and subsequent elections.

In last year’s election, the Greens’ vote went up to 12.3 per cent in the House of Representatives and 12.7 per cent in the Senate. Its lower house vote was a record, whereas its Senate vote was marginally below its previous high. There might never have been a better time to stand for election representing anyone other than the major parties, but the competition for the minor-party and independent vote had also intensified.

According to the Australian Election Study — the detailed survey conducted by academics after each election — 24 per cent of the people who voted for the teals in 2022 had supported the Greens in the 2019 election. That was more than the 18 per cent who had previously voted for the Liberals.

Combined with the 31 per cent of teal supporters who had voted Labor in 2019, this at least partly tactical voting put the teals into parliament. They also reduced the Greens’ overall vote, though not in the seats that mattered. To the contrary, the party boosted its numbers in the House of Representatives from one to four, with the re-election of Bandt for a fifth term, and three seats in inner Brisbane won with strong grassroots campaigns, including two taken from the Liberal National Party

On one view, the Greens have reached or are close to the upper limit of their vote, except now in Victoria. Increasing their representation in the Senate will certainly be difficult for the foreseeable future, given they already have two senators in each state. But in the lower house the argument that the party has hit a ceiling is based partly on three assumptions that are looking outdated.

One is that a vote for the Greens is wasted because they can’t win. Increasingly, in inner-urban seats, that’s no longer true.

Another is that the party is too radical and left-wing to command mainstream support. So how come it’s winning Liberal seats? Possibly because the whole notion of left and right is breaking down, at least among younger voters.

The third assumption is that the Greens can’t overcome the dominance of the major parties and their habit of stealing any of their opponents’ policies that attract significant support. That tactic is becoming much harder for the big parties because they’re shedding support at both ends: the Liberals are losing votes to the teals on the one hand, and to One Nation on the other, while Labor struggles to straddle the gap between more conservative voters in the suburbs and those attracted to the Greens in the inner cities. And then there is the Brisbane factor, where community activism and volunteering, together with a solid base in local government, means Greens are identifying better than other parties with real voters.

Demographics are also working in the Greens’ favour. Better-educated voters are more likely to vote Greens and their numbers are rising as a proportion of the population. Younger voters are much more likely to support the Greens and more likely than in the past to keep doing so as they get older, countering the effect of an ageing population. Concern about global warming has been rising among the general voting population and it has been rising more among the young.

The greatest challenge for the Greens is spreading beyond its base in the inner cities. The suburban vote is large and — combined with the country vote in the case of the Coalition — that means there is still a long way to go to replace a big party.

Not that this deters Bob Brown who, when I contacted him for an update, stuck unhesitatingly to his prediction of the Greens as an unstoppable force. “I think it is too slow, but it’s inevitable and inexorable because the old parties — Labor, Liberal and National — simply can’t change from being in favour of widespread exploitation of nature,” he says. “These days I liken it to the slowly rising sea levels: people aren’t taking notice until the next storm hits.”

If the Albanese government remains popular — a big ask for any government these days — it may be able to stave off further Greens advances. But that can’t be taken for granted. The big risk for Labor is defections by supporters who think the government is not doing enough to tackle climate change.

The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss, who has worked for the Greens in the past, sees a particular vulnerability in the government’s position on coal and gas exports. “Labor for decades has focused on domestic emissions reductions, and they have always been slightly more ambitious than the Liberals and that has always been enough to win them first or second preferences on climate change,” he tells me. “Labor’s blind spot is supporting new coalmines and gas wells and arguing it doesn’t matter because they don’t count towards Australia’s emissions. This is an enormous opportunity for the Greens and the teals.”

The government argues that it is doing no more than following international practice in counting emissions where they are generated. But the United Nations and the International Energy Agency, among others, have said there can be no new coal and gas projects if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. The Greens claim 114 such projects are waiting for approval in Australia.

Underlying the government’s approach is the hope that the market will get it off the hook: that falling demand for coal and, in the longer run, gas will see many projects shelved. That means it won’t bear the odium for blocking development and jobs. In the meantime it has supported the development of the giant Scarborough gas project off the Western Australian coast, although on one estimate it could produce three times Australia’s current annual domestic emissions over its lifetime.

Environment minister Tanya Plibersek said last year that it was not sustainable or reasonable in a modern economy like Australia to argue for a stop to mining (overstating the Greens’ policy of no new coal or gas projects). Besides, so goes the refrain, other countries will simply buy their fossil fuels from somewhere else.

The trouble is that the United Nations and the International Energy Agency say that’s not good enough. Particularly not, so the Greens argue, since Australia is the world’s third-largest exporter of fossil fuels and new projects will mean we miss our targets for emissions reduction.

Labor is caught politically on this issue. Stopping what has been an important source of Australia’s wealth would create a sizeable target for the Coalition, as would the risk of domestic gas shortages, though that should be avoidable. But the hypocrisy of its present policy creates the real risk of further haemorrhaging to the Greens.

The teals aren’t buying the government’s arguments either. Sophie Scamps, who won the Sydney seat of Mackellar from the Liberals, said in September it was hard to believe that “new coal and gas projects are being assessed and approved without any consideration given to the future impact that emissions from these projects will have on our environment and on our nation.”

But the Greens have their own dilemma: they need to avoid being seen as wreckers. After making loud threatening noises over the legislation enshrining Labor’s 43 per cent emissions reduction target, they ended up supporting it after securing minor concessions. Now the party is ramping up the rhetoric over the bill for the safeguard mechanism, which requires major polluters, including those opening new gas wells, to gradually reduce their emissions.

Bob Brown’s arguments about the Greens’ future notwithstanding, nothing is inevitable in politics. Independents and smaller parties have come and gone in the past. The Democratic Labor Party, formed from a split in Labor in the 1950s, maintained representation in the Senate for two decades and helped keep Labor out of office for twenty-three years by directing its preferences to the Liberals. The Australian Democrats, founded by former Liberal minister Don Chipp “to keep the bastards honest,” were a force on the centre left of politics for more than three decades. They have both faded to near irrelevance.

But the Greens are looking increasingly like a permanent fixture. Apart from their federal representation, the party has twenty-seven MPs in state and territory parliaments and more than one hundred in local government.

With growth, though, have come some of the same issues that make life difficult for the main parties. Stephen Luntz, the party’s long-serving Victorian psephologist, identifies three streams within the party: social democratic, a more radical or Marxist grouping, and a pure environmental strand. “We do best when we manage to harness those altogether,” he says. “There are times when we don’t and some members seek to push others out.”

This has been evident particularly in New South Wales (though also in Victoria), with outbreaks of factional fighting, threatened splits and resignations. In last year’s federal election, the Greens’ vote in New South Wales was 10 per cent, well below the national average of 12.3 per cent.

In Victoria, meanwhile, a brawl over perceived attitudes to transgender members escalated at the end of last year to an extraordinary threat to expel the Victorian Greens from the national party, which happens to be headed by Victoria’s Adam Bandt.

Going into next month’s state election in New South Wales, the party nevertheless has three seats in each of the two houses of parliament. The trend away from the main parties, reinforced by both the federal and Victorian elections, provides opportunities, though optional preferential voting will make it harder for the Greens to win lower house seats.

To date, the Greens have enjoyed the luxury of a party seldom held responsible for implementing its policies. Twice when it wielded real influence it suffered politically. In 2009, Labor blamed it for blocking the Rudd government’s legislation for an emissions trading scheme because it wanted something better. In 2013 it used its alliance with the minority Gillard government to negotiate significant measures to tackle climate change but was hurt by the association with a divided and unpopular Labor Party.

With more MPs in the current parliament, the Greens are walking a fine line between taking a stand against new coal and gas mines and not blocking progress on tackling climate change. The extent to which the party carries off this balancing act will help determine its future trajectory.

But the climb up the electoral mountain will get steeper as more attention is paid to Greens policies and the consequences of implementing them inevitably arouse controversy. That is the price of power. •

The post Walking a fine line appeared first on Inside Story.

In the first three pages alone, she labels Morrison secretive, petty, vindictive, a liar, a bully and a betrayer of his closest colleagues. In case she hasn’t made herself clear, he’s also “a deeply flawed personality” and “a duplicitous, damaged leader with limited horizons and appalling judgement” who “rarely understood what Australians expected of a prime minister.”

Reporting how colleagues reacted to the news that Morrison had signed himself up to multiple ministries, Savva reaches for alliteration: Morrison is “messianic, megalomaniacal and plain mad.” Still steaming 384 pages later, in the book’s acknowledgements, she describes Morrison as the worst prime minister she has covered in a line stretching back to Labor’s Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s.

The headline revelations from Bulldozed have been well aired: former treasurer Josh Frydenberg denounced Morrison’s taking of his portfolio as “extreme overreach”; even Morrison’s most loyal colleagues, Stuart Robert and Alex Hawke, have been deeply critical of his actions; the governor-general and his wife expect their dinner guests to face the person next to them and sing the final verse of “You Are My Sunshine.” Particularly welcome is the fact that Savva has persuaded so many of her interviewees to speak on the record.

But what else does Bulldozed tell us — not just about the election campaign but also about the virtues and vices of that enduring phenomenon, the election book?

Savva is an experienced, well-connected political journalist who also spent nine years working in John Howard’s governments of 1996–2007, first as a media adviser to treasurer Peter Costello and then in the Cabinet Policy Unit. She knows politics from two perspectives, then, but her abiding interest is in the daily cut and thrust rather than how policy is created or run.

So she barely mentions robodebt, for example, despite Morrison’s having been social security minister when it was developed and prime minister when the government was forced to abandon it. The scheme was found to be unlawful, to have taken much-needed funds from low-income households, to have imposed acute anxiety and to have cost lives. It was at best punitive, at worst cruel.

But if, like many in the Canberra press gallery, Savva focuses less on policy than on politics, she differs in making sharp judgements derived from firmly held moral views. And she rarely fails to notice who does what to whom and to comment accordingly.

She notices, for instance, which politicians reached out to each other after the election loss and which didn’t. In the former camp is Josh Frydenberg, who called Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers to offer his congratulations despite having lost his own seat of Kooyong, and contacted Kristina Keneally to offer his commiserations on her failed attempt to move from the Senate to a lower house seat. Albanese called Frydenberg during the campaign to say he had ordered the removal of a photo posted online by a Labor supporter showing the then treasurer in a Nazi uniform, and Chalmers texted Frydenberg on election night to ask if he was okay.

Liberal MP Fiona Martin, on the other hand, lost her seat but received no call from her former leader because, Savva concludes, she had crossed the floor to vote against the government on the Religious Discrimination Bill. Other backbenchers did receive calls from Morrison.

Savva has a gift for the pithy summation. Of the inability or unwillingness of Morrison’s staff to save the doomed PM from himself — a failure that culminated in the burly Morrison crash-tackling a child on a soccer pitch in the campaign’s final week — she writes:

It was one stupid stunt too many, on top of so many stupid ones that preceded it, like washing a woman’s hair in a salon, or welding by lifting the protective mask with sparks flying, or playing the ukulele. No one dared tell him to stop. They kept feeding his addiction for prearranged acts of self-parody.

Although Morrison is Savva’s primary target, others don’t escape her acid tongue. Tony Abbott’s chief accomplishment as Liberal leader was to “destroy Julia Gillard and then himself.” Liberal backbencher Nicolle Flint resisted joining a WhatsApp support group for women because she was sick of women casting themselves as victims, until she “cast herself as a victim of a hateful campaign in her seat of Boothby in 2019 and announced her retirement from parliament.” Former National Party leader Barnaby Joyce cops this zinger: “Joyce was to Liberal voters what Roundup was to weeds.”

The great virtue of campaign books is their recounting of vivid scenes witnessed by their authors and well-reported details from inside the parties’ headquarters. Bulldozed is a fine exemplar of this tradition, though it offers more of the latter than the former. Its account of how Anthony Albanese spent election evening, for instance, is accompanied by a candid photo of the future PM wearing a footy jumper, ugg boots and a face flushed with excitement, sitting next to a smiling Penny Wong, who is leaning towards him.

We learn that Wong declined to be on a television panel after having to endure Labor’s unexpected 2019 loss on screen. Katy Gallagher, the ACT senator who filled that role in 2022, didn’t have a chance to eat during the television coverage and also failed to avail herself of a shot of the whisky fellow frontbencher Chris Bowen had stashed away. At 1am she found herself back in a hotel room, alone, savouring victory with a packet of chips from the minibar.

This kind of detail is catnip for political junkies. More substantively, though, Savva gives useful insights into how the parties went about their campaigns. She shows us the on-the-ground diligence of the Greens, who used a one-third increase in their volunteer numbers to knock on 260,000 doors around the country. She describes the teal campaigns in some detail — Monique Ryan in Kooyong attracting 2000 volunteers, for example, who knocked on 55,000 doors — and recounts sharp insights from Cathy McGowan, the former independent member for Indi, whose community-based campaign both inspired and offered a roadmap for the teals.

McGowan points to how, in 2019, Frydenberg had lost nearly 11 per cent of his primary vote in Kooyong, a party citadel, to independent candidate Oliver Yates and the Greens’ Julian Burnside. “If such a disorganised effort could reduce his primary vote to 49.4 per cent,” thought McGowan, “a better-organised, better-funded one could do a lot better.” Which of course it did.

Labor’s campaign was clearly better organised and better funded than it had been in 2019. And shrewder: Savva reports how the party’s national secretary, Paul Erickson, realised — when family circumstances required him to stay in the northern suburbs of Melbourne during the second half of 2020 — that the federal government’s attacks on premier Daniel Andrews fatally misread the dominant mood among locked-down locals. “Victorians wanted Andrews to succeed, not fail,” she writes, “because failure would lead to more illness, more deaths, and more pressure on the hospital system.”

As for this year’s Liberal campaign, it was equally clearly a mess, starting with the prolonged tug of war between the prime minister and the party’s NSW branch that led to candidates being preselected perilously close to the election. In that respect, Savva remarks, Morrison won the battle but lost the war: he got his way on preselections but failed dismally in his apparent strategy of sacrificing moderate Liberals to pick up outer-suburban seats.

The candidacy of Katherine Deves in the seat of Warringah, strongly supported by Morrison in the face of internal protests, epitomised the strategy in all its grisly brutality. When moderate Trent Zimmerman reluctantly attended a rally to support western Sydney candidates on the proviso that Deves wouldn’t be there, he was shocked to see the prime minister single her out from the podium. Former NSW senator Chris Puplick, also a moderate, went so far as to say post-election that Morrison’s strategy was an “act of treason” meriting his expulsion from the party.

Having been hailed as a master strategist after winning the 2019 election campaign, Morrison appears to have swallowed his own story, becoming convinced of his acumen as a campaigner and a prime minister. When he joined Mark Skaife in his Ford Mustang supercar at Bathurst in late 2021 and uttered the cheesy line that Australians were “looking out the front windscreen, not in the rear-view mirror,” Bulldozed reports that Peter Dutton remarked, “There’s a reason they call him Scotty from marketing.”

More importantly, Savva recounts how a key reason for the failure of the Religious Discrimination Bill was that the prime minister didn’t understand the bill’s implications. He didn’t see that it set up two potentially irreconcilable positions on the rights of religious bodies and LGBTQI+ people:

Once the implications of what he had done were explained to him, he is said to have responded by saying: “I didn’t mean that, that’s not what I had in mind.” One MP paraphrased his excuse thus: “He stuffed up, but couldn’t bring himself to say it.” Everyone felt dudded. The moderates were furious; the conservatives were incredulous.

It wasn’t only the prime minister whose self-perception went awry; so too did the news media’s, most of whose members took an awfully long time to realise that the 2022 election campaign was not a repeat of 2019. Well before the election, Morrison’s verbal bulldozing, characterised by many in the media as an impressive mastery of detail, was exposed — first in Sean Kelly’s excellent book, The Game, then on Shaun Micallef’s ABC TV program, Mad as Hell — as a sequence of non-sequiturs tending to collapse into a veritable word salad.

The notion that many members of the news media are unreflective and prone to herd behaviour is not new. The problem is that political narratives are like quick-drying cement. Billy McMahon was Australia’s worst prime minister and a figure of fun; Gough Whitlam was a political visionary but couldn’t run the economy to save himself. Both views have been challenged — by Patrick Mullins, biographer of McMahon (most recently in Inside Story), and by political scientist John Hawkins in the Conversation.

The quick-drying cement on the Coalition government of 2019–22 is that it was led by someone vying with McMahon for the title of Australia’s worst prime minister, whose deep personal unpopularity always made a 2022 election loss more than likely. But if the outcome was that obvious, why did so much media coverage either downplay what now seems conventional wisdom or ignore it altogether?

Savva is not immune from this affliction. She was certainly an early and consistent critic of Morrison’s leadership, but as Laurie Oakes reminded those attending the launch of Bulldozed in Canberra, she also wrote in her previous book, Plots and Prayers, that Morrison was “the most astute conservative politician of his generation.”

This contrast brings to mind the line uttered by Jack Nicholson as a mob hitman in the 1985 black comedy Prizzi’s Honor, when a particular character’s qualities are lauded. “If Marxie Heller’s so fuckin’ smart, how come he’s so fuckin’ dead?” Good question. Scott Morrison may well have been the most astute conservative politician of his generation and an epically failed prime minister. Explaining just how he went from one to the other requires more than a snapshot of the present, however vivid and well reported. •

Bulldozed: Scott Morrison’s Fall and Anthony Albanese’s Rise
By Niki Savva | Scribe | $35 | 391 pages

The post “No one dared tell him to stop” appeared first on Inside Story.

The by-election had been brought on by the resignation of the sitting Liberal member, external affairs minister Paul Hasluck, to become governor-general. At any other time, Labor would probably not have bothered to run in this very safe Liberal seat. Indeed, Labor had not run a candidate for Curtin even in the 1963 general election.

Such a cop-out would have been anathema to Whitlam. He had campaigned impressively in two by-elections in 1967, his first year of leadership, and regarded such events as opportunities to spread the party message to a citizenry that had not elected a federal Labor government since 1946.

Nineteen sixty-nine was also a federal election year. Having narrowly won a self-inflicted caucus ballot to reassert his leadership the previous year, Whitlam needed to perform strongly and pull off a decent swing at the election. While a Labor victory was almost in the realm of fantasy, winning just a few seats here and there was unlikely to cut it: too many enemies in his own party were ready to use a weak result as a good reason to turn up the heat on Whitlam.

Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war, and the use of conscripts to fight there, remained major issues, and while it is almost certain that Whitlam referred to them that night in 1969, my only abiding memory of his address was his criticism of the inequities and inefficiencies of Australia’s federal system. What especially stuck in my mind was his scathing description of how different state governments ordered different railway rolling stock from different countries when some coordination and cooperation would make more economic and practical sense. It didn’t exactly bring the (sparsely populated) house down, but it wasn’t without impact either.

Whitlam is associated so greatly with emotion and passion (especially after 1975) it is easy to forget that in opposition he spent much more time criticising the government for its inefficiency and ineptitude than decrying its moral failings (although sometimes it was both) — or that his enduring critique of Australian federalism’s shortcomings was something of a magnificent obsession. Even on conscription, his criticism was often as much about its inherent inefficiency (a view traditionally shared by many in the military) as about its violation of liberty and its cruel impact on those whose lives it took or damaged beyond repair.

What of the Curtin by-election? The seat was retained by the Liberals’ Vic Garland, who would go on to achieve ministerial office in the governments of William McMahon and Malcolm Fraser. But Labor achieved an estimated two-party-preferred swing of 7.9 per cent, closely matching the national swing of 7.1 per cent that Whitlam secured later that year in the general election.

That result set the stage for victory in 1972, although to regard it as inevitable is to ignore the risks Whitlam had to take, the best examples being the decision to launch a federal intervention into Labor’s left-controlled Victorian branch in 1970 and his visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1971, when Australia still recognised Taiwan as the real China.

The “inevitable” tag also ignores the modest nine-seat majority Labor achieved in 1972: the win was no landslide, and it is near certain that only Whitlam within federal Labor’s parliamentary ranks could have brought the conservative domination to an end.

That night in April 1969, I walked home reasonably impressed. But my impression would have been of little use to Whitlam: the voting age was twenty-one and I was too young to vote in 1969 — and indeed, even in 1972. •

The post Before it was time appeared first on Inside Story.

“Get your hands off me,” an angry photographer in a pink shirt snarls at a television reporter. Punches are thrown. Blood spurts from the nose of a radio journalist. “Come on, simmer down,” people shout. Someone warns the pink-shirted troublemaker: “This is going all over the country, you know.” More punches are thrown. “Go to buggery, punk,” the photographer screams at a member of the ABC crew. “This is not the ABC studio.”

One of the Labor Party’s public relations team, David White, is pleading with the mob to “ease back, make room for the camera.” Tony Whitlam, the six foot five inch son of the Labor leader, moves in to try to break up the scuffles. He is patient at first, then he flushes angrily and clenches a fist. A Whitlam aide, Richard Hall, places a hand on his shoulder and says, “Easy, Tony.” David White motions to a rather large member of the Canberra press corps and whispers, “Stand in the doorway and look imposing while I get some policemen.”

Inside the house, oblivious to the violence on the patio, Gough Whitlam and his wife, Margaret, are cutting a victory cake. In the icing are the words “Congratulations Gough Whitlam, Prime Minister, 1972.” The party workers sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” but the noise from the garden drowns them out.

“We should have thought of barricades,” mutters Richard Hall, as he and other members of the Whitlam staff hurriedly make new arrangements for the prime minister–elect to face the television cameras inside, away from the mob. Party guests are cleared from the sunroom. The big ABC camera is lifted through the door. Lights are set up. Mrs Whitlam appears and is questioned by radio and TV men, but her answers are inaudible more than a few feet away. Whitlam’s driver, Bob Miller, fights his way through the crush with a white piano stool for his boss to sit on.

About forty media people are packed into a room that measures no more than twenty feet by fifteen feet — together with the TV camera, the lights, the microphones. The heat is overwhelming. Television reporters sweat under their make-up. Then, at 11.27pm, Gough Whitlam squeezes along the passage and takes his place on the stool.

Radio reporters lunge at him with microphones as he begins to speak. “All I want to say at this stage is that it is clear that the majority given by New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania is so substantial that the government will have a very good mandate to carry out all its policies. These are the policies which we have put in the last parliament, and throughout the campaign we did not divert from them, we were not distracted from them, and we are very much reassured by the response the public gave to our program… We are, of course, very much aware of the responsibility with which the people have now entrusted us.”

The TV and radio men begin to fire questions about the actions he plans as prime minister, but he stops them. “I can’t go on answering questions like this… I have to wait for a call from the governor-general.” But it is enough. He has claimed victory, and now he moves out into the garden to mingle with Labor supporters, friends and neighbours who have attended similar parties at the unimposing Whitlam house in Albert Street, Cabramatta, every election night since he moved there in 1957.

Twenty-five miles away, at Drumalbyn Road, Bellevue Hill, a far grander residence in a far grander suburb, William McMahon has watched the Whitlam performance on television. He had been about to go outside to face the cameras himself, but now he must wait another ten minutes or so. Early that afternoon one of his press officers, Phillip Davis, anticipating a Labor win, had drafted a statement conceding defeat. At 10pm he and speechwriter Jonathon Gaul had retired to the family room in the McMahon home to dictate a final version to a stenographer.

Now McMahon reads it over, scribbling in a note at one point to “thank government supporters.” Then he says, “All right, let’s get it over with.” A staff member asks if he is sure he knows what he is going to say, and he nods. Davis asks Mrs Sonia McMahon if she minds accompanying her husband. “Nothing would stop me going out with him,” she says.

Outside the door are the cameras and a tunnel of pressmen. To the right nearly 200 well-wishers — neighbours, party supporters, curious sightseers — are gathered. McMahon walks out. His wife, looking strained but dry-eyed, follows. “Mr Whitlam has obviously won and won handsomely,” says the politician who has led the Liberal–Country Party Coalition to its first defeat for twenty-three years.

“There can be no doubt about the trend in New South Wales and Victoria, and they show a decisive majority for him. I congratulate him, and I congratulate his party, too. For my own part, I accept the verdict of the people as I always would do… Mr Whitlam must also accept the fact that we are an opposition that will stick to our Liberal principles and will give him vigorous opposition whenever we feel that he is taking action which is contrary to the interests of the Australian people.”

He thanks those who voted for the Coalition, and then adds, “Above all, I want to thank my own staff who have been driven relentlessly over the last few months and have stuck with me, they’ve helped me, and they’ve never wilted under the most heavy and severe oppression.” Finally: “The election is gone, it is over, and Mr Whitlam is entitled to be called upon by the governor-general to form a government.”

It has been a dignified statement, delivered with scarcely a tremor in his voice. The man who has gone through an election campaign reading speeches from an autocue has departed from his prepared text, and improved on it. He has been more generous in his references to his opponents than Davis and Gaul had been. The appreciative remarks about his staff are totally unscripted, coming as a shock to people who in the past have felt themselves to be little more than numbers to their employer.

McMahon refuses to answer questions on the reasons for the Coalition’s defeat. “That’s something for deep consideration,” he tells the reporters. Then he turns away and, with Mrs McMahon, plunges into the crowd clustering around the wrought-iron double gates and across the gravel driveway. For several minutes his diminutive figure is lost from sight as he moves among the well-wishers, shaking hands and accepting condolences.

Gough Whitlam and William McMahon spent polling day, Saturday 2 December 1972, touring booths in their electorates. There are forty-one booths in the sprawling electorate of Werriwa in Sydney’s outer-western suburbs, and Whitlam, accompanied by his wife and the Labor Party’s radio and television expert, Peter Martin, visited all of them.

Mr McMahon, too, visited all thirty-three booths in his seat of Lowe, not far away but closer to the city. On his way home he dropped in on several booths in Evans, one of the marginal seats the Liberals feared they would lose. The sitting Liberal member, the navy minister Dr Malcolm Mackay, was one of his closest supporters, and McMahon wanted to help him if he could, even at that late stage. Then McMahon returned to Bellevue Hill, had a swim in his pool and settled down to wait with his staff and a few friends. Whitlam went back to Cabramatta to prepare for the party.

The Whitlam election night party is by now a tradition in Werriwa. For several months before the 1972 election, members of Whitlam’s staff — particularly his press secretary and speechwriter Graham Freudenberg — had been trying to persuade him to change the venue, to hold it at a club or a hotel. With a Labor victory likely, they foresaw security problems.

The crowd, they warned, would be too big for the small cottage and its pocket-handkerchief garden. But Whitlam insisted the function would be held at the house as usual. The party workers in the electorate expected it, he said, and that was that. But he made one concession. He agreed that, while the figures were coming in and he was studying the count, he would retire to the Sunnybrook Motel two blocks away.

Mrs Whitlam supervised the arrangements for the party. A bar was set up in a corner of the back garden. In another corner was a makeshift toilet labelled “gents.” She explained proudly to early arrivals, “It’s a two-holer. Have a look at it.” At various places in the back garden were five television sets, their cords snaking among the shrubs to power points inside the house. On the roof, television technicians set up a microwave link disc, giving the house a science fiction appearance. There were three television outside broadcast vans in the street near the front gate.

On the patio, the television men had placed a ten foot high microphone to pick up the sounds of the party. It produced considerable amusement. “Have you seen it?” Peter Martin kept asking people. “It’s the Gough Whitlam microphone stand, the first one we’ve found that’s tall enough for him.” There was one television camera set up high, near the bar, which could sweep the whole garden. The other, on the patio, was to record whatever Whitlam might say in either victory or defeat. One of the bedrooms had been taken over as a press room, with half a dozen telephones on a long table.

Preparations in Bellevue Hill were more modest. At the insistence of Phil Davis the Liberal Party provided a tent for the press beside the swimming pool, with a few tables and chairs. Davis had stocked it with a car fridge and $30 worth of beer. There were no television sets until the TV men themselves set up monitors, but Davis left his transistor radio with the journalists mounting the vigil which, as the night wore on, they dubbed the “death watch.”

In the lounge room were two telephones and two portable television sets for McMahon and his close advisers. In the family room another set had been provided for the stenographers and Commonwealth car drivers on his staff.

McMahon appeared briefly to talk to the press and the cameras before the figures began coming in. He was confident of victory for the Coalition, he told them, and had no worries about his own position in Lowe. No one could be sure whether he believed it, but he appeared jaunty enough, immaculate in his freshly pressed blue suit, white shirt, crimson tie and carefully polished shoes. With a wave he disappeared into the house, not to be seen again for more than three hours except in silhouette through the lounge room windows.

It was a strange atmosphere inside the house, tense but not emotional. McMahon settled down at one telephone. John Howard, a vice-president of the NSW Liberal Party, remained glued to the other. Davis, Gaul, McMahon’s private secretary Ian Grigg, Mrs McMahon, and several friends of the family watched the results on the television sets. Little was said.

McMahon received frequent reports on his own seat from scrutineers, and remained outwardly calm even when it looked as though he might lose it. Only once did he snap at a party worker when conflicting figures were phoned in from Lowe. He was in constant contact with electoral officials in Canberra, and with the federal director of the Liberal Party, Bede Hartcher, who was in the national tally room. From time to time Howard handed him figures. Davis and Gaul kept him up to date with the figures coming up on television. He scribbled on a notepad, calculating the government’s position and appreciating it far better than anyone else in the room.

McMahon has the ability to “feel” a political situation before most other people. It is one of the reasons he was able to survive so many crises in his turbulent career, the talent that earned him a reputation as a political Houdini. He got the “gut” feeling that told him the government was heading for defeat almost as soon as the early figures began to come in. He was ready to concede by 10pm, but wanted to make sure Lowe was safe before he faced the questions of the press.

Hartcher and other Liberal officials urged him to wait, telling him there was still a chance the government could scrape back, but he knew better. Then [Liberal frontbencher] John Gorton appeared on television, admitting that Labor had won. The customs minister, Don Chipp, also conceded. And the treasurer, Billy Snedden. McMahon knew he had to go out on the lawn, where the cameras and the journalists were waiting like vultures. But first he had a cup of tea. Mrs McMahon handed it to him, and those in the room watched as he spooned in the sugar. His hand was steady.

The ordeal of the statement over, McMahon returned to the small group in the lounge room and sat quietly for a time. Then he perked up. “Oh well, that’s it,” he said. “We’ve got some champagne. Let’s open it.” From then on the mood was almost one of relief that it was all over. Party workers from Lowe dropped in, and some NSW Liberal Party officials. Outside, their work over for the night, journalists and TV men were drinking in the tent. Davis and Gaul joined them.

At about 1am a young woman broke through the security screen around the McMahon house by clambering over a fence from next door. She joined the press group, and gushed over McMahon and his wife when they emerged soon after for a final, off-the-record chat. Only once during the night did McMahon lapse into introspection and ask rhetorically, “Where did we go wrong?” He did not offer an answer to the question. Later he said, “At least we didn’t lose as many seats as in 1969.”

Whitlam’s staff spirited him away from his home to the motel soon after 8pm. Very few people knew where he had gone. It was well over an hour before a group of journalists and photographers tracked him down, and they were kept locked out of the room where he was studying the results.

Around the room were four television sets tuned to different channels. At one end was a table with a bank of seven phones. Richard Hall was constantly on the phone talking with scrutineers and candidates round the country, getting figures before they were posted in the tally room. Clem Lloyd, Lance Barnard’s press secretary, phoned through figures from the national tally room at regular intervals. David White was also manning phones.

Mungo MacCallum, the Nation Review journalist, had been co­opted to work a calculating machine. Whitlam sat in an armchair facing the television set tuned in to the ABC, but frequently he screwed himself around to watch the other sets as they showed new figures. Peter Martin was there. Graham Freudenberg sat on the bed listening intently to the analysis of British psephologist David Butler on Channel 7. Another of Whitlam’s press aides, Warwick Cooper, hovered in the background. His private secretary, Jim Spigelman, was making calculations on a notepad.

Bob Miller poured glasses of beer and orange juice for the workers. Also present was Ian Baker, press secretary of the Victorian opposition leader, Clyde Holding. There was whispered conversation. “It’s starting to look as though the DLP vote is down in Victoria,” said Martin at 8.45. “A trend is developing to us in the outer suburbs,” Hall told Whitlam a few minutes later. “We’ve got Phillip,” Freudenberg announced at 8.50. Placing his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone, Hall read out the first figures for MacArthur and told Whitlam, “It looks like Bate is going to poll well.” Less than a minute later he interrupted another phone conversation to tell Whitlam, “There’s no doubt about it, the DLP is ratshit in Victoria. They’re going down.”

But Whitlam remained cautious. When the ABC showed figures for Mitchell and compere Robert Moore told viewers that Liberal member Les Irwin was trailing his Labor opponent, Whitlam commented, “It’s still not marvellous.” Hall announced. “There’s a clear absolute majority to us in Hume,” but Whitlam replied, “Later figures always go against us. We’d have to have a very good lead.” One of the TV screens showed Liberal Alan Jarman trailing in Deakin, but Whitlam said, “He’ll still get in, though.”

Whitlam showed little emotion as he stared intently at the television screen, until a little after 9pm when Hall told him, “I reckon we’ve won Casey, Holt, Latrobe, Diamond Valley and Denison.” On the TV set tuned to Channel 9, [journalist] Alan Reid was saying, “If this trend continues I’d say Labor is home and hosed.” Then Whitlam allowed himself a smile, and sprawled back in his chair clearly more relaxed.

At that point he knew he had almost certainly won. There was irony when one of the channels rescreened McMahon’s earlier interview, showing him saying, “I feel more confident than I did this morning.” But there was bad news, too. At 9.05 MacCallum looked up from his calculator and remarked, “In Bendigo David Kennedy is only on 48 per cent. He’ll go to preferences.” Whitlam became sombre again as he said, “But will he get them?” At 9.15 Whitlam gave Hall permission to phone the Labor candidate in Denison, John Coates, to congratulate him on a certain win.

Then Hall reported that Labor scrutineers had no doubt the party would win Evans. At 9.18 one of the staff let out a cry of “Jesus!” as figures for Flinders on one of the TV sets showed the labour and national service minister, Phillip Lynch, fighting to hold the seat. Then at 9.20 MacCallum performed some more calculations and announced to the assembled company, “I think we can send the white smoke up the chimney now.”

From then on, the mood in the room was one of elation. “Welcome home Victoria!” said Spigelman as one of the television computers came up with a printout showing a swing of 6 per cent to Labor there. NSW party officials had told Whitlam there was a good chance of a Labor win in the Country Party–held seat of Paterson, but he had not believed them. At 9.26, when Freudenberg said, “They were right about Paterson,” he sprang out of his chair with an astounded cry of “What?”

He rubbed his hands together gleefully when Freudenberg hold him a few minutes later, “Look. Race is in.” Race Mathews, his former private secretary, had a clear lead over the minister for the environment, Aborigines and the arts, Peter Howson, in the Victorian seat of Casey. At that point, Bob Miller was sent to fetch Mrs Whitlam, and as soon as she arrived Hall popped the cork from the first champagne bottle. Glasses were clinked all round. “Many happy returns,” said Mrs Whitlam.

Only the news from the South Australian seat of Sturt, where Labor’s Norm Foster had been defeated, interrupted the celebratory atmosphere. “We can’t really do without Norm,” said Mrs Whitlam. “We need someone with that sort of tenacity and ferocity.” Her husband was quickly on the phone to Foster, offering commiserations and promising to find a job for him.

But Whitlam was possibly more upset by the bad result for Labor in Bendigo, and he phoned David Kennedy too. The Labor leader has what his staff describe as “a thing” about by-elections. They have played an important part in his political career. It was his role in the Dawson by-election in Queensland which saved him from expulsion over his fight with the ALP machine on State Aid in 1966. In 1967 the by-election victory in Corio in Victoria was his first triumph as party leader, and gave him the leverage to secure reforms to the structure of the federal ALP conference and executive. In the same year the Capricornia by-election success helped him to “break” Harold Holt. In 1969 a by-election in Bendigo had shown his mastery over the then prime minister, Gorton. The possibility of losing one of the seats to which he had devoted such time and effort in a by-election campaign appeared to affect him deeply.

Whitlam had been hoping McMahon would go on television first to concede. But soon after 10.30 he decided further delay would be fruitless, and prepared to return to the house and the waiting cameras and pressmen. But first he and Mrs Whitlam posed for the photographers who were gathered outside the motel room. In typical fashion, they hammed it up. “This is my best side,” said Whitlam. “Well, my nose is too big on this side,” replied his wife, “but I’ll do it for you, dear.” Their eighteen-year-old daughter turned up and gave her father a hug. “Are you happy now, Dad?” she asked. “Yes, Cathy,” he said. “I hope you are.”

Back at the house a British journalist was phoning a story to his paper in London. “Australia has a new prime minister,” he dictated. “Yes, I’m quite serious.” In the back garden the party guests were milling around the television sets, sending up loud cheers as each new set of figures confirmed the Labor victory.

The NSW ALP president, John Ducker, wandering through the crowd beer in hand, did not seem to quite believe it. “There’s no doubt, is there?” he kept asking people. “Billy McMahon’s going to lose his seat,” a gloriously drunk party worker shouted at the top of his voice. Laughter rippled from one end of the garden to the other.

Then the word was passed excitedly through the crowd: “Gough’s coming. He’s here.” Whitlam’s tall figure could be seen slowly forcing its way through the crush as people tried to shake his hand or simply touch him.

Photographers held their cameras above their heads, trying to get shots. “Good on yer, Gough,” people shouted. And then the chanting started. “We want Gough! We want Gough!” Slowly he made his way to the sunroom door, stood there a moment smiling, and then disappeared inside.

Sometime later, when he had made his television appearance and done the right thing by his party guests, Whitlam returned to the motel and the stock of champagne for a quieter celebration. And there, away from the cameras and the crush, he was more expansive in his comments to journalists. The Liberals would have lost under any leader, he said, adding, “It’s just too silly for them to blame or for us to thank Bill McMahon. The whole show was running out of steam.” Then, a little wearily, “It’s been a long, hard road.” •

This is an extract from The Making of an Australian Prime Minister, published by Cheshire in 1973.

The post A party for the people appeared first on Inside Story.

“The funny little man,” Perkin told a colleague, “has convinced himself that he is a brilliant success and sees himself winning handsomely in November and remaking the nation in the following three years; leading them” — the Coalition — “to victory in 1975, and then retiring with honours thick upon him. God save us all!”

To modern readers, McMahon’s hopes seem as preposterous as they did to Perkin. Most accounts of his government use the same adjectives — incompetent, reactive, hapless, embarrassing — and follow the same line: nothing of consequence was achieved between 1969 and 1972, and the election of the Gough Whitlam–led Labor Party was never in question.

This view has several effects. One is to diminish Labor’s genuine achievement in 1972, when a party scarred by twenty years of discord and electoral failure convinced voters that the vision, policies and leadership Australia needed were to be found among its MPs. Another is to render the years from 1969 to 1972 as a shapeless interregnum between the going of prime minister Robert Menzies and the coming of Gough, an antipodean Dark Ages during which nothing really happened. The last is to leave our understanding of those years profoundly incomplete by failing to take seriously the efforts of the Coalition government to govern during a period of immense change.

While confident of victory, Whitlam always insisted the 1972 campaign was a live contest. And while he was never backward in adducing McMahon’s flaws, he also perceived an opponent more wily than popularly imagined. As prime minister, Whitlam argued, McMahon had tried to “bestride two horses”: “He claimed to be the real heir to Menzies, yet he also claimed to recognise and accept the need for change in a changing world.” And the result? “This balancing act he did with some skill.”

A “balancing act” is one useful way of understanding the Coalition government’s actions during 1969–72, of seeing how it tried relentlessly, first under John Gorton and then under McMahon, to manoeuvre itself into a position where another election victory might be possible.

At a distance, the events following the 1969 election are confounding: the leader of the victorious party was immediately challenged by two of his own ministers.

With the benefit of hindsight, the 1969 election result — which resulted in the Coalition’s loss of sixteen seats — confirmed the waning fortunes of a government in office for two decades. At the time, though, it seemed more like a stern rebuke to prime minister John Gorton. Vaulting him from the Senate into the prime ministership after the unexpected death of Harold Holt, Gorton’s colleagues had elevated him in the belief that he possessed sound and sorely needed political judgement, and that his ability to perform on television would be compelling to voters.

The two years that followed brought both beliefs into question. Gorton’s ambivalence towards some of his colleagues and his tendency to unilateral decision-making antagonised many within the government and increasingly alarmed those outside it. Strong-willed and confident, he rarely backed down: “John Grey Gorton,” he rounded on one impertinent senator, “will bloody well behave precisely as John Grey Gorton bloody well decides he wants to behave!”

After a strong start, moreover, Gorton’s abilities as a public speaker seemed to desert him over the course of 1968–69. Tortuously convoluted prime ministerial statements became so much the norm that Whitlam took to ridiculing Gorton simply by quoting him verbatim. As one famous example ran, “On the other hand, the AMA agrees with us, or, I believe, will agree with us, that it is its policy, and it will be its policy, to inform patients who ask what the common fee is, and what our own fee is, so that a patient will know whether he is to be operated on, if that’s what it is, on the basis of the common fee or not.”

Amid these personal shortcomings were more serious policy disagreements. During the 1969 campaign, Gorton had gestured towards traditional Coalition strengths as well as “new horizons”: alongside hawkish statements on national security and tax cuts, he promised increased spending on education, a new Australian film school, and reforms to healthcare. But his statements about defence did little to assuage suspicious hardliners in his own party and in the avowedly anti-communist Democratic Labor Party, which generally backed the government. And his moves to withdraw Australian troops from Vietnam failed to mollify the anti-war protesters who took to the streets in successive moratorium marches.

Gorton’s domestic policies, meanwhile, many of which included an empowered Commonwealth reaching into matters traditionally the purview of the states, antagonised state premiers and colleagues whose fidelity to federalism was a matter of faith.

All this fed into the leadership challenge launched less than two weeks after the election. While treasurer McMahon and national development minister David Fairbairn failed in their bid to displace Gorton, the fissures their challenge exposed didn’t close over. A ministerial reshuffle to blood a younger generation of MPs — including Malcolm Fraser, Billy Snedden and Andrew Peacock — spurred suggestions of cronyism. Backbenchers attacked government legislation in the privacy of the government party room and the public spaces of the House and Senate.

A poor showing at the half-Senate election, late in 1970, was followed by an unsuccessful party-room motion for Gorton’s resignation; then a murky series of press reports in March 1971 spurred Fraser to resign as defence minister and savage Gorton in the House. A confidence vote on Gorton’s leadership tied; Gorton resigned as prime minister; McMahon was elevated to the top job; and — farcically — Gorton was elected, if only for a short time, to the deputy party leadership. As one reporter exclaimed after the last of these events, “You must be joking.”

The bitterness engendered by these developments lingered. Trust was non-existent, whispers of further leadership spills continued, and policy disagreements were so pronounced that the break-up of the Coalition was even broached. In McMahon, the government had a leader who had done much to sow the seeds of this turmoil and who, in office, would sow more still; but, again in McMahon, it had a politician with twenty years of experience at the highest levels of government who was willing to do all he could to stay in office. As governor-general Paul Hasluck wryly remarked, McMahon would “not be cumbered either by ideals or principles” in pursuing that goal.

McMahon’s at-all-costs attitude surfaced conspicuously when he began shifting and tacking on the question of whether Australia should extend diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China, abandoning its long recognition of the Taiwan-based Republic of China and the fiction that the latter remained the sole, legitimate government of China.

In 1958, as a relatively lowly minister, McMahon had argued that the People’s Republic should not be admitted into the international community until it had renounced the use of violence; as minister for external affairs, in 1970, he agreed that the country could not forever remain on the periphery but insisted on putting conditions on any kind of recognition or engagement. His view was influenced more by domestic political circumstances than any moral or strategic factor: “Remember, please, that we have a DLP,” McMahon told deputy secretary Mick Shann, “and that its reaction must be considered!”

By the time the Gorton cabinet reviewed its relationship with the People’s Republic, in February 1971, its resolution was similarly timid: it accepted that the government in Peking (as Beijing was known) was engaging with the international community and that Australia’s policy of diplomatic recognition would have to be reappraised — but decided that it would, for the moment, follow the lead of the United States.

The consequences of this hesitant ambivalence began to play out a month after McMahon became prime minister, when Whitlam sought an invitation to visit Peking. McMahon attacked him on grounds of naivety for engaging with a government that had not yet renounced violence; then, when Whitlam’s invitation to visit was granted, announced that his government would “explore the possibilities of establishing a dialogue” with Peking.

In the space of a month, McMahon had put his government astride two horses, of opposition and of engagement. He still believed the government to be riding high when Whitlam visited China in July. Criticising the Labor leader for his “instant coffee diplomacy,” he told a gathering of Liberal Party members that China “has been a political asset to the Liberal Party in the past and is likely to remain one in the future.”

That future was terribly short-lived. Within days of Whitlam’s visit, US president Richard Nixon announced he would visit China the following year. McMahon sputtered. He told the press that “normalising relations with China,” as Nixon was doing, had been his government’s policy all along, but in private he was angry and embarrassed, aghast that he had been so publicly undercut. Lashing out, he sacked his foreign minister and criticised Nixon. In the eyes of the Americans he was “on edge and almost frenzied in trying to stay on top of his job”; to the British, McMahon knew already that he was “not much good in the part” of prime minister.

McMahon eventually conceded that his government had failed on China. He was aware that Whitlam had won considerable plaudits and that he himself had looked a fool. Yet he continued to try to ride the two horses. He explored accompanying Nixon to Peking; he tried to find a halfway point between complete aversion and the diplomatic recognition Whitlam had promised. Rebuffed by the Chinese, he was then rebuked by DLP leader Vince Gair, who denounced the contest over who was more “ahead” on the issue of China. Stung, McMahon refused an invitation for army minister Andrew Peacock to visit China as part of an unofficial business party.

When the People’s Republic was admitted to the UN General Assembly and took a seat on the Security Council late in 1971, McMahon’s attempt to reconcile opposing pressures finally came to an end. Resiling from engagement with China was no longer an option, and yet China would not accept anything less than diplomatic recognition. The horses had bolted.

Another attempted balancing act came in the middle of 1971 when the South African government sent an all-white Springboks rugby team to Australia. Foreshadowing an October tour by South Africa’s cricket side, the Springboks became a barometer of how fast public opinion could turn on an issue. A Gallup poll taken in March 1971 had found that almost 85 per cent of Australians thought the South Africans should come, and most members of McMahon’s government believed, as Menzies did, that the cancellation of a South African tour of England in 1970 had been a surrender to the “threats of a noisy minority” and were not willing to do likewise.

McMahon genuflected to respectable opinion by making much of his disappointment that South Africa had sent a whites-only team, but he baulked at any real response. “We believe that the [all-white] policy in respect of teams is unfortunate, but it is nevertheless a South African matter, and not our matter,” he said privately during what happened to be the UN International Year for Action to Combat Racism and Race Discrimination.

Having effectively condoned a racially selected team, McMahon’s government then directed that Australia abstain from voting on a UN resolution condemning the application of apartheid in sport. It then helped sustain the tour by making available an RAAF aircraft to ferry the Springboks around the country after the ACTU and its president Bob Hawke promised to impose a “black ban” on the tour. “We are not going to be beaten here,” McMahon said privately.

Disruptive protests met with furious responses from Liberal–Country state governments. Victorian premier Henry Bolte called the demonstrators “louts and larrikins”; Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen government declared a state of emergency so as to more easily crack heads. Amid the barbed-wire barricades, smoke bombs and police batons, McMahon mused about calling an election with a law-and-order theme.

By the time the South Africans left, the weight of public opinion had shifted completely. McMahon’s own ministers were against an early election and dreaded the prospect of a repetition of the controversy when the South African cricketers arrived in summer. Not willing to admit defeat, the government refused to decide whether that tour should take place. It threw the ball to Sir Donald Bradman, chair of the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket, leaving it to him to make the necessary decision to call off the tour.

Yet another example of McMahon’s balancing act emerged at the end of 1971, when he made clear to a cabinet committee that he supported applications from Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory for leases on consolidated lands, provided they could satisfy criteria related to their association with the land. Had this been translated into government policy, it would have been an acknowledgement that a traditional association with the land should be a basis for land rights claims. His view diverged from those of the cabinet committee members considering the government’s approach to Indigenous issues. The fact that McMahon’s subsequent wavering failed to bring them around was reflected in their decision in late December 1971.

When McMahon issued a statement on Aboriginal policy on 26 January, it featured a gaping hole. The new objectives, though laudable, were overshadowed by the government’s failure on land rights. McMahon announced the creation of a new form of lease but ruled out land claims made on the basis of traditional association. The reason? To do so would introduce a “new, probably confusing component, the implications of which could not clearly be foreseen, and which could lead to uncertainty and possible challenge in relation to land titles elsewhere in Australia which are at present unquestioned and secure.”

The attempt to hew to a conservative course — rejecting a traditional association with the land — and simultaneously announce updated objectives for government policy fell flat. The timing hardly helped: McMahon’s statement came on a day traditionally considered a day of mourning by Indigenous peoples. The statement spurred one of the striking images of that year: four Indigenous men sitting beneath an umbrella as the sun rose on the lawns outside Parliament House the following day, a sign strung up beside them reading “Aboriginal Embassy.”

Failures like these left the government far from the “first, fine, careless rapture” that Menzies had suggested was necessary to stay in office. “There is an imminent feeling of decay about the place,” recorded Liberal MP Bert Kelly when parliament resumed late in February 1972.

Blame for the government’s woes fell almost entirely on McMahon. As Kelly asked his diary, “What the devil do we do next? We’ve got Billy McMahon elected as our leader and obviously he is not doing it at all well and everybody knows this. What we can’t think of is, how do we get rid of him? I suppose the only hope we have is that he suddenly drops dead one day.”

The unrest stirred by dire polling, as well as whispers that John Gorton might try to supplant him, didn’t bring out the best in McMahon. “Christ, he must be mad,” said one MP, after one blundering parliamentary debate by the prime minister. “What is wrong with him?” asked another.

Everything the government and its prime minister did seemed to end in disaster. McMahon’s late-1971 trips to the United States and Britain had been memorable for a mangled toast to his hosts, his wife’s revealing dress and Richard Nixon’s inability to remember his name. A swing through Southeast Asia early in 1972 became an “excursion to blunderland,” declared a Canberra News journalist, extinguishing any hopes of making defence and foreign affairs a centrepiece of a re-election campaign.

But ministers also shared in the blame, with no small number of blunders and public spats occupying headlines. Some ministers dithered; others were disengaged. David Fairbairn regarded the five months he spent as education minister, in 1971, as hard and unrewarding, and departed the portfolio admitting he had not achieved anything.

Environment minister Peter Howson, meanwhile, citing the lack of an explicit directive, did himself no favours when he refused to lend Australia’s support to New Zealand’s criticism of renewed French nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1972, putting the government at odds with public opinion. (A belated move that mainly suggested the government was going along with the public for craven reasons.)

The economic outlook also proved difficult for the government. The Coalition had been nearly broken by a currency revaluation forced upon it when the Smithsonian Agreement — which pegged currencies to the US dollar — came into operation in December 1971. Slowing economic growth and rising inflation spooked treasurer Billy Snedden and McMahon, who were soon at loggerheads over how to get the economy moving in time for the election. The government was caught between the competing objectives of economic rigour and voter-attractive spending.

After a tough budget in 1971, the increased pensions and reduced personal income taxes in the government’s April 1972 mini-budget suggested a new focus on the pending election. As deputy prime minister Doug Anthony admitted, “I wouldn’t be very honest if I said that this [the election] isn’t in the back of our minds.” The budget proper, issued in August, was even more electorally focused: “Taxes down; pensions up; and growth decidedly strengthened,” as Billy Snedden remarked.

The attempt to find a way between change and stasis often saw progress. Under customs minister Don Chipp, the government liberalised censorship policy yet also refused to authorise the publication of Philip Roth’s controversial novel Portnoy’s Complaint in Australia — only for a monied publisher to embarrass the government by evading its jurisdiction and publishing the book anyway. The government was ignominiously forced to remove its ban on Portnoy in 1971, and the following year an attempt to hold the line on the banned Little Red Schoolbook foundered when activists smuggled it into the country and began distributing free copies. Chipp insisted that the government remove its ineffective ban, but Malcolm Fraser and other ministers continued to protest that the book “undermined family and society.”

Other initiatives came too, on an unexpectedly broad front. Writing a decade later, Donald Horne wondered whether McMahon was too busy “plucking policy out of passing straws” to know what he was doing. But in terms of results, Horne conceded, the government modernised the political agenda in a significant number of ways.

Although the government resiled from passing a wholly new Trade Practices Act, it did initiate new laws preventing foreign takeovers. It withdrew the last Australian combat troops from Vietnam, leaving only 128 members of the Australian Army Training Team in the country. It joined the Five Powers Defence Arrangements and the OECD. It passed the Childcare Act, which allowed the Commonwealth to intervene in the childcare sector and helped transform it into a profession supported by research and grants. It increased education spending and the number of scholarship places at universities and TAFEs.

The government also adopted the “polluter pays” principle for environmental protection, and began giving the Commonwealth the capacity to intervene in environmental matters. Howson, for all his grumbles that he had been given responsibility for “trees, boongs and poofters” as minister for the environment, Aborigines, and the arts, was nonetheless the first person to be appointed with explicit responsibility for these policy areas.

Notably, too, the government released its own urban and regional development policy. This was partly in response to Whitlam’s well-established interest in this area, but also a recognition of public demand for Commonwealth action. Meeting that demand required the government to overcome its longstanding aversion to Commonwealth intervention in state responsibilities.

Housing minister Kevin Cairns’s priority was “to seek agreement at all levels that an urban policy is needed” — rather than to actually devise a policy — but McMahon pushed for both the agreement and a policy. He reserved to his authority and his department responsibilities traditionally held by state governments, and then, in September, pushed cabinet to create the National Urban and Regional Development Authority to foster a “better balance of population distribution and regional development in Australia.”

When he introduced the legislation, McMahon stressed the significance of the change that was now manifest: “It marks our recognition that there is a direct contribution that the Commonwealth government can make in national urban and regional development.” It also showed that the government had an answer to Labor’s policies in this area.

“We should be able to tell people where we stand and where we are heading,” McMahon had written in August 1971. Here, perhaps, was the government’s approach in a single phrase: stasis and movement. When McMahon went to Government House to seek a dissolution of parliament, he felt sufficiently confident that his two-pronged approach would be enough to see the government returned. To Paul Hasluck, he predicted the Coalition would pick up two seats in Western Australia and two seats in New South Wales — and perhaps even three in Victoria. He didn’t envision losing any seats except, perhaps, that of Evans, held by Malcolm Mackay.

That prediction was somewhat redeemed: the Coalition picked up two seats in Western Australia and one seat apiece in Victoria and South Australia. But it lost six seats in New South Wales, four in Victoria, and one apiece in Tasmania and Queensland, with the result that Labor took office with a nine-seat majority.

It was a closer result than many would like to think. The rural gerrymander meant that around 2000 votes distributed across five seats could have allowed the government to cling to office. In such an event, the first steps in McMahon’s forecast to Perkin may well have been vindicated.

Why the close result? Some have pointed to the electorate’s innate conservatism, especially after twenty-three years of Coalition rule. Few have suggested that McMahon might have been a factor in limiting the swing — but one of them was his successor as prime minister. Without McMahon’s skill, tenacity, and resourcefulness, Whitlam later wrote, Labor’s victory in 1972 would have been “more convincing than it was.” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post “God save us all!” appeared first on Inside Story.

The Liberal Party took another trouncing, losing most of the seat-by-seat contests for the fifteenth time in Victoria’s last sixteen federal and state elections. Despite leader Matthew Guy’s optimistic claims in his concession speech last night, it is very unlikely to end up with more seats; at best it could hold on to the same small number it started with. It seems even further from winning back power.

The Nationals had a night to relish, taking back all three seats they had lost to regional independents over the previous eight years and holding their own with the greatest of ease. But the Liberals’ malaise condemns them, too, to remain on the opposition benches seemingly forever, until a new crowd can win control of the Liberals, recruit members from mainstream Australia and take the party back to the middle ground.

Early last night the Greens’ tide came in. Their vote was surging and it seemed they might sweep through inner Melbourne to win as many as nine of the Assembly’s eighty-eight seats. But as the night wore on, the tide went out again, their vote slumped back to its 2018 level, and it looks like they won just one more seat, Richmond.

And the independents had a terrible night. The two remaining regional independents, seen as tied to Labor, paid the price for the government’s lack of interest in country Victoria. Of the four teal indies backed by Climate 200, two will be elected at best, but more likely none. In other seats, the average independent won only a few per cent of the vote; in the end, they were poorly funded amateurs up against well-funded professionals.

There might be one exception: Gaetano Greco, an independent from Preston in the northern suburbs, who seems to have slipped through unnoticed while Labor was focused on the Greens. More on him later.

The one blow for Daniel Andrews was in the Legislative Council: on current counting, Labor would lose three seats, forcing it to rely on support from the Greens or the fringe parties of the right — One Nation, the Shooters and the DLP — to pass any legislation the Liberals and Nationals oppose. That was predictable, and predicted, but it could require a more inclusive style of governing.

As I half-forecast, this election looks like introducing a significant newcomer to Victorian politics: Legalise Cannabis Victoria. It’s the party formerly known as HEMP, but its rebranding and its decision to be part of a preference swap among left-wing parties could win it two seats in the Council, maybe more. It’s very significant that it’s got there with Labor preferences. Soon the joint could be jumping.

The Council aside, this election confirmed more than it changed. Andrews’s one-man rule and uncompromising way of handling the pandemic have been endorsed by the majority of Victorians, at the cost of alienating both those seriously inconvenienced or maddened by the repeated lockdowns, and increasingly, the minority of Victorians who dislike his government’s lack of transparency, lack of openness, centralisation of power and slide into heavy debt.

The transparency warriors were never going to win yesterday: they had no horse in the race. Their best hope now is that the smaller parties of the left — the Greens, but also Fiona Patten (if she gets back), the dope smokers and Animal Justice — might use their numbers in the Council to pressure Labor to raise the quality of Victorian democracy, as the governments of John Cain, Steve Bracks and John Brumby did.

This election was a triumph for the defenders. Labor has lost only four or five seats from the fifty-six that were nominally its seats after the redistribution. The Liberals were defending virtually nothing but marginal seats; yet they’ve lost only two for sure, and possibly two more. The Greens and Nationals had bumper swings in all their seats. Only the independents lost out.

The Liberals and Nationals never had a hope of winning the extra eighteen seats they needed to form government. Whatever their leaders said publicly, the best they could hope for was to win enough votes and seats to be in a position to make a realistic bid for power in 2026. And they failed.

Guy put the best spin on it he could last night, claiming his team had won a 4 per cent swing and got “more than halfway” to closing the gap. Not so. As Ben Raue of the Tally Room points out, the average swing was more like 2.5 per cent. The Coalition will have only half as many seats as Labor in the new Assembly, much the same as in Labor’s last term. The party’s new leader will start from no better a position than four years ago.

What went wrong? First, Labor had few marginal seats to defend: most of its seats had majorities of more than 10 per cent. Only ten Labor seats were held by margins of less than 5 per cent — and when you have a government willing to play Scott Morrison’s game of spending taxpayers’ money to win marginal seats, there is no advantage like incumbency.

On ABC TV last night, Antony Green pointed out the sharp difference between the zero swing (or at one stage, a swing to Labor) in seats southeast of the Yarra, where most of the marginal seats are, and the big swings against Labor in some seats in the more deprived Labor heartland, north and west of the river; but the Liberals were starting from too far back to win any of them.

Late counting in some seats moderated that difference. Late at night the Liberals reclaimed Kew and Caulfield, both of which seemed lost two hours earlier, took the lead in Hawthorn and Mornington, secured Polwarth, Croydon and Rowville, and got back in the contest in Hastings. Meanwhile across the river, Labor pulled away from the Greens in Northcote, Footscray and Pascoe Vale.

Some of the swings against Labor in the outer-northern and western suburbs were extraordinary. There was a swing of 14 per cent against energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio in Mill Park, 12.5 per cent in Yan Yean, 15 per cent in Greenvale, and 8 to 10 per cent in Broadmeadows, Sunbury and Sydenham. But the Liberals’ past vote in these areas was so low that it didn’t even come within 5 per cent of winning any of these seats.

The Liberals were not a problem for Labor in its rusted-on heartland. With one exception, nor were the independents. There were dozens of them in Labor’s safe seats, many making the case that their area had been neglected because it was a safe seat. But Labor’s campaign team identified what it saw as the three real threats — Melton, Point Cook and Werribee — and ensured that they were not forgotten in the campaign promises. After their strong showing in Melton and Werribee in 2018, the independents flopped badly there in 2022.

Here’s my scoop. The exception — completely overlooked in last night’s coverage — was Preston, and Gaetano Greco. A long-time Darebin councillor and Labor activist, Greco had the advantage of running in an area where the Liberals are weak and the Greens and (increasingly) Victorian Socialists have eroded Labor’s support. A plan to demolish most of the heritage Preston Market became the centrepiece of his campaign, along with a range of local issues that the state government was not tackling because Preston posed no political problem. So Greco resolved to make it one.

Apart from Labor and Greco, seven other candidates ran in Preston — and six of them (all but the Freedom Party) directed preferences to Greco. Labor’s Nathan Lambert (denounced by Greco as a candidate “parachuted in from Geelong”) has 38.3 per cent of the vote, and the rest are evenly divided: Liberals 16.5 per cent, Greens 14.8, Greco 14.2, Victorian Socialists 6.7, others preferencing Greco 6.6 and others preferencing Labor 2.9.

While some preferences always leak, it seems certain that Greco will overtake the Greens and the Liberals to make the final two with Labor. Who wins the seat will then depend on how many preferences leak to Lambert: on these figures, he needs about 25 per cent for Labor to hold the seat, which gives Greco a 50–50 chance, though the postal votes will favour Labor. Victoria’s electoral commission will have to carry out a new two-candidate count for the two of them.

Early in the night, the Greens looked like being the big story. The commission’s two-candidate counts showed them clearly ahead in Northcote and Richmond, and neck and neck with Labor in Albert Park, Footscray, Pascoe Vale and Preston. But as the prepoll votes were counted the Liberals pushed the Greens into third place in Albert Park, and Labor regained the lead in Northcote, and pulled ahead in the rest. Richmond will be the Greens’ only gain in the Legislative Assembly.

The final Greens first-preference vote statewide will end up much the same as the 10.7 per cent they polled in 2018. But that is largely because there was far more competition, with roughly three times as many micro-party candidates as in 2018. The Greens have increasingly cast themselves as an inner-suburban party, and in Melbourne they are expanding that territory. In 2026 they will be the sitting party or serious competitors in nine seats.

Apart from Greco, three teal independents were the only indies to come close to winning a seat. At the close of counting, Kate Lardner had 49.8 per cent of the two-candidate vote in Mornington, Melissa Lowe had 49.4 per cent in Hawthorn, and Sophie Torney 47 per cent in Kew. With postal votes favouring the Liberals, all of them are likely to lose, but it will be close.

Liberals trying to find something to celebrate last night were grateful for the likely return of leading moderate John Pesutto in Hawthorn and the arrival of Jess Wilson in Kew. Pesutto could be a candidate for the party leadership if and when Guy steps down.

The Liberals didn’t have much to celebrate elsewhere. To put themselves in a position to win in 2026, they needed to win back the eastern suburbs seats they lost last time, but Labor successfully defended Ashwood (formerly Burwood), Box Hill and Ringwood, and captured Glen Waverley and Bayswater (nominally Liberal after the redistribution). The outer-suburban seats of Pakenham and Yan Yean, both seen as Liberal chances, stayed with Labor.

Labor maintained its grip on Geelong’s four seats, as well as the two seats each in Ballarat and Bendigo. The Coalition’s one success in Victoria’s bigger regional centres came when the Nationals reclaimed Morwell, the centre of Victoria’s electricity industry, which is facing a dismal decade ahead with the gradual closure of all three coal-fired power stations. Andrews’s promise to revive the former State Electricity Commission as a renewable energy provider, while popular in Melbourne, brought no comfort to the Latrobe Valley.

In the Legislative Council, however, Labor looks set to lose a lot of ground. With 20 to 30 per cent of the vote counted, Labor was on track to lose three seats. That leaves it with only fifteen of the Council’s forty seats, which would make it uncomfortably dependent on support from the Greens or a collection of right-wing parties to get contested legislation through.

The biggest swings against Labor were again in the northern and western suburbs: 10 per cent in the Northern Metropolitan seat, 11 per cent in the west. But Labor lost ground everywhere, costing it seats in South-Eastern Metro, Northern Victoria and Western Metro.

It’s important to remember that these are early figures, and Victoria’s group voting system means small changes to the figures can cause quite different outcomes. As the numbers stand, though, three of those seats would go to left-wing parties who formed an alliance with Labor and the Greens to get their preferences first.

Legalise Cannabis Victoria is on track to win seats in Melbourne’s southeastern and western suburban regions, and is close in several others. Animal Justice, thanks to a deal negotiated when it was falsely pretending to be part of preference whisperer Glenn Druery’s alliance, stands to win a seat in Northern Victoria but has lost its leader, Andy Meddick, from Western Victoria.

Reason Party leader Fiona Patten is on track to narrowly hold her seat in Melbourne’s northern suburbs in a three-way contest with the Victorian Socialists and former Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek, now running for the DLP.

The Greens vote lifted everywhere: on these figures, enough to give them upper house seats in Western Victoria, North-Eastern (formerly Eastern) Metropolitan and Southern Metropolitan, while its leader Samantha Ratnam comfortably held her seat in the northern suburbs. If that holds, those four seats will be their most important victory at this election.

The Druery group had a bad night. In 2018, Druery’s team won nine of the forty seats. Last night, they won two (or three, if you count the seat won by Animal Justice on preferences Druery arranged before the party betrayed him). The DLP won a seat in North-Eastern Metropolitan from fellow Druery group party Transport Matters, and could still end up with seats in Northern Metro, where Somyurek is standing, and Western Metro, where their candidate is controversial former Liberal MLC Bernie Finn.

On current figures, however, the Liberals would reclaim their second seat in the western suburbs by just pipping Finn at the post, while the Coalition would also gain seats in Northern Victoria and Western Victoria. One Nation would take a seat in Northern Victoria from the Druery group, whose only other success was in Eastern Victoria, where Shooters party leader Jeff Bourman is on track to retain his seat.

I suspect these figures will change before the counting is over, but for now, the numbers in the forty-member Council would be: Labor fifteen, Liberals and Nationals fourteen, Greens four and Legalise Cannabis two, with one seat each for Reason, Animal Justice, One Nation, the DLP and the Shooters.

Whatever the final numbers, Labor will be in a minority but will have to find a way to make it work. Might we even see the two main parties of the left in Victoria lift their game to forge a constructive working relationship as their counterparts have in the ACT? Pigs might fly.

Like him or loathe him, this election result was a personal triumph for Daniel Andrews. It was in many ways about him, and his way of governing. No Victorian premier in my lifetime has acquired such an avid, uncritical fan base, or so many opponents who detest him (although Jeff Kennett came close). His photo appeared not only on Labor’s how-to-vote cards but also on those of other parties wanting to inspire Victorians to vote against him. The result, Labor’s overwhelming victory, speaks for itself.

The pandemic was rarely mentioned in the election campaign, but you suspect that, somewhere in voters’ minds, it was a defining issue. If you approved of Andrews’s handling of the pandemic, you voted for him. If you didn’t, you voted against him. There were many parties against him, but the election results showed us they’re still small parties.

The risk is that his success will further boost what Labor MPs described to his biographer Sumeyya Ilanbey as his sense that he’s always the smartest guy in the room. In his first term in office, Andrews consulted and listened more. In his second term, we’re told, he regarded listening to critics or people with different views as a waste of time. Many are urging him to adopt a more inclusive style in his third term. That could be challenging.

He starts his third term facing many problems. The Covid pandemic is as deadly as ever: last week sixty-two Victorians were reported dead from the disease, half the national death toll. The state budget is out of control, and Josh Gordon and Chip Le Grand of the Age have shown how the numbers are being fudged to make it appear that all is well.

Those are problems for tomorrow. Today, Daniel Andrews and Labor are winners with cause to celebrate. •

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“Justice is courage, the courage of conviction,” Anwar seethed on that day in July 2002. “God willing, the day of justice will return, and I call on the friends of justice to remain steadfast. We shall clear the rubble — the corruption and injustices Dr Mahathir left in his trail — and we will build a democratic and just Malaysia.”

Moments earlier, the judges had delivered a preposterous verdict, unanimously rejecting Anwar’s final appeal against a fifteen-year prison sentence for corruption and sexual misconduct. It was a verdict that ignored emphatic denials by the supposed victims of abuse, a police report dismissing the allegations as baseless and the discrediting of critical forensic evidence. It was roundly condemned by legal experts around the world and by foreign governments, including in Washington.

Anwar’s defiant words seemed more pitiful than prescient in that moment. It would take more than twenty years for his promised day of justice to return. His appointment this week as Malaysia’s tenth prime minister after the mid-November general election closes the circle on a titanic struggle between the man once called the father of Malaysian politics and his wayward son that has consumed the country’s politics for a generation.

In 1997, Mahathir Mohamad had been Malaysia’s prime minister for sixteen years. Anwar Ibrahim was the deputy he had recruited, groomed and anointed as his successor. Their partnership fell apart spectacularly in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

As finance minister, Anwar had committed to austerity measures suggested by the International Monetary Fund to rescue the battered Malaysian economy. But Mahathir, who claimed the cause of the problem was a conspiracy by global financiers, backed a slew of lavish bailouts for failing Malaysian corporations, not least his son’s shipping company. Anwar also angered Mahathir by beginning to tackle widespread corruption in the government and — as many Malaysians cheered the fall of Indonesia’s Suharto regime in May 1998 — embracing political and social reform.

Mahathir abruptly sacked Anwar that September. Three days later, police used tear gas and water cannons to break up the biggest protest rally in Malaysia’s history as more than 50,000 people took to the streets of Kuala Lumpur in support of Anwar. Malaysia’s reformasi movement was born.

That night, Anwar was arrested and detained. A week later he appeared in court with a black eye, the result of a beating in prison by police inspector-general Rahim Noor. (Rahim was later jailed for two months for the assault.) Anwar was eventually sentenced to six years’ jail for supposedly abusing his ministerial position by directing police special branch officers to pressure witnesses to retract allegations he’d had sex with his family’s driver and an illicit affair with the wife of his private secretary. (Both homosexuality and adultery are criminal offences in Malaysia.) A subsequent trial saw him also convicted for the alleged sexual offences themselves.

The Federal Court decision to uphold those verdicts in 2002 came despite evidence that Anwar’s driver had three times denied having sex with his employer and compelling evidence that police had threatened witnesses and manipulated evidence. The appeal judges also ignored an admission by police special branch chief Mohamad Said bin Awang that in 1997 — a year before Anwar’s sacking — he had sent a report to Mahathir dismissing the allegations of sexual misconduct as a whispered smear campaign.

Mahathir’s confected crucifixion of Anwar would do much more than brutally derail the career of a charismatic leader who had promised, since his earliest days as a student activist, to build a cleaner, fairer and more racially egalitarian Malaysia. It paved the way for even greater levels of cronyism and corruption within the ruling Malay elite, culminating in the kleptocracy of Najib Razak’s nine-year prime ministership from 2009 that presaged a twelve-year prison sentence. It also robbed the country, Southeast Asia and the world of a democratic and West-friendly Muslim leader committed to building a better order.

The day after emerging as leader of the most successful coalition in Malaysia’s latest general election, the now seventy-five-year-old Anwar told reporters gathered outside his home, “This you need to learn from Anwar Ibrahim — patience, wait a long time, patience.” Patience indeed. And extraordinary determination.

Anwar would spend a total of almost ten years in prison and be double-crossed a second time by Mahathir Mohamad before achieving what he believed was his destiny, and what his legions of devoted supporters among younger Malays and the country’s often marginalised Indian and Chinese minorities had long hoped for.

Anwar’s first years of imprisonment ended in late 2004, a year after Mahathir stood down as prime minister, after Malaysia’s Supreme Court overturned his conviction for sodomy. On his release, Anwar was still barred from politics but resumed de facto leadership of a resurgent opposition that went on to make a strong showing in the 2008 general election. The United Malays National Organisation, which had dominated Malaysian politics since independence in 1957, lost fifty-eight of its seats while the People’s Alliance, led by Anwar’s wife Wan Azizah, increased its numbers by sixty-one. After his ban ended, Anwar was returned to parliament in a by-election in April 2008 and resumed formal leadership of the opposition.

During the 2013 general election campaign Anwar drew massive and jubilant crowds to his rallies across the country. As I travelled with him on part of the journey, he spoke eloquently about his determination to change Malaysian politics. “The last fifteen years have certainly changed me,” he said. “You talk about freedom or reform. It is not the same when you understand what it is to be denied your freedom. My passion for justice is far more pronounced now… I can’t allow this to continue.”

His alliance would win the popular vote in that election with 50.9 per cent against 47.4 per cent for the ruling coalition, but was again thwarted by an entrenched gerrymander and allegations of widespread electoral fraud.

Nationwide protests led by Anwar rattled the government. Early the following year, as he was poised to contest and capture the premiership of Selangor State, Najib Razak dusted off the old Mahathir political playbook. On 7 March 2014, the Court of Appeal overturned Anwar’s earlier acquittal, unanimously declaring the High Court had failed to “critically evaluate” the evidence submitted by a government chemist. It rushed through a fresh sentence of five years’ imprisonment, once more disqualifying Anwar from political office. A year later, the Federal Court upheld the decision and he was sent back to jail.

Three years later, the man primarily responsible for Anwar’s torment came in search of a breathtaking favour. Now at war with the rest of the UMNO old guard, Mahathir Mohamed cut a deal with Anwar to unite their followers in a new coalition to contest the 2018 general election. Under the agreement, Mahathir would return to the prime ministership but would hand over to Anwar after an interim period.

Mahathir’s strategy worked. The new alliance led by Anwar’s Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope) — its leader still behind bars — won a simple majority and Najib’s Barisan Nasional coalition was relegated to opposition. After being sworn in as prime minister, Mahathir engineered a royal pardon for Anwar. But it surprised few — including most likely Anwar himself — when Mahathir stalled and then reneged on his promise to surrender the leadership. Their coalition collapsed after twenty-two months.

If Anwar’s path to power has been strewn with landmines, the road ahead may be similarly treacherous. While his reformist Pakatan Harapan coalition won eighty-two seats in this general election to emerge as the largest political grouping, he remains well short of a majority in the 222-seat national parliament. After days of wrangling in which the rival conservative Malay alliance Perikatan Nasional, with seventy-three seats, claimed it too was poised to forge a majority with minor parties, Malaysia’s King Sultan Abdullah stepped in and appointed Anwar as prime minister.

While incumbency gives Anwar a clear advantage, and he is a highly skilled negotiator, the deep and often bitter divisions in Malaysian politics mean success is not guaranteed when the numbers are finally put to the test in the parliamentary vote of confidence the new leader has promised to call on 19 December. Not least of his challenges will be the strong electoral showing of PAS, the Malaysian Islamic Party, which is opposed to the development of a more pluralist society, an essential element of Anwar’s vision for the country.

It is more than poetic justice that Anwar’s final ascent to the top of Malaysian politics has coincided with the end of Mahathir Mohamad’s political career. The general election was a humiliating repudiation of the man who had been an irrepressible force in the country’s politics for more than half a century, including serving a total of twenty-two years as prime minister.

The ninety-seven-year-old Mahathir — who had boldly proposed himself for a third term as leader and boasted to journalists that he had a good chance of winning — came fourth in a five-way contest in his electorate on the resort island of Langkawi, this time running under the banner of his own Pejuang Party. In his first election defeat in fifty-three years in politics, Mahathir also lost his candidate’s deposit after failing to secure a minimum of 12.5 per cent of the vote. •

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That’s not enough for the Murdochs’ Herald Sun, which has been whipping up its rusted-on older conservative readership with stories quoting fearful Labor insiders’ predictions of gloom: “Toxic Dan: ALP Fears Voters Are Turning against Andrews,” “Sign Dan Could Lose Mulgrave Seat in Shock Upset” and, today, “Dan Faces Minority Govt as Voters Turn against Labor.”

But I would take that less seriously than the polls. I’ve never heard an insider in the final week say, “We’re home. We’re going to win by a mile.” They are paid to worry. They always pretend it’ll be close. They did it in 2018, when Labor won twice as many seats as the Coalition.

By contrast, the polls tell us the contest is narrowing, but Labor remains well ahead and Daniel Andrews is still far more popular than Matthew Guy; and no poll has yet shown the Coalition remotely within reach of winning. The polls can be wrong — in 2018 they all understated the scale of Labor’s landslide — but my instinct is that this time they’re probably close.

On the average of the last five polls reported in the media, Labor’s vote is down from 43 per cent in 2018 to 37 per cent, the Coalition is unchanged on 35 per cent, the Greens have edged up from 11 to 13 per cent, and “others” — independents and micro-parties — have jumped from 11 to 15 per cent. (That’s partly because there are far more of them, almost three times as many micro-party candidates as in 2018, and mostly running to the right of the Liberals.)

In two-party terms, the average implies a swing to the Coalition of three percentage points or so, taking Labor from 57.5 per cent to 54.5 per cent. That would normally be a very safe lead — but this election is not just between two parties.

In this morning’s Herald Sun, former Labor assistant state secretary Kos Samaras, now director of the pollster Redbridge, forecast that Labor would lose six seats and is in danger in a dozen others. But only half of those are battles between Labor and the Coalition. On his reading, Labor is in danger of losing up to five seats to the Greens, and up to four seats to independents.

The punters half-agree. They don’t see many seats changing hands, but of the twenty-five electorates Sportsbet rated on Wednesday as the closest contests, three are Labor v. Green, four are independents v. Labor, five are independents v. Liberal, and two are independents v. National (including one that is shaping as independent v. National v. independent). Fewer than half are classic Labor v. Coalition contests. (I covered this last week.)

If Samaras is right, then Victorian Labor might lose its majority and have to learn how to share power in some form with the Greens or independents. Labor and the Greens have been doing that in the ACT for most of the last two decades, and it’s been quite harmonious. But Victorian Labor will also face the big unknown of a new Legislative Council.

Ah, the Legislative Council. Until the 1950s, it was a conservative bastion, elected by property owners to be a brake on hasty populist reforms. (It sure was: it took almost twenty years and nineteen private members’ bills before the Council agreed that women should have the right to vote.) It was a part-time chamber where gentlemen gathered in the evenings to debate the issues of the day. Most Victorian adults were excluded from the Council’s voting roll, and most MLCs were elected unopposed.

These days it’s so different. Since 2006 the chamber has been elected by proportional representation, with preferences decided not by voters but by backroom deals via group voting tickets, like the Senate elections of old. Even a decade ago, the Council’s only crossbenchers were three Greens. But at the 2014 election, “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery orchestrated the election of five crossbenchers from small parties — and in 2018 the forty MLCs elected included nine of Druery’s team plus a rebel breakaway, Fiona Patten.

There are eight regions with five members each. The quota for election is 16.7 per cent, yet those nine Druery members on average won just 3.4 per cent. Druery’s system works by getting ideologically diverse parties to direct preferences to each other, in effect pooling their votes — and then doing trade-offs with the major parties to get them to do the same. The preferences are arranged so that every party gets a seat or more — or at least, the chance of one.

His system works because Victorians have no control over their preferences unless they vote below the line — which last time only 9 per cent did. Voters below the line only have to number five boxes or more, far easier to comply with than the rules in the Legislative Assembly, where votes in seats like Point Cook and Werribee will be declared informal unless voters have numbered all fifteen boxes in order. Our ignorance and indifference let Druery and party bosses decide our preferences for us.

In 2018 this system led to many results seen as unjust. In Eastern Metropolitan, Greens MLC Samantha Dunn won 9 per cent of votes, yet lost her seat to taxi owner Rod Barton of Transport Matters, who won 0.6 per cent. In South-Eastern Metro, Liberal MLC Inga Peulich, with 12 per cent of the votes, lost her seat to Liberal Democrat David Limbrick with 0.8 per cent. And in Southern Metropolitan, Greens MLC Sue Pennicuik, with 12 per cent, was unseated by Sustainable Australia’s Clifford Hayes with 1.2 per cent.

In Western Australia, the last state apart from Victoria to tolerate this system, the McGowan Labor government has moved to abolish group voting tickets after the last election saw Daylight Saving Party candidate Wilson Tucker, then living in the United States, win a seat in the outback region with just ninety-eight votes. But the Andrews government has shown zero interest in electoral reform.

Why not? Because it sees this system as working in its favour — and at the 2018 election, Labor was effectively an associate member of Druery’s team. Its preferences were directed to Druery parties in six of the eight regions, and in four they helped elect parties as diverse as the Liberal Democrats, Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, Animal Justice and Transport Matters.

The losers in 2018 were the Greens, who went from five seats to one, and the Coalition, down from sixteen seats to eleven. Its election landslide gave Labor eighteen of the forty seats, close to a majority, and it could recruit enough allies issue by issue to pass its bills. The Age reported last year that its most reliable supporters were Animal Justice MLC Andy Meddick and Fiona Patten, followed by Rod Barton, and the one Greens MLC who survived Druery’s rampage, Samantha Ratnam.

The other six MLCs elected on Druery’s tickets have all voted mostly against Labor. One is from Sustainable Australia, two from the Liberal Democrats, and originally three from Hinch’s squad, one of whom, former Maribyrnong mayor and army reservist Catherine Cumming, soon quit the party and is now running for the Angry Victorians. (She was the one who told a rally last weekend she wanted to turn Daniel Andrews into “red mist” — a politicised play on the army term “pink mist” for the spray of blood on the face of the victim of a shooting.)

For this election, the Druery team consists of just eight core parties: the DLP, Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, the Health Australia Party, the Liberal Democrats, the New Democrats (a party founded by rebel Labor MLC Kaushaliya Vaghela), the Shooters, Sustainable Australia and Transport Matters. All but Health Australia have sitting members — in the DLP’s case, sacked Liberal ultraconservative Bernie Finn in Western Metropolitan and sacked Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek in Northern Metropolitan — and their priority is to retain those seats.

On the fringes are four other parties. Angry Victorians and the new party calling itself Sack Dan Andrews Restore Democracy in the end stayed out of the group, but their group voting tickets largely reflect its priorities. Animal Justice is now a former member. And Labor remains an unofficial associate member, but more distant than in 2018.

In 2022, Team Druery’s prospects are not looking good. It faces unprecedented opposition from the left and right alike. The Liberals, Greens, One Nation and United Australia Party all effectively refused to deal with it. Four smaller left-wing parties organised their own version of Druery’s system, and got Labor and the Greens to direct their initial preferences their way in every region. And some parties it thought were on board refused to sign up.

The worst betrayal was by Animal Justice. Elected with Druery’s help in 2018, it pretended to be part of the team again, and was awarded the group’s preferences in two regions, Northern Victoria and Western Victoria. But it hid the fact that it had joined the new left-wing alliance, and is directing its preferences there. This became known only when its real group voting tickets were released.

The second betrayal was by Angry Victorians. It is giving Druery’s parties high preferences in all regions, and has been rewarded by the group giving it high preferences in Western Victoria, where its leader Chris Burson is standing. But it gave the Herald Sun a secretly filmed video of a long chat with Druery in which he boasted of his power to select MPs and told them his aim was to create a Council that Labor could work with. (He was talking to the wrong people on that one.)

Labor is still a Druery ally, but its preferences at this election are going first to the left-wing alliance. Their combined preferences should ensure that in Northern Metropolitan, Fiona Patten will either hold her seat or lose it to the Victorian Socialists. Animal Justice’s double dealing has probably wrapped up seats for it in Northern Victoria and Western Victoria. The Greens look set to win back their lost seat in Southern Metropolitan, and possibly several others. But in some seats, the left’s alliance has fractured.

There was a plan that, to maximise the left’s haul, Labor and the Greens would also preference each other. But something got in the way of that. Instead, Labor will direct its sixth preference to the Shooters in Eastern Victoria, to Transport Matters in North-Eastern Metro, and to Derryn Hinch in South-Eastern Metro — and, of course, its second preferences are going to Animal Justice in Northern Victoria and Western Victoria (where Hinch and the Shooters will also get Labor preferences before the Greens).

All of them are (or were) the primary candidates of the Druery group in those regions. Clearly, Labor is still part of the team.

Spurned, the Greens have directed preferences to Transport Matters ahead of Labor in every region, but realistically, that has no effect:  in North-Eastern Metro the two parties will be rivals, and Transport Matters will be quickly eliminated everywhere else.

What does Labor get from Team Druery in return? Well, the Shooters have taken the unusual step of giving Labor their second preferences in the marginal seat of Morwell, as well as in Narre Warren North. Hinch nominated candidates in some of the Assembly seats Druery claimed Labor was worried about, but after the betrayals, he appears not to have registered how-to-vote cards.

Then there is a curious deal in Northern Metropolitan. Three of Druery’s parties are giving their second preferences directly to Labor’s number three candidate, Susie Byers. Why? Well, if the votes go as they did in 2018, she would be the one competing for Fiona Patten’s seat. Druery has never forgiven Patten for deserting his team and telling the world that he charges candidates a success fee of $50,000. And Labor has never forgotten that it is their old seat that Patten occupies.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Labor and Druery are combining to try to unseat Patten, even if Labor is also directing its preferences to her. But that assumes the voting at this election will be something like 2018. It won’t.

In 2018, Labor won 39 per cent of votes for the Council. In May 2022, it won just 31 per cent of Victorians’ votes for the Senate. If its vote is like that on Saturday, it could lose up to six seats in the Council, maybe even more.

By contrast, votes for the Greens and the minor parties of the left (including Legalise Cannabis, formerly HEMP) jumped from 12 per cent to 20 per cent. They stand to gain the seats Labor loses. There is no certainty that it will find all of them as easy to deal with as Animal Justice and Reason.

In 2018, Team Druery consisted of thirteen parties and won 20 per cent of votes. In May 2022, only four of its current members contested the Senate election, and they won 5.6 per cent of the vote. Of the other four, only the DLP has any proven following, and it’s pretty small these days.

Outside both groups are the other right-wing parties. One Nation and the United Australia Party are continuing their alliance, which helped the UAP win Victoria’s final Senate seat from the Liberals. But in contrast to the federal election, they have been inconspicuous in this campaign. Palmer’s party stands to get preferences from the Liberals in most regions, but with few others coming its way, it’s hard to see it being a strong contender. One Nation has a chance of winning a seat in Eastern Victoria, but generally its Victorian base is limited to the country.

The new Freedom Party has a preference deal with Family First, and a more limited one with One Nation, but by and large the minor parties of the right look uncoordinated compared with the tight preference deals of the left and the Druery group. It’s surprising that most of them appear to have no preference swaps at all with the Druery camp — whose largest members are the Shooters, the Liberal Democrats, the DLP and the Hinch party. I suspect they will win few if any seats.

But it’s really anyone’s guess who will win the final seats in each region. One dark horse: at the Senate election, the biggest small party on the left was Legalise Cannabis (formerly HEMP). It won 3 per cent of the Victorian vote, outpolling One Nation. It’s got its share of preferences coming. It’s got a pretty simple policy. A lot of people agree with it. For those who hate all politics and politicians, it could be an attractive alternative.

As you can probably tell, I have no idea who will control the new Council. We will find out very late on Saturday night. Those with a keen interest in the outcome can try out their tipping skills on Antony Green’s election calculator, but it’s more useful after the event.

There has been a buzz this week in the betting markets, picking up on the fears of Labor insiders. Even so, the Coalition’s odds of forming a government have shortened only from 10/1 to 5/1: giving it at best one chance in five of victory, and four chances in five of another term in opposition.

For what it’s worth, the punters see just five seats clearly changing hands. Labor is tipped to lose Richmond and Northcote to the Greens, Nepean to the Liberals, and Hawthorn to either the Liberals or teal independent Melissa Lowe. The Liberals in turn are tipped to lose Kew to teal independent Sophie Torney.

A lot of seats are seen as being on a knife edge: Bayswater, Glen Waverley, Morwell, Pakenham and Ripon between Labor and the Coalition, Melton between Labor and independent Dr Ian Birchall, Benambra between the Liberals and independent Jacqui Hawkins, and Caulfield between Liberal, Labor and another teal independent, Nomi Kaltmann. The Coalition would have to do a lot better than that to pose any threat.

But the punters can get things just as wrong as the pundits. In 2018, as now, they tipped just five seats to change hands. Yet only one of those five did, whereas twelve seats they hadn’t tipped to change hands did so.

To lose its majority this time, Labor would need to lose twelve of the fifty-six seats it has on Antony Green’s pendulum. To win a majority, the Liberals and Nationals would need to win eighteen seats on top of their current twenty-seven. Both sound improbable, but stranger things have happened. •

The post Will Labor need to share power in Victoria? appeared first on Inside Story.

Contrary to popular belief, voting is not compulsory. No one compels you to number the boxes with your little pencil. (But you do have to turn up and watch as someone from the Electoral Commission rules a line through your name; so, hey, you might as well vote.)

Contrary to the view of some journalists in the press gallery, with our system of preferential voting parties can win government with a primary vote of less than 40 per cent. (Labor led by Anthony Albanese did just that.)

And the teals are not really teals; they’re more cyans. (That’s what you get when you mix Liberal blue and Greens green together.)

Despite their misnomer, the teals gave Australia’s jaded democracy a welcome jolt — and we should all be grateful to them. Two short new books tell the fascinating story of their rapid rise to prominence and their impact on Australia’s fabled two-party system (which is also a figment of everyone’s imagination, but more on that later).

Journalist Margot Saville’s The Teal Revolution takes us inside the various teal campaigns at May’s federal election. She talks to the candidates, the advisers, the fundraisers, the organisers and the volunteers who made it happen. She discovers a committed cadre of well-heeled, tech-savvy guerillas energised by their disgust at the Liberal Party’s failure to tackle climate change, integrity in politics and the treatment of women. Even today, I’m not sure if the Liberal Party truly understands how it got king-hit in the car park.

As Saville reminds us, “Anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’”

It’s a story that was pretty much neglected by the mainstream media. While the press gallery was excitedly misinterpreting an insignificant mistake by Albanese at a press conference, Saville was out talking to people who were about to make history.

Their victories were stunning. The teals triumphed in Liberal citadels across the country: Kooyong (Monique Ryan), North Sydney (Kylea Tink), Goldstein (Zoe Daniel), Curtin (Kate Chaney), Wentworth (Allegra Spender) and Mackellar (Sophie Scamps).

Any of these women could have been preselected by a slightly different Liberal Party — if it had possessed the wit to approach them. Indeed, two of them, Allegra Spender and Kate Chaney, are Liberal Party royalty. But here they were, burning down the house they were raised in.

They’re now in Canberra, where they’ve joined a cohort of like-minded crossbenchers in the House of Representatives. They didn’t quite get the balance of power, but their brother-in-arms, former Wallaby great David Pocock, has a key vote in the Senate.

On election day 2022, Saville tells us, Monique Ryan was driving home from casting her vote, and having a good cry. The paediatric neurologist was convinced she’d fought and lost. Do you like the idea of politicians who shed tears because they think they might have let down the voters who supported them?

Just a few hours later she was on national television being told she had toppled treasurer Josh Frydenberg, seen by many as a future PM.

He waited days before gracelessly conceding, Saville tells us. “The defeated member for Kooyong never uttered the words ‘you won’ or ‘congratulations,’” writes Saville. “Frydenberg, a former tennis champ, was offering no polite handshake over the net.”

You can always judge a politician by their post-politics job: Frydenberg is now banking a mint at Goldman Sachs. But his sense of entitlement about Kooyong, his intransigence in the face of new ideas, his inability to maintain civil connections with people who disagreed with him, and his failure to build strategic partnerships are symptomatic of the Liberal Party as a whole.

Starting with John Howard and ending with Scott Morrison, Australia’s most successful political party has moved, it seems, from broad church to narrow-minded cult. During the campaign, a hopelessly out-of-touch John Howard was rolled out and promptly blew a large hole in the Liberal voter base when he described the teal women as “groupies.” As Saville notes, “‘I’ve had enough of this crap,’ thought many women. ‘I’m going to vote these dinosaurs out.’”

Simon Holmes à Court’s The Big Teal is a mini-memoir by one of the teal movement’s more important players. Holmes à Court is the bolshie child of a billionaire father, the late Robert Holmes à Court, and his equally accomplished mother, Janet. Given his background and business interests you’d probably pick young Simon as a Liberal Party supporter. And for a while, he was.

He relates how he went from being a supporter of Frydenberg’s via his membership of a Liberal Party fundraising organisation called Kooyong 200 to becoming an arch enemy of the Liberal Party’s boy wonder when he set up a pro-teal fundraiser called Climate 200.

Holmes à Court had become deeply frustrated by the Coalition’s lack of commitment to fighting climate change and had turned his considerable talents against them. Doing the right thing for the planet, and encouraging new businesses to do it, seemed like a no-brainer to a billionaire’s son, but would the Liberal Party listen? No, it wouldn’t. The dominant right wing of the party, and their sidekicks in the National Party — and even so-called moderates like Josh Frydenberg — knew better.

Though it was only started in mid 2021, Climate 200 managed to raise $13 million by election day. Thirteen million is peanuts compared with what the major parties raise, but every Climate 200 dollar invested in the teals paid dividends in the end.

Holmes à Court is particularly good at exposing and explaining how money greases the system of Australian politics. Did you know, for example, about “telephone rights”? Drop a $5000 donation on the Coalition and you acquire a hotline to the minister of your choice.

“It’s no surprise to me that Australian politics can be so transactional,” he writes, “but I was shocked to discover that some politicians are so cheap.”

To protect its brand as an honest broker, as a supporter not a player, Climate 200 always remained at arm’s length from the political trenches of the teal campaigns. “Climate 200 has never started a campaign, nor chosen a candidate,” explains Holmes à Court. “Every campaign we’ve supported began within their community and showed us they had a head of steam before we chose to turbocharge them.”

The puppetmaster slur peddled mainly by News Corp never got traction because it wasn’t true.

So, what lessons does this story of the recent past have for the near future? As always in politics, it’s hard to predict what might happen, but here are some ideas for your consideration.

Once elected, independents have a knack for sticking around. Every time they win, they get better at winning. Ominously for the Liberal Party, one teal adviser quoted by Saville says that teal insiders saw the 2022 result as “a launch pad, not a landing zone.”

The late Peter Andren — who doesn’t get a mention in either book, incidentally — held the NSW rural seat of Calare from 1996, when he won on Labor preferences, until his death in 2007, by which time he was winning by a mile on primary votes. That’s more than a decade in office.

The Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie first entered federal parliament in 2010; twelve years later he’s still there. Cathy McGowan won the seat of Indi twice and now her fellow independent Helen Haines has held the seat at two subsequent elections. As a result, Indi’s had an independent MP since 2013.

After winning in Warringah in 2019, Zali Steggall won again in 2022. The South Australian independent Rebekha Sharkie first became a federal MP in 2016 as a member of the Nick Xenophon Team, survived a by-election in 2018, and has been winning as an independent ever since.

Could the newly elected teals last as long? And could the crossbenches grow in number at future elections? Yes and Yes.

This brings us to Australia’s “two-party system” — which, as I said, is a figment of our national imagination.

Australia has two main political teams: in the red shirts is Labor, factionalised but unified in pursuit of office; in the blue there’s a coalition, known as “the Coalition,” made up of the Liberal Party, the National Party (formerly the Country Party) and a strange hybrid beast from Queensland called the Liberal National Party.

So — not really a two-party system; it’s more a two-main-sides system. And the blue side turns out, under current conditions, to be increasingly unstable. The Coalition needs all of its constituent parts working in unison to achieve government. Is this in doubt?

Now, foolish political scientists used to sometimes get drunk and predict the demise of the National Party. It hasn’t happened. In fact, at the 2022 election the National Party pretty much maintained its seats. As did the Queenslanders. It was the Liberal Party that famously dive-bombed into an active volcano, shot out of the sky by the teals and a disciplined, resurgent Labor Party.

So, will juiced-up pol sci academics start predicting the end of Menzies’s child? Could the continued success of smart, well-connected, well-educated and capable female teal candidates force a realignment of Australia’s conservative politics?

I don’t know, but what’s currently a better political brand in certain big city seats: teal or “Liberal Party moderate”?

During the 2022 election campaign, in the federal seat of North Sydney where I live, I heard an effective line of attack deployed again and again against the hapless Liberal Party: “A vote for the Liberals is a vote for Barnaby Joyce.” Indeed, in the face of a growing climate catastrophe, why would you use your vote to help get a pro-coal National Party member into cabinet if you had a choice between a teal and a Liberal Party hack?

And finally, is Peter Dutton (known as The Placeholder in my house) the man to overcome this contradiction, square this vicious circle, and return the Liberal Party to its former glory? Let’s see. All we have to do is wait, and watch. •

The Big Teal
By Simon Holmes à Court | Monash University Publishing | $19.95 | 96 pages

The Teal Revolution: Inside the Movement Changing Australian Politics
By Margot Saville | Hardie Grant | $24.99 | 128 pages

The post The teal thing appeared first on Inside Story.

Midterm elections — treated by many voters as a referendum on the sitting president’s agenda — are always fraught with danger for the party in the White House. This year the Republicans ran on issues like crime and the economy, seen as their bailiwick, and hoped to capitalise on lingering resentments over Trump’s 2020 election loss and the partisan divide opened up by the Democrats’ probing of the 6 January invasion of the Capitol. But Trump changed the dynamics fundamentally when he inserted his candidates, his policies and indeed himself into the campaign.

The expected Republican wave failed to eventuate not just federally but also in the states. Democrats lost fewer House seats than in any midterm election under a Democratic president in forty years. They retained the Senate and performed better in midterm elections for state governors than at any time since 1986.

With angry Republicans blaming Trump, the former president’s role as party kingmaker is under challenge from Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who emerged as the big Republican winner.

The election results have immediate consequences for the remainder of Joe Biden’s first term. They will help shape the 2024 elections, and provide important clues as to how changing demographics will influence the future of American voting.

In Biden’s view, the results showed that “the overwhelming majority of the American people” support his economic agenda. He might well be right: exit polling shows that voters see the economy and jobs as the most important issue facing the nation, and inflation as the most important issue in determining their vote.

Those polls also revealed other factors driving support for Democrats: anger at limits on abortions, concerns about healthcare costs and gun control, and a high turnout among young voters. As Biden had warned in a prime-time address ahead of the elections, the very future of the nation was on the line in the face of election denial, voter intimidation and political violence. His concern was no doubt driven by the large slate of extremist candidates for federal and state offices endorsed (and largely handpicked) by Trump on the basis of their loyalty to him and their support for his grievances.

Voters in crucial battleground states, perhaps tiring of the endless rhetoric about a lost presidency during a period of high inflation, rejected Trump’s election-denying candidates. Voting was peaceful, with few technical glitches and only muted Republican claims of election fraud. Biden summarised election day thus: “It was a good day, I think, for democracy.”

That optimism overlooks the fact that the president will have to deal with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives less interested in working cooperatively than in investigating and probably impeaching him, his family and Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi. Biden must push hard to get key elements of his agenda — and legislation essential for the operation of government, including a lift in the debt ceiling — enacted by the lame-duck Congress that lasts only until new members take their places in January.

The House promises to be a can of worms for both sides of politics. For all that Trump’s election slate has been deemed a failure, at least 145 of the Republicans elected to the House are election deniers. Importantly, they will constitute the majority of the GOP caucus.

This means that current House minority leader Kevin McCarthy might not have sufficient support to realise his ambition of becoming speaker; the position could instead be taken by someone as contentious as Representative Jim Jordan, a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus and the top Republican on the House judiciary committee. With a slim majority, Marjorie Taylor Greene and other so-called MAGA Republicans will make electorally unpopular demands of the leadership. But perhaps the chaos that is almost certain to ensue will work in the Democrats’ favour in 2024.

In the Senate there is a very real possibility that the Democrats can win fifty-one seats, but this is dependent on incumbent senator Raphael Warnock winning a run-off against Herschel Walker in Georgia. With a Republican-controlled House, Democratic control of the Senate is essential if Biden is to win confirmation of any future appointments. A one-seat majority on the relevant committees will help, and will also provide a buffer during difficult negotiations with senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who often resist toeing the Democrats’ line.

In the states, meanwhile, Democrat victories will provide a bulwark against the erosion of electoral rights. Democrats won important gubernatorial races in Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, along with secretary of state positions (responsible for overseeing elections) in Minnesota and New Mexico. They also took the majority in state houses in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, long controlled by Republicans. For the first time in modern history, Democrats were elected to all twenty-six statewide and federal offices in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

In Michigan, governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has been heavily targeted by Trump, made abortion rights central to her winning campaign and Democrats won control of the state legislature for the first time since 1984. Michigan’s election lines have been determined since 2018 by an independent, nonpartisan panel.

In Florida, by contrast, incumbent governor DeSantis had made sure new electoral districts were heavily gerrymandered in his party’s favour He defeated his Democrat opponent Charlie Crist by nearly twenty percentage points and delivered four more Republican seats in the House of Representatives.

DeSantis, who contends that his state has become a (Republican) “promised land,” has positioned Florida in the vanguard of many of the nation’s most polarising culture war fights. His election success sets him up for a fascinating presidential primary battle — and simmering warfare — with Trump.

While DeSantis may not emerge as the Republican saviour, Trump’s status as party kingmaker is no longer secure. Republican leaders are openly blaming election losses on his poor-quality candidates and failure to financially support their efforts. Trump has responded with his usual denial of responsibility, lashing out at his advisers. Many wealthy potential donors are looking at other potential presidential contenders, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, Virginia’s governor Glenn Youngkin, South Carolina’s senator Tim Scott and even former vice-president Mike Pence.

Where the money goes will be an important factor for the Republican presidential primaries. Trump’s early entrance into the field is as much about getting first access to donors as it is about trying to fend off other contenders — and is perhaps also an attempt to avoid prosecutions.

In a few short weeks (or sooner if Trump has his way) the United States will be plunged into the maelstrom of presidential primaries, and political operatives will start strategising for 2024. Far-thinking Republicans must recognise that rusted-on Trump supporters — mostly older, white and without a college education — are a diminishing demographic. On the other hand, Democrats can’t take for granted the longstanding support of Black voters or ignore evidence that Hispanic support is slipping.

Across the nation, the share of non-Hispanic white voters is declining. America’s youngest voters, millennials and generation X, are more racially and ethnically diverse than older generations. At the same time, the increasing proportion of voters aged sixty-five and over (19 per cent by 2024) will force a focus on social security and Medicare, programs Republicans have said they will cut.

The fevered gerrymandering and vote-suppressing efforts of Republican governors and legislators reveal their understanding that only these forms of election-rigging stand between their party — at least in its present form — and oblivion. Even the Republican-dominated US Supreme Court has pitched in, allowing states to use unlawfully gerrymandered congressional maps for last week’s elections and currently hearing a case that would undermine the Voting Rights Act.

The midterm results have delivered a sense of relief to many, including leaders in other democracies, but they also highlight the work still needed to protect American democracy and America’s place in the world. The new balance in Congress is hardly a prescription for the national unity that Biden seeks to promulgate, and the looming internecine warfare between Trump, DeSantis and the Republican leadership will work against any efforts to bridge the party divide. •

The post Game changers appeared first on Inside Story.

In the last three weeks, though, the atmosphere has changed. Victoria’s election has begun to get interesting. The polls, the politics, and the momentum appear to be swinging — not enough to suggest that this election could end Labor’s rule, but enough to make the outcome a bit less certain.

Daniel Andrews specialises in being in control: it’s his thing. Doing press conferences for 120 days straight during the Covid lockdowns was fine with him: the journalists could only ask questions, whereas he could talk as long as he liked without even answering those questions. But he can’t control interviews with thinking radio hosts like Neil Mitchell (3AW) and Virginia Trioli (ABC) who ask critical questions and interrupt him if he goes off on a tangent. So he refuses to face up to them. And in an election campaign, a leader who refuses to appear on the state’s biggest talk shows is a liability to his party.

As the government, Labor normally dominates policy debates. But an election campaign is a more even contest. Both sides have been told by their focus groups that the two key issues for voters are the cost of living and the state of Victoria’s hospitals and healthcare. Both sides are equally able to throw money at any group they think might consider such bribes worth voting for. And both sides are doing so with similar recklessness.

Victoria’s budget is heavily in deficit: even on optimistic assumptions, net debt is heaving towards $165 billion, or 25 per cent of the state’s GDP within four years. The only saving either side has offered so far is Guy’s welcome pledge to cancel the $13 billion Andrews has committed to his “Suburban Rail Loop” (which is not a loop at all). That aside, all the new spending both sides have promised — mostly to shift household costs onto the impoverished state budget and build or rebuild dozens of hospitals — would be funded by further state borrowing, adding to the debt to be repaid by future taxpayers.

It is depressing to watch a once-strong budget being weakened daily by political leaders who lack the courage to make voters pay for what they spend. The long-term costs to Victorians of the Andrews government’s fiscal lassitude in its second term will be substantial. But the spending competition has made the election a more even contest, leaving Andrews for once unable to dismiss the opposition as irrelevant.

Similarly, Labor usually dominates the tactical game, but last weekend it was caught by surprise when opposition leader Matthew Guy announced that the Victorian Liberals would change their preference policy to “put Labor last.” On paper, that’s enough to swing at least two Labor seats to the Greens, even if some Liberals have made it known they don’t like the change.

And the polls are moving, and serving up plenty of variety. Two weeks ago a Resolve poll for the Age found Labor leading 59–41 in the two-party vote. Within days, Newspoll in the Australian declared that lead had shrunk to 54–46. The Financial Review’s new pollster, Freshwater Strategy, put it at 56–44, a Roy Morgan poll reported it as 57–43 (almost unchanged from the last election), while in Monday’s Herald Sun a Redbridge poll put it at 53.5–46.5 — implying a 4 per cent swing against Labor.

What should we make of all that? Take it with a grain of salt. I keep seeing the ghosts of Victorian polls past, such as “Matthew Guy Preferred Premier in Poll as Support for Daniel Andrews Collapses” (2016), or figures during Victoria’s six Covid lockdowns suggesting Labor’s hold had become genuinely precarious. No recent poll suggests that Guy’s Coalition team could win the election.

But there is now a remote possibility that Labor could lose enough seats to lose its majority in the Legislative Assembly — as well as having to deal with a less controllable Legislative Council.

In November 2018, only 22 per cent of Victorians voted for Greens, minor parties and independents. In May 2022, 34 per cent did. That cost Labor no seats at the time, but a repeat of that vote in state electorates on 26 November almost certainly would.

Some numbers might be helpful. Here are three sets of them: in summary form, the votes at the 2018 Victorian election; the Victorian voting at the federal election in May; and a simple average of the five latest polls.

Three things to highlight. First, on the average of the polls, Labor’s primary vote is down 5 per cent since the 2018 election. Yet its two-party-preferred vote is down only 1.5 per cent — and the Coalition’s primary vote is also down, albeit marginally.

What the polls are telling us is that a significant minority of voters are shifting from the major parties — mostly from Labor — to Greens, minor parties of left and right, and independents of all shades.

Even in May, the signs were there. In three-party-preferred votes (that is, Labor v Coalition v the best of the rest), Labor went backwards in two-thirds of its Victorian seats. Even in two-party-preferred contests, competing only with the Liberals and Nationals, Labor lost ground in fourteen of Victoria’s thirty-nine House seats.

Until 2018, the idea of Labor facing challenges in its old working-class seats was implausible. They were rusted on, so it could ignore them with impunity — and did. But then loose coalitions of independents banded together in three of its neglected western suburbs seats to demand similar services to the rest of Melbourne.

Melton, with 70,000 people and growing fast, had no hospital, no TAFE and only an occasional country train service. Werribee was the centre of the booming southwest, where single-lane roads are choked with traffic most of the day. And Pascoe Vale was one of many Labor suburbs repeatedly ignored when the politicians direct their spending promises to marginal seats across town.

None of the independents won in 2018, but they gave the government a scare. In Werribee, treasurer Tim Pallas was fought to final preferences by local GP Joe Garra. In Melton, neuroscientist Ian Birchall came within 5 per cent of winning the seat.

The government briefly acknowledged the western suburbs and made more promises. But four years later, Birchall tells voters, Melton is no closer to getting a hospital, or being part of the suburban rail network, or having its own level crossings removed. You can’t drive around outer northern or western Melbourne without being stunned by the inadequacy of the main road networks their people have to put up with.

Birchall is running again, along with another of the 2018 independents, Bacchus Marsh snake catcher Jarrod Bingham, who in May came third in the new seat of Hawke. Joe Garra has swapped seats to contest Point Cook, but Labor now faces three other independents in Werribee, and more in Broadmeadows, Bundoora, Greenvale, Kalkallo, Kororoit, Laverton, Macedon, Preston, St Albans, Sunbury and Tarneit — as well as in seats in Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong.

They may all lose. For now, the bookies and punters assume that all of them will lose. But the punters got it very wrong in May, when they bet that Labor’s Kristina Keneally would win Fowler comfortably and only one new crossbencher would be elected: Zoe Daniel in Goldstein. In fact she was one of ten.

As of now, the bookies’ odds imply that only five seats will change hands on Saturday week: Labor losing Richmond and Northcote to the Greens, and Hawthorn and Nepean to the Liberals, while holding on to Bayswater (notionally now a Liberal seat after redistribution changed its boundaries). I suspect they might be once again underestimating the likely changes.

Thirteen seats changed hands in 2018, and the Coalition lost eleven of them. It was left with just twenty-seven of the eighty-eight seats in the Assembly. Most of the Liberals’ seats were won very narrowly, with majorities of less than 3 per cent. The overall two-party-preferred vote (including an estimate for inner-suburban Richmond, where an independent Liberal ran after the party failed to nominate) was 57.5 per cent for Labor, 42.5 per cent for the Coalition.

It’s not a good place for the Coalition to start from, and the redistribution has not made it any easier. In Antony Green’s judgement, nine of the twenty-one Liberal seats are held by 1 per cent or less, whereas the vast majority of Labor seats are held by more than 10 per cent. To imagine the Coalition winning this election requires a creativity beyond my powers.

In Green’s view, the redistribution has left Labor with fifty-six seats, the Coalition twenty-seven, the Greens three and independents two. The Labor-held seats of Bayswater and Bass have become notional Coalition seats on their new boundaries, while Liberal-held Ripon and the Latrobe Valley seat of Morwell, held by National-turned-independent Russell Northe, have become notional Labor seats (the more so because Northe is retiring).

Labor will be re-elected for a third term unless it loses twelve or more seats, and there’s no sign of that happening. But Labor won the federal election in May because of a landslide in Western Australia that I don’t recall anyone predicting. If Victorians are hiding their anger from the pollsters, where might it suddenly erupt on election night?

First, we never have a good handle on country seats. The Liberals won Ripon last time by just fifteen votes; it’s possible that they will squeeze home again, despite the unfavourable new boundaries. The Nationals seem surprisingly confident of regaining Morwell, even though it now includes Labor-voting Moe.

And Mildura is facing a challenging election. Not only are the Nationals out to regain the seat they lost so narrowly last time, but seven-time mayor Glenn Milne is running as a conservative independent against its proto-teal independent MP Ali Cupper.

The bookies see two of the seats Labor won in 2018 as low-hanging fruit for the Liberals. Nepean, at the ritzy end of the Mornington Peninsula, voted Labor for the first time in 2018 but came back strongly to the Liberals in the federal election. Former big-serving Davis Cup player Sam Groth is expected to win the seat back for the Liberals.

The biggest upset on election night 2018 was the Liberals’ loss of Hawthorn. Its MP and shadow attorney-general, John Pesutto, spent the night on ABC TV’s panel, gradually realising that he had lost his seat and his job. At least he lost no friends with the classy way he handled the situation, but as the Age columnist Shaun Carney reminded us last week, Pesutto thereby also lost his chance to take over the Liberal leadership and move the party back from the fringes into the middle ground. His loss was one reason why Labor has faced little competition since.

Labor’s candidate John Kennedy, once one of Tony Abbott’s teachers at Riverview, was living in a retirement home at the time, and won preselection only because it was seen as an unwinnable seat. Despite his win, Labor has reportedly excluded Hawthorn from its priority list, opening the way for Pesutto to fight it out with one of just four teal independents at this election, Melissa Lowe, an administrator at Swinburne University.

But to get close enough this time to make a serious bid for power in 2026, the Liberals will need to win back more seats than that. At the federal election in May, their biggest swings from Labor were in the outer suburbs, especially in the new state seat of Pakenham, and in northern Yan Yean, where they had to disendorse their candidate last time. If, as many argue, the Covid lockdowns did most damage to outer-suburban families, many of whom could not work from home, these two seats could be among the casualties.

Labor generally had easy wins in the outer southeast last time, but that was before Covid. Both sides are putting resources into new housing areas in seats like Bass (now notionally Liberal), Cranbourne, Narre Warren North and Narre Warren South.

The Liberals are also hoping to take back some of Labor’s other unexpected gains last time, including the middle-suburban electorates of Ashwood (formerly Burwood), Box Hill and Ringwood, and the outer-south Geelong seat of South Barwon. Ministerial retirements have opened up rare opportunities for them to win back the Dandenongs electorate of Monbulk, held until now by former deputy premier and education minister James Merlino, and the sea-change electorate of Bellarine, vacated by former police minister Lisa Neville.

But Labor’s success in May reminds us that it’s pretty good at looking after marginal seats. It’s the safe seats it often mucks up. And while most of the 129 independents are running in Labor seats, many of them aren’t well known, and virtually all of them will be poorly resourced relative to the major parties, for whom Labor’s electoral reforms carved out a far more generous set of rules than those applied to new parties.

That leaves the Greens as the third opponent Labor has to worry about. But not too much: even with the Liberals preferencing them ahead of Labor, the Greens’ dream result would be to double their seats in the Assembly from three to six.

They first entered Victorian politics at the 2002 election. Amid a Labor landslide, they overtook the Liberals to run second in four inner-suburban electorates — Melbourne, Brunswick, Northcote and Richmond. Liberal preferences helped an unknown young medico named Richard Di Natale to come within 2 per cent of winning Melbourne.

In 2006 they won three seats in the Legislative Council after the Bracks government made a principled decision to switch it to election by proportional representation. (You could not remotely imagine Andrews proposing such a reform.) And when Adam Bandt broke through to win the federal seat of Melbourne in August 2010 — with 80 per cent of Liberal voters directing preferences to him — the state election seemed set for a similar breakthrough.

But Bandt immediately became one of the crossbenchers supporting Julia Gillard. Federal opposition leader Tony Abbott decided to reverse Coalition policy on preferences: he wanted the Greens to be treated as untouchable, which meant giving Coalition preferences to Labor instead. The Victorian election in 2010 was the first under the new policy, and it saw the Greens lose all four contests.

In 2014 the Greens retaliated by targeting a Liberal seat, Prahran, as well as a Labor one, Melbourne. They won them both, despite Liberal preferences in Melbourne going to Labor.

Let’s note: Daniel Andrews and Labor won that election with a majority of just six seats. Had the Liberals not shifted preferences to Labor, the Greens in 2014 would also have won Brunswick, Northcote and Richmond from Labor, leaving it as a government without a majority. Labor would have had forty-four seats, the Coalition thirty-eight, with five Greens and an independent on the crossbenches. Labor would still have formed government, and could have made it work, but it would have required Andrews to develop skills he has yet to show us.

In 2017, future senator Lidia Thorpe won Northcote for the Greens at a by-election. But she lost it a year later at the full election, although her colleague, medico Tim Read, took Brunswick and the Greens just held on to their other two seats, all very narrowly, while Glenn Druery’s machinations saw them reduced to one seat in the Council. Their progress appeared to have stalled.

The federal election changed that, as they became part of the crossbench wave. Their big successes were in Queensland, but their vote surged to a record 13.75 per cent in Victoria, up from 10.7 per cent at the 2018 state election. The Greens came within 0.32 per cent of winning Macnamara (formerly Melbourne Ports) and within 2.40 per cent of winning the three-way contest for Higgins. Had the Liberals preferenced the Greens at that election, Wills and Cooper (formerly Batman) would also have been very close.

The recent polls suggest the Greens’ surge is holding. Their goal for the Assembly is to consolidate their three existing seats, and pick up three more: Richmond, Northcote and Albert Park.

In Richmond they had been held at bay repeatedly by Labor’s veteran MP Richard Wynne, a well-respected former social worker and Labor idealist, and until recently planning and housing minister. But Wynne is retiring, and the bookies already had the Greens as narrow favourites in both Northcote and Richmond before the Liberals’ preference shift made that outcome more probable.

Albert Park is a tougher ask. Alongside Prahran, it makes up roughly half of Macnamara. But while much of Prahran is natural Greens territory, Albert Park is pretty well-off. On my sums, the Greens would need to top their federal election high by another one to two percentage points to win the seat.

The state redistribution did the Greens favours in some other seats, turning Footscray and Pascoe Vale into possible Greens seats in future. But that’s not where this election will be fought.

The single most important fact in Victorian politics is that, for all the mistakes, the polarisation, the high death toll and the policy overkill of 2020 and 2021, the polls make it clear that a majority of Victorians think the Andrews government did a good job in handling Covid. Clearly, he has earned his plaudits as a communicator with voters.

A survey by the Age suggests the voters just want to forget about Covid: old and young voters alike ranked it near the bottom of the list of a dozen key issues. Andrews clearly just wants to forget about it too. Chief health officer Brett Sutton, for so long at Andrews’s side at all those press conferences, has now been dispatched to the “freezer”: the government didn’t even ask his advice before agreeing to abandon mandatory isolation of people with active Covid.

Of course that is a national policy somersault, not just a Victorian one. It is a fact almost universally unreported and undiscussed that most Australians who have died of Covid have lost their lives in the last six months.

Sources: Covid Live, Australian Bureau of Statistics

Victoria is still by far the nation’s worst Covid hotspot: in the past six months alone, it has seen 63 per cent more deaths per million people than the rest of Australia. But to the premier and the voters alike, it seems it no longer matters. They are sick of Covid restrictions, and if old people die of it, so be it.

Andrews’s second term as premier was a lot worse than his first. Fiscal discipline has collapsed, causing an escalation of debt that will make future generations of Victorians poorer. Its symbol is the so-called Suburban Rail Loop, in reality a very expensive twenty-six-kilometre arc underground through Labor seats in the southeastern suburbs. On conventional cost-benefit tests, the auditor-general estimates the cost to Victorians will be twice the benefits they receive.

If Andrews wins a thumping majority on Saturday week, as still appears the likely outcome, what will his third term be like? Sumeyya Ilanbey’s recent biography depicts a leader who thrives on adulation, resents criticism and doesn’t listen to alternative views. His old colleagues have mostly left the room: only four of the twenty-one ministerial colleagues he started with in 2014 still remain.

If there is any constraint on his power in the next term, it could come from the new Legislative Council: the election result we don’t know already. We will look at that later this week.  •

The post Victoria considers its verdict appeared first on Inside Story.

Of course, talk of presidents naturally brings to mind the United States’ powerful chief executive. But that’s a false comparison: a dramatic shift from a parliamentary to a presidential model of government is not on the cards for Australia. Better to look at parliamentary systems that already have presidential systems. What they have in common is that their presidents tend to be symbolic figureheads more akin to a constitutional monarch than an American-style president.

Proponents of the republican cause in Australia might therefore like to look more closely at the Irish experience of presidentialism. Ireland was once part of the British Commonwealth, as Australia still is, but it adopted a directly elected presidency eleven years before formally leaving the Commonwealth in 1949. Like Australia, it has a parliamentary system of government with a strong prime minister, but it has managed to weave a president into its political fabric without too many hiccups.

What could Australia hope to learn from the Irish presidency? The first is that the president, by necessity, is more a symbolic than a political figure. When the presidency was created in 1937, some people feared it was part of a ploy by the then prime minister, Éamon de Valera, to create an elected dictatorship, but that anxiety primarily reflected the tense political atmosphere of late 1930s Europe.

Any concerns were quickly allayed by the election of the non-partisan Douglas Hyde, a retired professor of modern Irish and a leading cultural revivalist, as the office’s first occupant. Hyde was supported by all political parties and sought to stay out of the limelight for the duration of his seven-year term, adopting a minimalist interpretation of his role. Had a more political figure sought and won the office, and gone on to challenge the government’s authority, a different type of presidency might have evolved. The message for Australia is that, regardless of how the institution is designed, the tone is very much set by early incumbents.

For this reason, some thought needs to be given to the electoral rules for a president, beginning with candidate eligibility. Would anyone be allowed to run for a hypothetical presidency, or would eligibility be restricted, for example, to citizens aged thirty-five or older (as is the case in Ireland and the United States)?

To run for the Irish presidency requires either the signatures of twenty of parliament’s 220 members or the support of four local councils, all of which are party-controlled. The one exception is that current or former presidents can nominate themselves. That clause hasn’t caused problems to date but could easily do so if a disgruntled former president (inspired by a recent counterpart across the Atlantic, perhaps) wanted to disrupt the process. The nomination process is specified in the constitution and can only be altered by referendum.

Ireland’s major parties have kept a firm grip on the process, especially up to the 1990s, even colluding on a number of occasions to ensure no election was necessary when they agreed on a candidate. The level of parliamentary support required for a nomination means that only Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, historically the two largest parties, could field candidates. No Fine Gael candidate has ever been elected to the presidency, so when the party decided not to oppose Fianna Fáil, there was no contest.

That’s why presidential elections were the exception rather than the norm. Ireland’s directly elected model looks quite different from processes in other European countries, where parliaments rather than the people select the president, but has always been closer to that model in practice.

In recent decades, though, Ireland’s political parties have relinquished some control over the process by allowing their own local councillors to nominate independent candidates. The consequence of a more open system has been greater competition, with as many as eight independents securing nominations at the past two presidential elections and winning a combined total of almost 40 per cent support on both occasions.

The only attempt to change the nomination process more fundamentally was a referendum to extend candidate eligibility to citizens aged twenty-one and over. It was held on the same day as a marriage-equality referendum in 2015, but the overwhelming level of support to end relationship discrimination didn’t carry over to the presidential question, which was easily defeated by a three-to-one majority.

Aspirant presidential candidates in countries such as Bulgaria, Finland, Iceland and Poland can circumvent parties by securing a particular number of voters’ signatures to run for the presidency, but that option isn’t available in Ireland. Political parties have an open and stated fear of celebrities or media personalities using this avenue to get on the ballot, potentially undermining the presidency if elected — or worse, putting it into direct conflict with the government.

That’s not to say that the president has many powers to challenge the government. But some, including the power to send a parliamentary bill to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality, create a potential clashing point. That particular power has been exercised on fifteen occasions by different presidents, and the Supreme Court has struck down the proposed legislation seven times. One of those referrals drew criticism from a government minister, and the then president, Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh, ultimately resigned in 1976 when the minister was not rebuked.

With all bills requiring the consent of the president to become law, it’s no mystery why the parties are unlikely to open up the nomination process anytime soon.

What about the election itself? This process should be a bit more familiar to Australians, since Ireland is one of the few countries that uses preferential voting to elect its president. While most European countries use a two-round ballot, the Irish system — like Australia’s — is what is known as the single transferable vote. On only one occasion, when Mary Robinson beat Fianna Fáil’s Brian Lenihan in 1990, has a candidate with the largest number of first-preference votes been beaten.

Such an outcome might lead to the reasonable conclusion that parties in government usually get their candidate elected, but this has not proven to be the case in recent years. Voters have treated the presidential contest as a classic second-order, midterm election — in other words, as a means of expressing their opinion on the government of the day rather than the candidates running for office. This can give presidential elections an additional political dimension that opposition parties can exploit as a means of attacking the government.

In terms of who gets to vote in presidential elections, the franchise in Ireland is restricted to Irish citizens resident in the country. Unusually, Irish citizens living overseas are not allowed to vote in elections. Given the size of the Irish diaspora — estimated at several multiples of the resident population — successive governments have been reluctant to embrace overseas voting.

Earlier this year, however, it was announced that the government will hold a referendum before 2024 on allowing Irish-born people living abroad the right to vote at presidential elections. If this significant change were passed, the devil would be in the detail. Would all votes be counted equally, for example, or would overseas citizens have their votes weighted? If the former, then it could be possible for a president to be elected without majority support among the resident population.

These issues and more demonstrate that Australia faces complex questions if it decides to go down the republican route and adopt a presidency. Despite the controversy and confusion when it was introduced, Ireland’s presidency has endured, with recent incumbents among the more popular politicians in the country. Such popularity would be especially important for the first incumbents of a hypothetical Australian presidency. As the Irish experience shows, careful consideration needs to be given to the design of such an institution lest it tarnish the republican cause. •

The post The Queen is dead! Long live the president? appeared first on Inside Story.

Colorado has also done almost everything election experts recommend to protect its electoral system from hacking. County clerks are combating disinformation about the security and reliability of the system and refuting false claims of potential fraud in the wake of last year’s presidential election.

A large majority of Colorado voters have opted to be placed on a permanent mail-ballot list maintained by the state. As an overseas voter, I received an email link to the ballot papers from the office of the clerk and recorder of  Summit County (my district of residence) at the beginning of October. I needed some personal details to unlock these papers and a little tech savvy to fill them out and submit them. I returned my completed voting paper, along with an affidavit attesting my eligibility to vote, by email a few days later.

I have since received an email from Colorado BallotTrax to inform me that my ballot was received. A phone number and an email address are given for any questions I might have, and a link to the GoVoteColorado.gov website operated by Colorado’s secretary of state. Another email will let me know when my vote has been counted.

I voted in the same way in the Democratic primary races earlier this year (the results are here) and in every presidential and midterm election since I became an American citizen. A highlight was voting for the 2020 presidential primaries, in person this time, at the old County Courthouse in Breckenridge, using an unwieldy electronic voting machine. But it wasn’t very celebratory; although “I Voted” stickers were available, democracy sausages were nowhere to be seen.

In this election I could vote for one of the state’s two federal senators (incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet or Republican Joe O’Dea); for the representative for the second congressional district (incumbent Democrat representative Joe Neguse or Republican Marshall Dawson); for a state senator and a state House of Representatives member; and for thirteen state-wide offices, including governor and lieutenant governor (with Democrat incumbents Jared Polis and Dianne Primavera seeking re-election), attorney-general, secretary of state, treasurer, and four representatives each for the State Board of Education and the State Board of Regents, which oversee state spending in schools and universities respectively.

Voters who hadn’t run out of energy by that point could also say yes or no to eleven state ballot measures on public school funding, alcohol licencing and other matters. No judicial positions were on the ballot, but I could register whether or not I wanted those in current elected judicial positions to remain. (Full details of what was on the ballot are here.)

Colorado is a blue state with pockets of more conservative voters, including ranchers concerned about gun rights, petrol prices and more. (One rancher is currently spending US$11 million on anti-Polis billboards.) It also has five military bases, home to some 60,000 people, as well as military retirees and evangelical church members. But the political demographics are changing, with young, college-educated suburbanites making up a rising percentage of the population. After voting primarily Republican from 1920 to 2004, the state has voted with the Democrats in the last four presidential elections; Biden won in 2020 with a 13.5 per cent margin.

The Democrats hope that the 2022 midterms will defy historical precedent and enable them to retain control of the Senate and perhaps even hold the House. In Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet holds a comfortable lead over his Republican opponent and has done well in fundraising, but it is critical that this low-key senator is able to stave off his Republican opponent, Joe O’Dea. O’Dea’s moderate positions on issues like abortion, his rejection of former president Donald Trump and his endorsement by former president George W. Bush make him a very real threat.

Controversial Republican Lauren Boebert, who represents Colorado’s third congressional district in the House of Representatives, is backed by Trump and has earned notoriety for her inflammatory remarks. She has positioned herself as one of the most far-right members of Congress. One poll has her in a statistical tie with her Democrat challenger Adam Frisch, and there are hopes that he has the momentum to make this a competitive race.

Boebert won in 2020 with just 51 per cent of the vote, in a district that includes the wealthy ski centres around Aspen and the middle-class cities of Glenwood Springs and Pueblo, and where 43 per cent of voters are unaffiliated. But the nonpartisan election handicapper Cook Political Report rates this district as solidly Republican. This race matters, not just because it contributes to controlling the House of Representatives but also because more wins for Trump-endorsed candidates will boost his kingmaker status and increase the likelihood he will run for president in 2024.

In contrast to Boebert’s high-profile contest, the second congressional district where I vote remains a solidly Democratic seat. Our local congressman, Joe Neguse, who is running for a third term, is the son of Eritrean refugees (a significant number of whom have settled in Summit County) and the first African-American man elected to the US Congress from Colorado.  His Republican opponent Marshall Dawson is so low-profile I had to research him on the internet, and I still don’t know much about him.

Neguse, who is on House leader Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team, is one of the co-chairs of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. He was also chosen as an impeachment manager for Trump’s second impeachment trial. In recent years, this seat has been a strong jumping off point for politicians seeking higher office: of the last four to hold it, two went on to the US Senate and one (Polis) to the governorship.

Neguse has already marked himself as a man to watch, and he is expected to play an enhanced role in the House leadership as old hands like Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer step aside.

State elections are an increasingly important feature of the American political landscape. State governors and legislatures oversee the drawing of electoral boundaries, determine voting rights, decide who is eligible for Medicaid, and now— after the recent decision of the US Supreme Court — make decisions about abortion access.

In this, too, Colorado is in a better position than most other states. Since 2020, the state’s legislative and congressional districts have been drawn up by two separate independent redistricting commissions created after the state’s voters resoundingly approved ballot provisions in the 2018 elections.

The state has also set up an insurance marketplace (as outlined in the Affordable Care Act) to help make health insurance more accessible, and more than half a million Coloradans are covered under Medicaid Medicaid expansion. Low-income undocumented pregnant people and children will gain eligibility by 2025. It is ranked in the top ten states for healthcare.

In April, Governor Polis signed into law the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which codifies protections to ensure that abortion and choice remain legal in Colorado; in July he signed an executive order further protecting reproductive health rights and clarifying that Colorado won’t cooperate with other states’ criminal or civil investigations of health decisions that are legal in Colorado.

Polis has a good track record: he has provided full-day kindergarten and universal preschool and he is entitled to tout his management of the pandemic. FiveThirtyEight’s poll average has him ahead of his Republican rival Heidi Ganahl by a widening margin of 14.3 percentage points.

The political climate has seen secretaries of state — who oversee elections and maintain voter registration files — become increasingly important. Colorado incumbent, Democrat Jena Griswold, made a name for herself in 2020 when she pushed back on national television against election disinformation and challenged Trump’s assertions that mail ballots are less secure. She has subsequently faced death threats from Trump allies.

Griswold successfully went to court to bar Mesa county clerk Tina Peters, who faced criminal charges for allegedly compromising voting equipment and election security, from overseeing both the 2021 election and this year’s midterms. Undeterred, Peters ran in the Republican primary but was beaten by Pam Anderson, a former head of the Clerk’s Association who has made standing up for the state’s election model central to her campaign. No polls are available for this race, but Griswold has to be seen as the frontrunner, although Anderson is a plausible opponent.

Voter turnout — always a problem in the United States and especially so in midterm elections — will be crucial for Democrats if they are to retain the seats they need to hold power in Congress. Campaign staff aim to keep the spotlight on abortion and women’s anger over the Republicans’ curtailing of their rights to reproductive health. Colorado’s progressive stance on abortion issues might turn out to be a two-edged sword, though, if voters don’t feel their reproductive health rights are under threat and aren’t motivated to vote.

Polling suggests the key issues for the state’s voters include inflation and the cost of living; housing shortages and homelessness; climate change, with the state exposed to wildfires and drought; and the cost of childcare. Still, protecting abortion rights and addressing racism and discrimination are in the top ten.

As voting begins around the nation, the FiveThirtyEight forecast has Democrats slightly favoured to win the Senate and Republicans slightly favoured to win the House — and the evidence is that all the races are tightening. Ten states in particular will play a significant role in deciding the balance of the US House and Senate and shaping the map of governorships: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Kansas, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

While Colorado doesn’t appear on that list, every race is important, never more so than this year. The United States is facing rising threats from domestic extremists and those who would undermine the sanctity of the right to vote. As vice-president Kamala Harris says, “everything is on the line in these elections.” •

The post American democracy at its best? appeared first on Inside Story.

In fact, the most recent set of numbers, from the Age Resolve poll, shows a two-party-preferred lead of twenty points for Labor: Danslide 2 territory. Simply regaining what was lost in 2018, let alone winning a majority, will be a major achievement for the Liberals. And the task is rendered all the more challenging by independent candidates seeking to replicate the “teal bath” of May’s federal election in Liberal seats like Kew, Hawthorn and Mornington. All this in the state once seen as the jewel in the Liberal crown.

And yet, every day, there he is, on the telly, in the papers, on the campaign trail: Liberal leader Matthew Guy trying to scale his election mountain. His climbing pick for this year’s attempt to reach the electoral summit? Health policy. Since returning to the state leadership a year ago, Guy has spent months attacking the government’s alleged mismanagement of the state’s health system — the shortages of hospital beds, trip-zero delays, ambulance ramping, gigantic elective surgery waitlists and more.

To repair the damage, he has promised major investments in new and refurbished hospitals, in massive recruitment and training schemes, and to slash waiting times. The result has been a runaway bidding war on health: so far, the Liberals have promised $4.5 billion for hospital infrastructure alone, and Labor is north of $6 billion, matching the Liberals on some points, exceeding them on others.

To an extent, the strategy suggests the Liberals have learnt from their mistakes. In 2018, Guy led the party to an ignominious defeat after campaigning heavily on crime — and particularly the threat supposedly posed by “African gangs.” The party’s own campaign post-mortem noted that “the focus on African gangs became a distraction for some key voters who saw it as a political tactic rather than an authentic problem to be solved by initiatives that would help make their neighbourhoods safer.”

This time, rather than trying to conjure an issue from the subterranean depths, the Liberals are focusing on the item already at the top of the agenda for many voters. Indeed, the electorate may never have been as acutely aware of limits of the health system as it is after the pandemic. Shortages of staff and beds have led to blowouts in waiting times, with vulnerable patients sleeping in tents and on benches. The Australian Medical Association says that less than two-thirds of emergency department patients were seen within four hours in 2020–21, while the ABC reported that as many as 800 emergency patients went home each day without having been seen.

Delays in answering triple-zero calls, meanwhile, have been associated with a dozen deaths over the past twelve months, and a review of the authority running the service found it not fit-for-purpose. No wonder Guy told his party, “It’s the healthcare system, stupid!” It is indeed an unavoidable and irresistible target for the opposition.

What’s more, campaigning on health has delivered dividends for other oppositions around the country this year. SA opposition leader Peter Malinauskas brought Labor into government in March following a campaign keenly focused on problems in healthcare, and particularly the state’s ambulance ramping crisis. And Anthony Albanese made it into the Lodge at least partly thanks to promises to make it easier to go to the doctor and to get prescription medication. Health is on voters’ minds; health is what is swaying them away from incumbents.

The problem for Matthew Guy is this: campaigning on health as a Labor leader is one thing; doing the same as a Liberal is another. Polls stretching back a long way show voters in Australia tend to trust Labor to handle the healthcare system far more than they do the Liberals. Labor “owns” health just as the Coalition “owns” crime and economic management.

This concept of issue ownership sprang up first in the work of the American political scientist John Petrocik. According to his account, the association of a party with issue competence isn’t necessarily based on actual performance. Voters don’t carefully follow what a party is doing or what a candidate has delivered (or failed to deliver). Rather, the reputation builds up over time and become ingrained at an almost subconscious level — which is what makes it incredibly hard to challenge. Labor owns health almost no matter how bad the health system gets on its watch.

Or, take another example, the Coalition and migration. According to this “sticky” theory of issue ownership, even if Labor adopts the same policies as its opponent, voters will still see the Coalition as more credible and effective at managing migration. These perceptions are entrenched; they are not continuously re-evaluated as new information comes in. A change in issue ownership doesn’t come easily, according to Petrocik. Only an especially acute crisis shakes voters out of their assumptions about who owns what.

Such a notion has profound implications for campaign strategies. It pushes parties to campaign about their issues and to ignore their opponents’ issues. To take the alternative course — to try to show voters why you would do better in your opponent’s areas of strength — is to fall into a kind of strategic trap.

A classic case, the 1994 governor’s race for California, has been described by American scholar Adam Simon. Simon shows how the Democratic frontrunner in that campaign, Kathleen Brown, blew a twenty-point lead against incumbent Republican Pete Wilson. Wilson was unpopular because of the dire economic situation he had presided over in California. But although Brown was the preferred candidate for economic management among voters, he succeeded in moving the focus of the campaign towards illegal immigration, in part by pairing it with his controversial Proposition 187 vote to cut off most social services to undocumented migrants.

Brown’s mistake was to follow Wilson into that territory. She stopped campaigning on the economy and education, started critiquing Wilson’s Proposition and launched her own immigration policies, courting endorsements from immigration-focused groups and explaining to voters that she was tougher than she looked on the question. It was a disaster: Wilson, having polled just 29 per cent support a year earlier, won the election by a devastating fourteen points. Had Brown simply ignored Wilson’s campaign and stuck with the economy, so the theory goes, Wilson would have been toast.

Matthew Guy could well be leading the Liberals into a similar trap. Despite the real problems in the health system, it seems entirely plausible that Labor is still more trusted by most voters on health than are the Liberals. If that’s the case, every time Guy elevates the issue he is sending undecided voters back Labor rather than to the Liberals. Every attack, every promise for more health funding, is another reminder to vote Labor — or so the theory goes.

This is not a sure thing of course — Guy could be making a dent in Labor’s ownership of health. Maybe Victoria’s crisis is acute enough for voters to shake off their assumptions and shift — we shall have to see. But the theory suggests this is close to impossible to do.

Whatever your partisan preferences, there’s something grim about Guy’s campaign on health backfiring in this way. It would seem to encourage more “African gangs”–style campaigning — the strategy of changing the topic, avoiding opponents’ issues, avoiding real dialogue. The Liberals are showing a certain admirable bravery by engaging in real debate about the issue at the top of voters’ agenda rather than trying to direct attention elsewhere. We would be better served, as an electorate, if we had more debates like this. •

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A record 33 per cent were “pre-poll ordinary” votes. This option, available since 2010, essentially replicates the election-day experience but can happen anytime during the two weeks before. (For the 2016 and 2019 elections the period was three weeks.) Another 4 per cent voted early, in person, by “declaration,” meaning their ballot was submitted inside an envelope with a signed form (usually because their name couldn’t be found on that portion of the roll).

And a record 14 per cent voted through the mail — an almost doubling of 2019’s 8 per cent, which was a drop from the previous election. This year’s figure was, of course, a result of the pandemic. And like many Covid-induced behavioural changes, the extent of any snapback to previous modes of behaviour remains to be seen.

What does the electoral class — experts, parliamentarians and others interested in the running of elections — think about these evolving voting methods? Should we all relax and go with the flow, or would it be better to insist that as many people as possible turn up on election day to immerse themselves in its binding rituals?

The answer so far has been to accommodate demands for convenience gradually, repeatedly drawing a line before yielding a little more several years later.

In the medium term, the explosion has been most obvious in pre-polls. Eighteen years ago, pre- and postal voting each accounted for around 5 per cent of turnout. As figures quoted above show, even in 2022 pre-polls were more than double postals. That’s due to the 2010 changes, and a commission that publicises pre-polling’s availability almost to the point of encouragement. Postal voting, on the other hand, is treated more like a necessary evil. (See, for example, electoral commissioner Tom Rogers explaining to a parliamentary committee just before the 2022 campaign why the commission prefers pre-poll.)

And yet, according to the electoral law, if you meet a criterion for one you meet it for the other; indeed, criteria for both are stated in the same schedule. Postal voters must sign a form or tick an online box declaring they meet one of those conditions. The pre-poller verbally affirms it to an electoral official. (The long schedule of reasons obviously isn’t read out; instead there’s a conversation along the lines of “Do you qualify to vote pre-poll?” “Yes.”)

What’s wrong with postal voting? To most election watchers its greatest sin is that it can hold up the election result because postal votes are not counted until the following week. (It really needn’t be like this; the Brits manage to count theirs on election night. If we really tried we could include most of them in the Saturday evening tally.)

A random voter, if asked, might offer that postal voting is more vulnerable to abuse. Letterboxes can be stolen from and postal workers might be tempted to interfere. Anecdotes — or sometimes versions of the same anecdote — abound of postal voting applications going unanswered. (It certainly happens, as two people I know found out in May.)

Perhaps people worry about postal delivery times. Letters take much longer to deliver than they used to, potentially missing the cut-off two weeks after polling day.

But there’s another problem. It doesn’t tend to worry the average voter, but it does concern many in the electoral law class: postal votes are not truly secret.

Why do we have the secret ballot? In Australia and other “advanced democracies” we tend to see it as a “right” — and so, by implication, an add-on. But secrecy was actually an integral part of the “Australian ballot” right from the beginning. It had to be, because if people were bribing or threatening others to vote a certain way (including at polling places), opt-in secrecy alone wouldn’t eradicate it. The state had to ensure a person had no way of proving to another how they had voted.

And postal voting isn’t compulsorily secret. Voters could be filling out their ballots in the visual presence of family, friends or anyone else. That was why voting by post came so long after the move to the Australian ballot in the 1850s. If postal voting had been available in the nineteenth century, bosses could instruct their employees, and landlords their tenants, to (a) apply for a postal vote and (b) fill it out the desired way, show it to them and let them to put in the mail. It was obviously a tractor-sized loophole.

In democratic countries with less-developed economies, such as our close neighbours East Timor, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, postal voting is either non-existent or limited to tiny classes of people — for example armed forces overseas — for this very reason. (In the case of East Timor at least, the absence of a postal system is an overriding factor.)

In Australia, though, anyone can vote postal as long as they sign the form claiming they qualify. Does this loose arrangement matter? The logistics, expense and likelihood of getting caught render the risk of this potential absence of privacy tiny, but we might still envisage, for example, one spouse (most likely the husband) instructing and supervising the other. Nursing home staff voting on behalf of residents is a possibility. Maybe the question is whether it would happen enough to worry about.

Earlier this year, as a Covid measure for a set of by-elections, the NSW electoral commission skipped the application process and sent postal votes to everyone on the roll. Voters could use them, or they could cast their vote in person. A touch under half of the turnout, 49 per cent, was postal.

In Switzerland they do this as a matter of course for national elections, and about 90 per cent of voters mail their ballots back. Estonia has for many years made internet voting available to all, and around a third of the electorate uses it. Some Australian local council elections are postal only. Is our third tier of government so unimportant that enforced secrecy doesn’t matter?

This, then, is a question for the future of voting at national and state elections: should remain hung up about secrecy?

There’s one other complicating factor: how private is in-person voting anyway? The Electoral Act says votes must be cast privately, but no penalties seem to apply for breaches. Australia’s booth layout sits at the more relaxed end of international practice. It’s easy to peek at your neighbour, especially if they’re willing to show you. (A couple of visual examples.) Few eyelids are batted. Electoral officials would probably intervene in egregious examples — but it would be too late in most cases.

And if I filled in my ballot and then, on the way to the ballot box, shouted out who I was voting for and held it up, I would likely receive a stern admonition but little else. Even if the official reached me before I got to the box, would they throw my ballot away?

Contrast this with rules during the counting of votes: if you put your name, or anyone’s name, on the ballot it is rendered informal because it supposedly breaches secrecy. (This rule really is an unneeded remnant of a bygone era, if for no other reason than that officials really have no way of knowing who wrote the name.)

Let’s step back and imagine elections were just invented and we were setting up an apparatus to conduct them. What might the arrangements look like?

We would create and maintain the electoral roll largely as we do now. A decade ago, with direct enrolment, Australia embraced modernity, using various government agency databases to do most of the work, complemented by elector-initiated activity.

And voting itself? Would it really be in person, on a single day? Or would it mostly be via the internet, including by email — security, and perceptions of security, allowing? A lot more work would be needed; NSW’s Ivote, which has been wound back to its original use by vision-impaired voters, provides a cautionary tale.

People who can’t access the internet would need some form of postal voting. And voting in person? In a big country like Australia, the fewer people who vote on election day the less easy it is to justify having six or seven thousand polling places scattered across the continent. (Switzerland, mentioned earlier, has a population density around sixty-six times Australia’s.) But decreasing the availability of Saturday voting would further encourage other voting channels.

The most recent ACT election, conducted during the pandemic, was framed by that jurisdiction’s electoral commission as a five-week “election period.” This might provide a partial template.

The early forms of “postal voting” in this country, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, actually involved people visiting their post office and doing the deed there, in front of the postmaster (but without he or she seeing how they voted!). The postmaster then posted an envelope containing the ballot to the returning officer. Gradually the class of people who could take votes in this way was widened. (Federally, it wasn’t until 1918 that electors began posting their own ballots.)

The mid-twenty-first-century version might see people voting at various government agency offices during the voting period.

And would something like MyGov have a place? In terms of perceptions of integrity, something might be said for people possessing evidence of how they voted. But see notes on secrecy, above.

Around the globe all manner of vote-taking can be observed. In America alone, the 3000-odd counties provide a rich tapestry, not just for their own but also for state and national elections. Some of that international experience is worth considering.

My crystal ball is no less murky than the next person’s, but change is already happening thanks to evolving social expectations and the contradictions inherent in current laws governing convenience voting: yes it’s allowed, but floodgate’s hinges remain intact by making people claim to have a good reason, even if it’s with a wink and a nod.

And much of the change will depend on decisions, explicit or otherwise, about mandated secrecy. •

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Compare that with the Senate result in 2013, for example, when the Australian Motor Enthusiast Party’s Ricky Muir won a Senate seat in Victoria despite his party attracting a primary vote of just 0.51 per cent.

This year’s close correlation was largely a result of parliament’s decision to abolish Senate group voting tickets, or GVTs, before the 2016 election. The abolition followed widespread concern that the GVT system was being exploited — via “preference harvesting” — to enable candidates with minuscule primary votes to win seats despite above-the-line voters being overwhelmingly unaware of the (party-directed) destination of their preferences.

GVTs were also used in upper house elections in four states — at least until three of them (New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia) abolished what was broadly seen as a blot on electoral democracy. In the case of Western Australia, any defence of GVTs collapsed with the election in 2021 of a candidate who had attracted just ninety-eight primary votes (0.01 per cent of a quota) and was resident in the United States at the time of his election. To compound his unsuitability, he was running on a daylight-saving platform in a region that had demonstrated minimal support for the concept in several referendums.

Victoria alone still retains GVTs, despite the fact that two upper house members were elected with a party primary vote of less than 1 per cent in 2018, and eight others with votes below 5 per cent. In statewide terms, those ten members’ primary party support ranged from 0.62 per cent to 3.75 per cent. By contrast, the Greens, with a statewide vote of 9.25 per cent, secured only one position. The other main victim of GVTs at that election was probably the Liberal Party.

Past Victorian Labor premiers John Cain (1982–90) and Steve Bracks (1999–2007) made a significant contribution to the democratisation of the state’s electoral system. It would be an understatement to observe that the current premier, Daniel Andrews, shows no such ambition.

Why? In his first term, Andrews was able to assemble an “ideological” upper house majority comprising Labor (fourteen seats) and the Greens (five) plus the Sex Party member and the Vote 1 Jobs member. In his second term, he could rely on Labor’s eighteen seats augmented by the single Greens member, the Reason (née Sex) Party member and the Animal Justice Party member.

Those numbers were critical for the approval of legislative measures — especially emergency powers — associated with Victoria’s controversial pandemic response. The government was also able to secure support from other crossbenchers on a case-by-case basis, making the composition of the upper house essentially a non-issue in the first half of the parliamentary term.

This satisfactory state of affairs for Andrews ended in mid 2020 with new revelations of extensive branch stacking in the state Labor Party, the main offender being small business and local government minister Adem Somyurek, a member of the upper house. Somyurek was dismissed from the ministry but then pre-empted his expulsion from the Labor Party by resigning to sit as an independent, denying Andrews his access to a reliable majority.

Somyurek’s absence from Labor’s Legislative Council ranks obliged the government to be more accommodating on amendments to its pandemic powers legislation in late 2021. Did it cross Andrews’s mind that Greens numbers in the upper house would have been sufficient to render the desertion irrelevant if he had abolished GVTs when he had the chance?

Recent developments threaten to make the 2018 upper house result a model of stability compared with what may emerge at this year’s election. A number of new micro-parties have registered with the Victorian Electoral Commission and can be expected to target the ballot for the Legislative Council, fully aware that a low primary vote is no necessary impediment to a well-paid four-year term on the plush red seats.

Several of these groups have been motivated by anger at the government’s strong measures on the pandemic — especially the lockdowns — and it is feasible that an effective GVT strategy could see one or more of them, including anti-vaxxers, elected. If elected, they are unlikely to see negotiation and compromise as desirable qualities in fulfilling the role.

The crowded ballot paper also makes it more likely that voters will vote 1 above the line rather than try to construct an authentic set of preferences from below, even though only five below-the-line preferences are needed for a valid vote. A strong above-the-line vote will further enhance the prospects of candidates with minimal genuine support. Fewer than 9 per cent of electors voted under the line in 2018.

Two years ago the parliamentary electoral matters committee considered GVTs as part of its review of the 2018 election. Several submissions made the powerful case for change, but the committee declined to recommend their abolition, opting to pass the buck by recommending a separate inquiry that (predictably) has not occurred. The government’s stance could well have reflected its reluctance to assist the Greens in any way, hostility towards that party being the default position in Victorian Labor. If so, it suggests an inability to distinguish between organisational and legislative priorities.

While polls continue to point to a re-elected Andrews government in November, a manageable upper house appears doubtful. Whether this will be enough to generate an interest in electoral reform in the premier remains to be seen. Perhaps it will take the election of a candidate with even fewer than ninety-eight primary votes. •

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Current two-party-preferred polls are more encouraging for the new government than they were for Abbott at this point, but not as heartening as for the other two. Does this point to anything? No. Both Abbott and Rudd were dragged down by their parties before their governments’ first re-election. Howard was looking rather shop-worn by the time of the 1998 election, which he survived with the lowest national two-party-preferred victory in history. Only after the 2001 election was he the untouchable man of steel.

They don’t call it a honeymoon for nothing. Young governments find they can make mistakes and barely anyone notices, while ageing, more experienced ones can get away with much less. Fledgling government ministers are boosted by their new positions at the top table.

On the other side of parliament, stripped of the authority of incumbency and the allure of power, the nakedness of former Morrison government members is faintly embarrassing. Did this bunch really run the country for so long? Was that Liberal leader really home affairs minister so recently?

Scott Morrison’s bizarre, secret swearings-in to multiple portfolios provides further revisionist fuel. Were the higher echelons of the just-deceased government particularly lacking in talent, or does it just seem that way?

The early Hawke government went to town on the fiscal misdeeds of its vanquished predecessor, and Howard and team used the same playbook thirteen years later. While Rudd and his treasurer Wayne Swan were negligent on this front — yes, it’s harder when you inherit a budget surplus, but they barely tried — Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers aren’t making that mistake. They’re rarely missing an opportunity to employ the “t” word — a trillion dollars of debt. It’s not fair, it’s not honest, but politics is often like that.

What did the 21 May result tell us about voters’ changing behaviour?

After every election the Australian Electoral Commission provides us with two-party-preferred results for all House of Representatives electorates. Those two parties are Labor and the Coalition, whether or not the actual two-candidate-preferred count was between them. (The Liberals are given a 51.4 per cent two-party vote in Warringah, for instance, though Zali Steggall was the victor.) Total all 150 seats and you have the national two-party-preferred vote.

In 2007, a national Labor vote of 52.7 per cent saw eighty-three of the 150 seats return Labor two-party-preferred majorities, and all of them were won by Labor. This time eighty-four seats out of 151 recorded two-party victories for Labor, but MPs representing seven of them sit on the crossbench: four Greens plus independents Andrew Wilkie in Clark and Dai Le in Fowler, and — the surprise Labor two-party win — the Centre Alliance’s Rebekha Sharkie in Mayo.

So although Labor’s countrywide vote of 52.1 per cent was well below 2007’s, and although its seventy-seven-seat haul was lower than 2007’s eighty-three, its victory over the Coalition, nineteen seats, was larger by one than it was fifteen years ago.

The leakage to the crossbench was even worse on the other side. Of the Coalition’s sixty-seven two-party-preferred wins, nine were taken by independents and minor parties.

The massive crossbench is a result of the decline of support for the major parties, and there is no reason to believe it won’t continue over the medium term. Recent history tells us that Labor will have difficulty evicting the Greens from their lower house positions. We don’t know if the teals will prove similarly durable, nor the extent to which they will become, or be seen as, a quasi party. The future of Dai Le, the independent who won Fowler, is similarly unpredictable.

Does it worry you that the party that won 33 per cent of the primary vote formed government? It’s a bit like Emmanuel Macron becoming French president in April despite receiving just 28 per cent of the first-round vote. But at least Macron topped that first round.

You’d rather the Coalition, with 36 per cent primary vote support, had been sworn in? But then there’s no point having preferential voting, which gives the voter multiple bites at the cherry. Overseas, our voting system is often called “instant run-off” because it roughly replicates the French-style two-round system, but does it on a single voting occasion, using the one ballot paper.

Back in 1995, France’s first-round winner Lionel Jospin lost the second round to Jacques Chirac. A majority of the voters who cast a ballot two weeks after the first bout found Chirac the lesser of two evils. Same with primary vote versus two-party-preferred here. Australian federal elections have seen primary vote losses turned into two-party-preferred wins three times: 1987, 2010 and, now, 2022. The victor on each occasion was Labor.

Even under the awful first-past-the-post voting system, which Britain and Canada still have and New Zealand used to, the overall vote winner can lose the seat count.

Perhaps you’d prefer more proportional results, giving parties representation closer to the share of support they received? Then you need an electoral system of — drumroll — proportional representation. Single-member electorate systems are in many ways a relic of a pre-party time, when men (as they were) were elected to represent their geographic constituencies in parliament. Much of our system — indeed our Constitution, and most obviously the make-up and powers of the Senate — is like that. (I’ve argued before that PR in our lower house would improve governability by giving the upper house more incentive to make life easier for the executive.)

But back to our current government, and the question of how long Anthony Albanese will be prime minister. Our longest-serving PMs — Bob Menzies, Howard and Hawke — were elected at or near the beginning of longish periods of sustained international economic growth. They got the boasting rights and the favourable comparisons with their predecessors.

We live in different, stranger times, with unemployment very low yet growth sluggish and wages stagnant. And leaders are more disposable these days.

Both major parties are on the nose, but the contradictions in the Coalition’s support base are more glaringly on display because it’s in opposition. Peter Dutton gives every indication he won’t try to win back teal territory, and will instead prioritise what used to be seen as swing seats, the ones that tend to go to whoever forms government. They’re in the outer suburbs and regions: “aspirational,” socially rather conservative, not very multicultural, the fabled western Sydney seat of Lindsay being their archetype. But those voters and seats simply aren’t numerous enough to come close to a governing majority.

They also have a habit, at state level, of swinging to narrowly elected incumbents. (While the states and territories boast plenty of examples, we’ve not had a federal opposition squeak into government at an election since the formation of the two-party system over a century ago.)

That’s one way it could turn out: a stronger vote for Labor in three years. But Dutton is unlikely to be leader at the next election, and his successor would probably take a different tack.

And with a global recession on the cards, the pendulum could — in the context of low major-party support — swing back, quickly.

Did I mention we live in strange, uncertain times? •

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In the event, the swing to Labor was less than 3 per cent. Labor had been wrong-footed by Malcolm Fraser’s announcement of a national wage freeze. Its candidate was unimpressive. But inevitably the blame fell primarily on Hayden.

It was Labor’s third successive election loss, and a new mood of pessimism descended on the party. Frantic behind-the-scenes activity culminated in senator John Button, an astute and respected Labor figure who had been a close ally of the opposition leader, writing to Hayden on 28 January 1983 after unsuccessfully trying to persuade him to make a peaceful transition to Hawke.

Button’s letter summed up the mood of senior figures in the party. “You said to me that you could not stand down for a ‘bastard’ like Bob Hawke,” he wrote. “In my experience in the Labor Party the fact that someone is a bastard (of one kind or another) has never been a disqualification for leadership of the party. It is a disability from which we all suffer in various degrees… I must say that even some of Bob’s closest supporters have doubts about his capacities to lead the party successfully, in that they do not share his own estimate of his ability. The Labor Party is, however, desperate to win the coming election.”

Six days later came one of the most extraordinary events in Australian political history. On 3 February, Fraser, hoping to maintain the momentum generated by the Flinders by-election and fearful that Labor could change leaders, asked governor-general Sir Ninian Stephen for an early election. At the very same time, but without being aware of Fraser’s decision, Hayden announced his resignation to a meeting of shadow cabinet.

Hayden had been convinced by Button’s letter, which he called “brutal but fair.” Nevertheless, it was a wrenching decision. “I am not convinced that the Labor Party would not win under my leadership,” he told the media. “I believe that a drover’s dog could lead the Labor Party to victory the way the country is and the way the opinion polls are showing up for the Labor Party.”

Fraser had been outmanoeuvred. When he went to Government House, he was expecting to fight an election against Hayden. When the governor-general granted him the election, his opponent was Bob Hawke, although still to be formally endorsed by the Labor caucus five days later.

With the economy in recession, a government in its third term and the public popularity Hawke had developed over the years, only a disciplined Labor campaign was needed to ensure victory. That was not quite the foregone conclusion it seemed in retrospect, particularly after Hawke reacted angrily to a question from the ABC’s Richard Carleton about whether he had blood on his hands over Hayden’s demise. If voters had a concern about Hawke, it related to whether he had the right temperament to be prime minister. Carleton’s question touched a raw nerve in Hawke: political assassinations are never gentle affairs, however much he might have pretended.

But he was a model of statesmanship and responsibility for the rest of the campaign. He exploited the recession and condemned what he argued was Fraser’s divisive approach to government. He adopted Hayden’s campaign themes of national recovery and reconstruction and added his own “r” — reconciliation.

As well, Labor promised a big spending program, tax cuts and petrol price reductions to tackle the recession. Fraser tried a scare campaign against Labor’s “mad and extravagant promises,” saying people’s savings would be safer under their beds than in the bank. Hawke responded with a clever quip harking back to the “reds under the beds” bogy that the Liberals had used against Labor in earlier times: “They can’t put them under the bed because that’s where the Commies are!”

On 5 March 1983, at the age of fifty-three, after decades of frustration and a period of self-doubt, Hawke became prime minister. Labor’s win was convincing: the two-party swing of 3.6 per cent came on top of the 4.2 per cent it had achieved under Hayden in 1980, resulting in a final Labor vote of 53.2 per cent — the highest support it has ever received in a federal election.

The vote gave the new government a majority of twenty-five in the 125-member House of Representatives, compared with the Whitlam government’s nine-seat majority in 1972. It was all the more impressive considering that Labor had suffered a devastating loss in 1975 and some had questioned not only its legitimacy as a governing party but its very survival.

The day after the election, Treasury secretary John Stone came to see Hawke and the new treasurer, Paul Keating, with a reality check: the projected budget deficit for 1983–84 was $9.6 billion. Adding Labor’s election promises could take the figure up to $12 billion — the highest since the second world war. Hawke had received an inkling of the deficit figure before the election, leading him to qualify his election promises. It was the signal that the economy would come ahead of election promises and that pragmatism was the priority.

In truth, the $9.6 billion figure was not a measure of anything tangible but a projection that Treasury typically calculated on pessimistic assumptions. But it was the excuse Hawke and Keating used to abandon most of their promises on spending and tax cuts. And it was the political weapon that they used relentlessly to attack the Fraser government’s economic legacy.

From the very beginning, Hawke was intent on laying the foundations for something that had eluded federal Labor for all its history — long-term government — and with it the opportunity to entrench Labor policies, and even, in his fondest hopes, to become the party of natural government.

Resentment lingered within the party over how the Coalition had never accepted Labor’s legitimacy after Gough Whitlam had returned it to power in 1972. That attitude led to breaches of convention such as the Coalition parties’ blocking of the budget and culminated in the sacking of Gough Whitlam by governor-general John Kerr. But there also was a recognition of the failings of Whitlam’s government.

This is why Hawke drew an immediate and deliberate contrast with his Labor predecessor. In his victory speech on election night he promised not excitement or a great wave of reform but “calmness and a sense of assuredness.” It did not sound like a revolution, socialist or otherwise, and that was precisely Hawke’s intention. Determined not to allow a repeat of the indiscipline of the Whitlam government, his first focus was process — the orderly management of government.

Under Whitlam, all ministers were members of cabinet, meaning decision-making was unwieldy and sometimes resulted in those who lost in cabinet appealing to caucus to reverse the decision. Instead, Hawke created a cabinet of thirteen from the ministry of twenty-seven elected by caucus. Ministers, including those from the outer ministry who participated in cabinet discussions in their area of responsibility, were required to support cabinet’s decisions in caucus. In a strictly formal sense, the supremacy of the Labor caucus in decision-making was preserved but in practice it was greatly weakened.

A second contrast was on foreign policy. Where Whitlam was intent on carving out a more independent foreign policy, sometimes at the cost of criticism from the United States, Hawke went out of his way to build good relations with president Ronald Reagan and secretary of state George Shultz, despite their conservative credentials. The Americans trusted Hawke and that was a political asset in Australia.

Third, Hawke drew a sharp distinction with the Whitlam government on economic policy. Whitlam had shown little interest in economics and it became one of his government’s biggest liabilities.

In many areas, Hawke left the running to his ministers, avoiding delving into the detail of policies unless there was a pressing political need to do so. But economic policy and foreign affairs were exceptions. He had studied economics at university, prepared national wage cases for the Australian Council of Trade Unions, served on the Reserve Bank board for seven years as ACTU president, and been a member of a committee of inquiry into the manufacturing industry, headed by Gordon Jackson, the head of CSR.

Within a month of coming to government, Hawke presided over a national economic summit that brought together leaders in federal and state governments, business, unions, and welfare and community groups. The epitome of Hawke’s consensus approach, it attracted scepticism, including by some within the new government. The opposition portrayed consensus as compromise when what was required was bold decision-making, and characterised the Hawke approach as corporatism — those in positions of power stitching up the game for themselves.

Significantly, the summit was held before the resumption of parliament and the venue was the House of Representatives chamber. The symbolism was clear: Hawke, no fan of parliament, was substituting the quest for agreement for the parliamentary clash that emphasised differences.

Hawke confronted the summit with “the gravest economic crisis in fifty years” and laid out his remedies: a budget with a deficit of $8.5 billion and the Accord between the government and the ACTU. The Accord was a distinctive feature of Labor’s economic policy, designed to subordinate wage increases to the overall demands of economic policy — in other words, to ensure that the kind of wage explosions that had occurred under both the Whitlam and Fraser governments, and for which Hawke carried some responsibility as leader of the trade union movement, would not be repeated. It traded off part of the wage increases that strong unions could achieve and that tended to flow on to the rest of the workforce under a centralised industrial system for the so-called social wage. This included universal health insurance under Medicare, more generous and targeted welfare benefits, and compulsory superannuation.

The government’s economic policy won endorsement from everyone present at the summit, with the sole exception of Queensland National Party premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The summit was also a success when it came to public opinion: voters liked the idea of community leaders agreeing on what was best for the country rather than playing politics. In reality, there was plenty of politics involved; it was just that it was being played more subtly than usual. Within months of coming to government, Hawke’s approval rating had shot up to 70 per cent.

The new government had luck on its side. The drought broke, bolstering the economic recovery already under way. Hawke was blessed with an exceptionally strong team of ministers, including Keating as treasurer, Gareth Evans as attorney-general, Hayden as foreign minister, Button as industry minister and Neal Blewett as health minister. Others who made their mark later were Peter Walsh in finance, Kim Beazley in defence, John Dawkins in education and Brian Howe in social security. In cabinet, Hawke was a skilled chairman, letting ministers have their say and striving for consensus. His own working style was methodical and diligent.

Three days after the election, the government had accepted Reserve Bank advice and devalued the dollar by 10 per cent, thought to be large enough to stop the damaging speculation in the currency. But almost immediately the dollar came under more pressure, as did the system under which officials set its value.

In the first week of December, the Reserve Bank spent $1.4 billion on buying foreign exchange to counter the overseas money flooding into the country. The Reserve Bank was advocating a free float of the dollar, as was Hawke’s senior economic adviser Ross Garnaut. But Stone, the formidable Treasury secretary, resisted, concerned about losing control of an instrument of economic policy and fearful that the Australian economy would be at the whim of international speculators. When Hawke concluded the lengthy internal debate by saying the dollar would be floated, Stone told him, “Prime Minister, you’ll regret this; you’ll come to see this as a terrible decision.”

The float became the Hawke government’s most significant economic decision, exposing the economy to the full force of international competition. It was a step that had ramifications for most other aspects of economic policy. No longer could the exchange rate be used to cushion against inflation that was higher than overseas or to protect inefficient industries.

Further steps towards financial deregulation removed the ceiling on interest rates and allowed foreign banks into Australia as a means of increasing competition. The latter was a controversial decision inside the Labor Party, but Keating sold it with the same zeal and political skill that he had used to oppose it when John Howard as treasurer had proposed it under the Fraser government.

The float and further financial deregulation triggered a wild ride during the 1980s, with the dollar crashing in value, a boom in credit, skyrocketing interest rates and big corporate failures culminating in a severe recession. Bob Johnston, the Reserve Bank governor at the time, subsequently told the author Paul Kelly, “It’s just as well they did not foresee all the consequences, otherwise we might not have got the change.”

For a Labor government, deregulation was a particularly bold decision, although one driven by circumstances, given the rapid growth of international currency markets trading in huge amounts of money. In opposition, Labor had opposed the Fraser government’s first moves towards financial deregulation. Effectively subjecting economic policy to the whims of the free market was the very antithesis of Labor dogma. Many on the left of the party accused the government of selling out, seeing its actions as justifying the resistance they had shown to Hawke’s becoming leader.

It is easily forgotten how vehement these complaints were. In the early years of the government, Labor’s national Left, a broader grouping than the parliamentary party but with caucus members playing a prominent part, periodically held news conferences to criticise government decisions, particularly on economic policy. Stewart West, the only left-wing member of the first Hawke cabinet, resigned after eight months because he could not support a cabinet decision on uranium mining. Brian Howe, a left-wing minister outside cabinet in the first term, accused the government on one occasion of having a “deficit fetish” and on another of policies that he compared to a mule — like the animal that cannot reproduce, they had no future.

The Left also took its grievances to Labor’s national conferences which, in theory, were the supreme decision-making bodies of the party. The debates were robust and the votes close, with the government relying on the Right and Centre-Left factions carrying the day.

But Hawke and Keating were dominant in cabinet and were strongly backed on economic decisions by employment minister Ralph Willis and by finance minister Dawkins and the fellow Western Australian who succeeded him, Peter Walsh. This meant their authority was rarely challenged successfully by the full ministry or caucus, even though caucus had the final say on decisions. On one occasion after an economic policy announcement following a meeting of the full ministry, science minister Barry Jones asked communications minister Michael Duffy, “How did that happen?” “It’s purely a matter of numbers,” Duffy replied. “There’s four of them and only twenty-three of us.”

The government had another advantage: on the hardest economic decisions, such as the float, financial deregulation more broadly and, in subsequent years, tariff cuts, privatisation and labour market deregulation, it had the support of the opposition, and particularly John Howard, first as shadow treasurer and from 1985 as leader. All these Labor decisions were in line with the philosophy of the Liberal Party, or at least that of its conservative wing led by Howard, who had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Fraser government to adopt some of the same measures.

The way for these decisions was smoothed by one of Hawke’s underrated achievements: the skill he brought to decision-making, particularly on contentious issues. He would come to cabinet meetings well briefed but would first listen patiently to his ministers, making them feel their contributions were valued. Then he would sum up the debate and conjure up a solution to what sometimes seemed intractable issues — one that satisfied most of the concerns or, if not, that his colleagues felt they could live with.

Enjoying an extended honeymoon in the opinion polls and wanting to avoid separate elections for the House and Senate, Hawke decided to go to the people in December 1984, only twenty-one months after the 1983 victory. Labor strategists were counting on a repeat of Neville Wran’s success for Labor as NSW premier, when he followed up his narrow victory in 1976 with “Wranslides” in 1978 and 1981, setting the party up for long-term government.

But Hawke was overconfident. He opted for an unusually long campaign of seven-and-a-half weeks in the expectation that he could destroy his opponent, Andrew Peacock. Instead, he gave the Liberal leader a platform as alternative prime minister. As well, Hawke campaigned poorly. He broke down in tears at a news conference over the heroin addiction of his daughter. Wracked with guilt over the neglect of his parental duties, “I was within minutes of resigning from office at that time,” he said later.

Peacock proved to be an effective campaigner, hammering away day after day to get a plain message across to voters: that, “as certain as night follows day,” a re-elected government would bring in new taxes. Peacock based his claim on reforms introduced in Labor’s first term — an assets test on the age pension and a 30 per cent tax on lump sum superannuation, both of which he promised a Liberal government would repeal.

Labor’s defence was muddied by Hawke’s off-the-cuff commitment during a radio interview to hold a tax summit after the election. It meant Labor could deflect questions about the specifics of tax changes until after the election, but at the same time it added ammunition to the Liberals’ scare campaign. But Hawke emphasised another commitment: that under a second-term Labor government there would be no overall increase in taxation as a proportion of national income, and the same would apply to government expenditure and the budget deficit.

This “trilogy” became a means of enforcing harsh discipline in future budgets. But in the election campaign voters were more inclined to believe their taxes would be going up than that Labor would keep its promise.

Not for the first time, the result of the 1984 election defied predictions of a thumping victory for Labor. Instead of a swing to Labor, the opposition gained 1.46 percentage points after preferences, cutting Labor’s majority from twenty-five seats to sixteen. With 51.8 per cent of the vote after preferences, it was a solid win for Labor but, given expectations of a landslide, it was the Liberals who were celebrating — except for Howard, who had expected to become opposition leader after the election loss. As for Hawke, the political messiah had been reduced to a mere mortal. •

This is an edited extract from Bob Hawke by Mike Steketee, part of the Australian Biographical Monographs series published by Connor Court.

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Biden’s speech in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall last Thursday may well come to be seen (in Biden’s words) as “one of those moments that determine the shape of everything that’s to come.” Biden castigated Trump and the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, wing of the Republican Party for pursuing an anti-democratic agenda and fomenting civil unrest, and underlined how the extremism of Trump and Trumpism threatens the very foundations of the nation.

That the current president was warning the nation of the dangers posed by the former president on the steps of the building where both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were debated, written and signed underlined the significance of Biden’s words.

He went on to remind Americans that they are “not powerless in the face of these threats — we are not bystanders in this ongoing attack on democracy” — and concluded with a call to “Vote, vote, vote.”

Biden didn’t come lately to this theme. He says he was driven to run for the presidency again after the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Amid fears that the forces that drove the 6 January attack on the Capitol aren’t fading away, he recently convened private meetings with leading historians and political analysists to discuss growing dangers to American democracy.

Even as Biden’s speech was being written, Trump was urging his followers to attack the FBI and the justice department and demanding yet again that he be declared the rightful winner of the 2020 election or that the election be re-run. Trump ally, Senator Lindsey Graham, was threatening civil violence if Trump was prosecuted for illegally possessing government documents.

The key Republican responses to Biden’s speech were also delivered in Pennsylvania. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy — the man who looks to be Speaker after the midterm elections — used a speech in Scranton to align himself with Trump’s efforts to undercut federal law enforcement over the search of Mar-a-Lago. He delivered a point-by-point condemnation of Biden’s policies and, in words that presaged Biden’s later that day, accused the president of launching “an assault on our democracy” with policies that had “severely wounded America’s soul.”

Two days later, at what was billed as a rally for Republican candidates in Wilkes-Barre, Trump delivered his own explosive, aggrieved response. He called Biden “an enemy of the state” and the FBI and the justice department “vicious monsters,” escalating the attacks he has made on his social media website. Dialling up the rhetoric, he called Biden’s words at Independence Hall “the most vicious, hateful, and divisive speech ever delivered by an American president.”

It’s no coincidence that Biden and Trump converged on Pennsylvania: with several high stakes, competitive races, the state is emerging as the nation’s centre of political gravity. The outcome of the open race for governor between Democrat Josh Shapiro, the former state attorney general, and Republican Doug Mastriano, a former state senator backed by Trump, may determine the future of abortion rights and free and fair elections in a state that has a Republican-led legislature.

Meanwhile, lieutenant-governor John Fetterman, recovering from a stroke, and Trump-endorsed celebrity TV physician, Mehmet Oz, are engaged in an ugly contest over who will replace retiring Republican senator Pat Toomey. The battle has included unedifying clashes over the price of the vegetables needed for crudités and concerns that Oz has spread misinformation and spruiked unproven medical treatments.

Trump narrowly lost Pennsylvania to Hillary Clinton in 2016 (by around 50,000 votes) and to Biden in 2020 (by just over 81,000 votes) but polled well in predominantly suburban and rural counties. The question for 2022 is whether this political alignment will hold or whether moderate suburban voters and the white rural and working-class voters who once embraced Trump will now reject the candidates he backs. And if that’s the case in Pennsylvania, what of the rest of the United States?

The conventional wisdom in American politics is that the president’s party loses ground in midterm elections. Midterms are referendums on incumbents and almost no president has escaped a tough critique: in the nineteen midterm elections between 1946 and 2018, the president’s party only once improved its share of the popular vote for the House of Representatives. Only twice in the past 100 years has the president’s party gained seats in both the House and Senate.

The Democrats hold razor-thin margins in both the House and the Senate. House Democrats have a mere six-seat advantage, and Republicans are helped by partisan redistricting in Republican-controlled states and the fact that more Democrats (thirty-one) than Republicans (nineteen) are retiring. Republicans need to win only one seat to take control of the Senate, a victory that would kill any chance of Biden implementing his agenda during the second half of his term.

But political pundits are now seeing 2022 as a year in which precedents might be broken and assumptions cast aside, not just in Pennsylvania but across the nation. Democrats have a new sense of optimism about the possibility of blunting predicted Republican gains.

Just a few months ago, the discussion was about how big the “red wave” was going to be. (Confusingly, Republicans are labelled red and Democrats blue in the United States.) On 2 June the respected Cook Political Report declared that things looked ominous for the Democrats; on 30 August it concluded that Republican control of the House was no longer a foregone conclusion.

Last weekend, Race to the White House gave the Democrats a 61.34 per cent chance of retaining the Senate. FiveThirtyEight, which gives the Democrats a 68 per cent chance, attributed the surprise figure to poor candidates in battleground states. Other political analyses are more cautious, but it’s reasonable to postulate that the Democrats might gain one or more Senate seats.

It still takes a lot of optimism to believe the House will stay under Democratic control, but the twenty-to-thirty-seat gains once predicted for the Republicans have narrowed to ten to twenty. (The 270ToWin consensus forecast is here.) Under the circumstances, holding the Republicans to less than ten extra seats could be viewed by Democrats as a victory of sorts.

Several issues have brought the pollsters and the pundits to envisage what one Republican strategist described as “more like a shallow red puddle” than the red tsunami predicted earlier.

The first is that women, especially Democrats and Independents, have been fired up by the US Supreme Court’s decision to reverse the constitutional right to abortion, and subsequent state efforts to limit women’s access to abortions and reproductive healthcare. American women are engaging politically in a way that has not been seen before.

The number of women registering to vote has surged, especially in deep-red states like Kansas, Idaho and Louisiana, where abortion rights have already been severely curtailed, and in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, where the electoral stakes for abortion rights are highest.

“In my twenty-eight years analysing elections, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening in the past two months in American politics,” wrote political strategist and pollster Tom Bonier on Friday. “Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed.”

In August, Kansas — a red state that hasn’t backed a Democrat for president in nearly sixty years — voted overwhelmingly to keep abortion rights in the state constitution. An estimated 69 per cent of new voter registrations ahead of the ballot were women.

In a string of recent House special elections, Democrats have out-performed expectations. Again, abortion has been a key driver. A surge in women voters helped Democrat Pat Ryan prevail over Republican Marc Molinaro in the special election last month in New York’s 19th congressional district, a swing district in the Hudson Valley that Biden won in 2020 by just two percentage points. After the race turned into a clearcut battle over abortion rights, Ryan exceeded the vote of the Democrat in 2020 and ran 1.3 per cent ahead of Biden in 2020.

Despite the prognostications — and evidence — that abortion could be a winning issue for Democrats, all but a very few Republicans are not listening. But it’s telling that Republican candidates in critical races in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, Arizona and North Carolina are scrubbing abortion language from campaign websites and adjusting their rhetoric on the hustings.

An election centred on the removal of a constitutional right has no precedent. And while the focus is on abortion rights, other minorities — LGBTQ and Trans groups, for example — are concerned that their hard-won rights will also be taken away by the Trump-appointed conservative majority on the US Supreme Court.

Also changing the election dynamics is Trump’s involvement in divisive primaries. He has hand-picked his acolytes for House and Senate races and for offices responsible for counting and certifying the votes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, the states that denied him victory in 2020.

The candidates he has backed have had mixed success in often-bitter Republican primaries and beyond, which might signal that his influence on his party has waned. But the Democrats’ prospects in the Senate are undeniably enhanced by his pick of inexperienced (to put it politely) Republican candidates including Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, J.D. Vance in Ohio, Hershel Walker in Georgia and Blake Masters in Arizona, all of whom have underperformed in polls despite Trump’s backing.

Trump’s support didn’t help Sarah Palin either; she lost the Alaska special election to replace Republican Representative Don Young, who died in March. Democrat Mary Peltola, who won under the state’s new ranked-choice voting system (which operates like Australia’s preferential system), becomes the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress. She will face re-election in November, again against Palin and Nick Begich, a more moderate Republican. It will be interesting to see if Palin’s rhetoric changes after her unexpected loss.

Trump and his allies’ aggressive midterm strategy is seen in the Republican party as a double-edged sword. Republicans don’t win if they don’t turn out the Trump voters, and the former president can boost excitement among that group, but he can also turn off moderates and independents — and Republicans can’t win with Trump voters alone. Republican candidates also fear that his capacity to dominate the political news will undermine the task of making the election all about Biden and the Democrats.

This problem for Republicans has an upside for Democrats (and America). If Trump’s role in the campaign delivers losses rather than victories then his 2024 presidential candidacy will be less likely.

More trouble for Republicans comes from a slowdown in fundraising, a strong sign of flagging electoral support. With small donors pulling back, online fundraising has slowed across much of the party. Some Republicans suspect Trump’s relentless fundraising pitches and cash hoarding has exhausted a donor base also affected by cost of living pressures. Worryingly for Republicans, Democratic contributions have meanwhile surged.

Republican Senate candidates who spent big on bruising primary campaigns are now finding that the National Republican Senatorial Campaign, or NRSC, is pulling advertising, even in critical states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. The conflict has intensified between Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and the NRSC’s chairman, Senator Rick Scott of Florida. McConnell has argued that huge sums of money (some US$150 million so far this election cycle) have been spent on poor quality candidates; Scott has retorted that “trash talking” Republican candidates is “treasonous to the conservative cause.”

Despite his (justifiable) concerns, McConnell is investing millions of dollars from his Senate Leadership Fund to support J.D. Vance in Ohio and Oz in Pennsylvania, both of whom have been running poor campaigns. He has also pushed Trump ally Peter Thiel, who has been bankrolling MAGA candidates, to continue to fund Masters in Arizona and Vance in Ohio, but has reportedly been rebuffed.

McConnell’s preoccupation with ensuring he resumes the Senate leadership is also hindered by his increasingly bitter feud with Trump, which the former president revived after McConnell criticised the quality of Trump-backed candidates. “Mitch McConnell is not an opposition leader, he is a pawn for the Democrats to get whatever they want,” Trump said, calling for a new Republican leader in the Senate to be picked “immediately.”

Trump’s gripe is no doubt partly driven by the fact that Biden and the Democrats can lay claim to a significant list of recent legislative achievements. These include the Inflation Reduction Act, with its major climate change, healthcare and tax reforms, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the PACT Act, which expands medical benefits for veterans exposed to toxic fumes at military bases.

These bills have helped counter public perceptions of a do-nothing Congress. Biden has also used his presidential powers to tackle issues like student debt, gun control and access to abortion that would have been blocked in Congress.

At a time when American voters are worried about cost-of-living pressures and pessimistic about where the country is headed, will these achievements — along with historically low unemployment and gas prices finally going down — be enough to influence their votes in November?

Maybe, but to strengthen their argument that midterm defeats will bring dark times, Biden and the Democrats are also forcing the Republicans to play defence on issues like the rule of law and public safety (on which Trump’s vendetta against the FBI is no help). Biden has also moved to put democracy and political violence on the agenda. These are issues the polls indicate voters of both parties care about (although perhaps in different ways for different reasons) and polling shows they are beginning to affect voters’ intentions. FiveThirtyEight’s generic congressional ballot has the two parties basically even, with the Democrats leading by a little less than a point, on average, but trending up since the beginning of August.

After hitting a low of 37.5 per cent in July, Biden’s approval rating has risen by more than five percentage points on FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker. When presidential approval ratings are less that 45 per cent their party tends to lose a lot of seats in Congress. Trump, though, with an approval rating of 39.8 per cent, is even less popular than Biden.

Neither Biden nor Trump is on the ballot in November, but their influence is important. A recent Wall Street Journal poll shows that Biden would defeat Trump by six percentage points in a hypothetical rematch this month. The more Trump is on people’s minds, says a CNN analysis, the better Democrats are doing.

While the non-MAGA Republicans want to ensure that the 2022 election cycle is a referendum on Biden not Trump, it is clear that Trump will do everything possible to stay in the news cycle and thus muddy the message. He brazenly demonstrated this by delivering what David Frum called “a protracted display of narcissistic injury” in Pennsylvania. Nothing could more perfectly have amplified Biden’s message. Can Democrats now widen the new but narrow path to winning in November? •

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What’s a personal vote? It’s the small level of support that attaches to any House of Representatives MP simply because they are the sitting member. A per cent or several of the electorate will vote for that person because they know their name, or have seen them at events, or in the local paper, or perhaps in parliament on the nightly news.

It’s conceptually simplest in the two-party contest, and is best estimated, or at least identified, after a change. When an MP retires (or is forced out) support for his or her party slumps a bit in that seat relative to the rest, or at least relative to surrounding electorates and/or similar electorates.

Western Sydney’s performance at the last federal election — when it famously swung to the Morrison government — is a good example. (Much of it was simply reversing outsized swings to Labor in 2016.) This chart shows the swings to the Liberals in decreasing order of size. The two seats at the bottom — one the seat of a retiring Liberal MP, Craig Laundy — swung to the opposition, the rest to the government. The next three were sophomore seats: Labor members elected at the previous election; having been largely unknown candidates in 2016, they had generated at least some profile in the community in the intervening three years.

(Lindsay, which swung big, would have been sophomore if the Labor MP Emma Husar had not been shafted. As it was there was no sitting member on offer.)

As Reid shows, personal vote effects also tend to show up when an MP retires (or is forced out by their party), particularly if they’ve been there for a long time. In 2019 four NSW seats had departing MPs. Lindsay, as mentioned, had no personal vote effects, but the other three, all Coalition-held — Reid, Cowper and Gilmore — swung to Labor, and Gilmore even changed hands. (And not just because of the disendorsed MP; Scott Morrison captain’s call of Warren Mundine as candidate proved a disaster.)

Back in 2016 Julia Banks was the only Liberal candidate to take an electorate from Labor. Buried in the fine print of this achievement was the fact that it was an empty seat, the sitting Labor MP of sixteen years, Anna Burke, having pulled up stumps. Burke had built up a good personal vote, particularly during her term as speaker in the Gillard government, so a drop in the Labor vote was inevitable.

Personal vote effects don’t always show up, but they usually do. All sorts of other things matter too. Sometimes sitting MPs end up with negative personal votes; they are a drag on the vote and the party would have been better off with somebody else there. That was the case in Warringah in 2019, when Tony Abbott’s unpopularity created the opportunity for an insurgent. Labor, the party of unions and workers, could never have won that upper-middle-class seat, but an independent stood a chance in a compulsory preferential system. Step forward Zali Steggall. Independent candidates are hoping to do this country-wide in 2022. Their endeavours will nearly all come to nothing, but one or two, maybe, could get through.

Major party campaigners tend to be sceptical of personal vote effects, particularly sophomore surges. They instead nominate the seats to throw resources at, and if they do relatively well there, they claim vindication of their campaigning prowess. In reality they chose these electorates because conditions were welcoming.

Maybe the most dramatic example of this was in 2010, when the Gillard government suffered a swing that should have put them into opposition, at least according to the pendulum. Of the NSW seats the apparatchiks crowed about “saving” — Eden-Monaro, Page, Robertson, Greenway, Lindsay — all but Robertson was sophomore (and Robertson was complicated.)

In general, the sophomore surge means that governments tend to do well, swing-for-seat, at the election after they’ve taken a big bunch of them off the other side. In October 1998 the Howard government survived a swing that, if uniform, would have sent them into opposition. It was put down to brilliant marginal seat campaigning, particularly in New South Wales, where it turned the then state Liberal director into a rock star, but only until the Carr government’s huge win at the state election in March the next year, which sent the same party official to the electoral dog house.

Retiring MPs in 2022 (announced so far) can be found here. Sophomore seats are here. Over the summer I will write a much bigger, wonkier examination of personal vote effects in 2022.

Have a wonderful break everyone! •

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Of course, opposition parties have held commanding leads three or four months before an election on earlier occasions, only to see their advantage vanish in the weeks before the ballot. The 2019 election was a case in point, 1993’s another. Yet today’s political circumstances suggest the Morrison government may have trouble turning opinion around. Typically the Coalition runs on a program of fiscal rectitude, accusing Labor of plans to tax, spend and run up big deficits. But with a deficit this year running second in Australian history only to last year, making that theme work will be harder. Unlike in 2019, Labor won’t be proposing big tax increases.

Likewise climate change and China. How we reduce carbon can be debated, but the government is committed to reduction targets, concedes climate change is a real problem, and accepts that coal is on the way out. Portraying China as the enemy helps consolidate the Coalition vote but unless and until Labor takes the bait it is limited in effect, and Anthony Albanese and his colleagues are resolutely refusing to take the bait.

Labor still faces a big challenge in winning the additional seven seats necessary to govern in its own right. The Coalition’s bastion is Queensland, where it holds twenty-three of thirty seats. Queensland out, and Labor holds a majority in the House; Queensland in, and Labor is seven seats short of a majority. Compared to the 2019 election result, which admittedly was a calamity for Labor in that state, the party needs a state swing of more than 3 per cent just to pick up one seat in Queensland, more than 4 per cent to pick up two and nearly 5 per cent to win two more. Still, it is a volatile electorate and a big swing to Labor in Queensland is suggested by the most recent Morgan polls.

So Labor has a chance in what will be a hard fought contest. What kind of economy would it (or the Coalition) face after it is elected and the pandemic’s impact wears off?

Last week the International Monetary Fund offered the cold thought that once the Australian economy has fully recovered, growth will slip to a long-term rate below the average of the twenty years before the pandemic. Output growth next year will be 4.1 per cent, it says, but will then slip to 2.6 per cent, a rate the IMF evidently thinks is as fast as it can go in the long term. Growth in employment will account for more than half of that 2.6 per cent. The rest will come from the long-term growth in output per worker, which the IMF evidently thinks will be around 1.3 per cent, or a little less. This is below the 1.5 per cent Treasury assumed for its recent Intergenerational Report, and a little lower than the Australian experience of the ten years before the pandemic. It is pessimistic but consistent with what is happening in other wealthy economies.

According to this IMF forecast the forthcoming election will be fought in a brightly recovering economy, obscuring the likelihood that the growth of living standards will then fall significantly — and stay that way for many years to come. It will also be an economy in which both fiscal and monetary policy are on long-term tightening paths — that is, interest rates will slowly be increasing and the budget deficit will be narrowing as a share of GDP. Short of recession, the budget and interest rates won’t be deployed to stimulate growth.

When the serious electoral contest resumes in February, much of the debate will focus on spending, taxing and the deficit, and much on our energy future, China and so forth. But the economic issue that really matters for our future is unlikely to be debated at all. This is a pity because whether Josh Frydenberg is still in the job post-election or has been replaced by Labor’s Jim Chalmers, it will be among the priority long-term issues Treasury presents in its post-election briefings.

This issue is productivity, or output per worker. One reason productivity won’t be much debated in the run-up to the election is that it no longer fits into the contesting narratives around which elections are typically fought.

Over the two decades to 2020 productivity growth was slower than in the 1990s, contributing to slower output growth, slower growth in wages after inflation, and slower growth in living standards. Productivity gains account for most of the growth of after-inflation wages, and of living standards.

In its recent report the IMF staff looked closely at productivity and came up with some surprising results. It found the decline in both business investment spending and productivity in the years before the pandemic may be related to the increasing concentration ownership of Australian businesses, and the associated decline in competition.

The IMF recommends Australia spend more on encouraging research and development spending by business. It argues that investment in research and development is associated with faster gains in output per hour worked, and that Australia invests less than the average wealthy economy and very much less than the leading economies.

Similar points were made recently by Reserve Bank assistant governor Luci Ellis. In an appropriately tentative way she argued that the slowdown in productivity growth in Australia and other wealthy economies in recent years may have something to do with increasing concentration of business ownership.

In its Intergenerational Report Treasury argued that the slowdown in the growth of output per worker may be linked to the increasing share of output accounted for by sectors in which there are only three or four big producers who can make it difficult for new players to enter. It may also be related to a slow take-up of new digital technologies. “Declining dynamism” is evident, it said, impeding the flow of resources from less productive to more productive firms. “Australian firms appear to be slower to adopt world-leading technologies” with the result that “non-mining businesses in Australian have fallen further behind the global frontier firms and appear to be catching up more slowly.”

Hardly a whisper of this shift in thinking among economic advisers and policymakers reaches the general media or comes through in the election contest. For Australia’s economic future, however, it is becoming an issue too big to ignore. •

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This is on song — in two-party-preferred terms at least — with all the other public pollsters except for the Nine papers’ Resolve, whose most recent outing gave the Coalition a whopping seven-point lead in first preferences, 39 to 32 per cent, which would translate to a small Coalition lead of about 51 to 49 in two-party-preferred terms. If Resolve keeps this up, the possibility of wall-to-wall pollster “herding” will not be a problem during this election campaign.

The Australian is headlining another finding: that a plurality of voters, 47 per cent, believe Labor will form government after the next election, 37 per cent think the Coalition and the rest aren’t sure.

Now, some political observers believe the expectation of a win is a good thing because it generates momentum and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your correspondent is definitely not in this camp.

Yes, expectations and outcome have correlated across electoral history. As they say in the classics, though, correlation doesn’t equal causation. Sure, the polls point to a likely victor, which largely generates expectations, directly and indirectly. But rather than millions marching dreamlike to vote for X because everyone else is — because the media says it’s so — the opposite is the case: it’s usually better to be the underdog because some voters are tempted to mitigate an expected big win.

During the 2019 campaign the Coalition seemed to grasp this, while Labor, by all appearances, believed playing up the likelihood of victory was just the ticket. We saw how that turned out.

The good news for Labor is that this time the expectations are not so one-sided. Once bitten by the opinion polls, voters are twice shy. And a prime minister who pulls off an unexpected victory will always be given some benefit of the doubt. In early December 2018, before all that happened, Labor was favoured by much more, 55 to 24 per cent, than it is now.

Back then, most of the commentariat were convinced a change of government was on its way. They could just feel it; they could smell the government’s decay. They had internalised the polls, and found further reassurance in the chaotic August change of Liberal leadership and in the November Victorian Labor landslide.

This week’s 47–37 lead on expectations — 56–44 if you exclude undecideds — actually seems surprisingly optimistic for Labor, given what happened last time.

Over in the United States the polls got it wrong in 2016 and got it wrong again in 2020, by about the same amount. The difference the second time was that Joe Biden’s surveyed lead over Donald Trump was about twice what Hillary Clinton’s had been four years before.

On that basis, Labor would want an election-eve lead next year significantly better than 2019’s average 51.5 to 48.5 per cent to feel confident of victory. (The result three years ago was 51.5–48.5 the other way.)

Right now Labor leads by roughly 6 to 8 per cent in all the polls except Resolve. A 2019-style 6 per cent error would put Labor on 51 or 50, which would be a probable (though messy, and perhaps in minority) government win. But we shouldn’t really compare today’s polls with those in the dying days of last election’s campaign. In December 2018, Labor was ahead by about what it is now, or a bit less.

As a rule, it’s best to be the underdog, but this can be complicated by another factor: the prospect of a minority Labor government reliant on Greens and independents. The Coalition has long believed it is in its interests to play up this scenario, and while it hasn’t really got much traction in past contests, this time the Greens are also pushing it energetically.

As most voters prefer majority governments, and some can even change their vote between the major parties to ensure this, that factor adds another dimension to the expectations game. It possibly played a part in that unexpectedly big Victorian result three years ago — Labor’s going to win, let’s make sure Dan Andews has a majority — but it can also work the way the Coalition wants it to. •

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Nonetheless, Morrison is hoping the setback will only be temporary and he can soon return to his promise to protect Australians from big government while letting rip “can-do capitalism.” He is courting voters who opposed major public health restrictions during the pandemic by arguing that it is time for government to step out of the way.

Despite a post-Covid spin, that rhetoric isn’t really new. Morrison went to the last election making a populist promise to protect ordinary Australians from a big, intrusive, high-taxing Labor government. His current arguments are largely a post-Covid variation on that old neoliberal, pro-market theme — though, given his criticism of official intrusion, it is ironic that his government has long exhibited an authoritarian tinge, especially when it comes to groups and perspectives it disagrees with.

Those Australians who hoped the Coalition might have learned from the economic stimulus measures it introduced during the pandemic will be sadly disappointed, particularly when it comes to the economic and social benefits that flowed from increasing unemployment benefits. The government even briefly offered free childcare. It was all a long way from the severely restricted role the prime minister sees government playing in helping rebuild the Australian economy after the pandemic, never mind tackling major issues such as climate change.

But the Coalition isn’t alone in turning to the past. Labor has been casting around for previous economic models too. Early in the pandemic Labor shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers evoked the Curtin and Chifley government’s Keynesian postwar reconstruction plans of the early 1940s: a model that sees a greater role for the state in a mixed economy than does Morrison’s can-do capitalism.

More recently, Chalmers has also been evoking British Labour’s Tony Blair by seeking to brand Labor as the “party of aspiration.” Such a flirtation isn’t new, as Labor leaders Simon Crean and Mark Latham demonstrated twenty years ago. But Chalmers should be cautious, given that those previous evocations of Blair didn’t end well for the Australian party.

Nonetheless, following an inspiring video call with Blair, and building on his own arguments, Chalmers has highlighted the role that technology can play in improving the economic wellbeing of citizens. Two decades ago, the Blair government optimistically promised that Britain would once again be a world-leading economy via its technological prowess in the information revolution. Paul Keating had embraced the opportunities of the new information economy years before Blair. New technologies can indeed bring great benefits, but they also risk deepening inequality — a risk that Chalmers, like earlier Labor figures including Keating, may well have underestimated.

It’s back to the future in other ways, too. Chalmers’s electoral focus on the suburbs has echoes of Mark Latham’s period as a Labor politician, when he published a book called From the Suburbs. Like Chalmers, former Labor leader Kim Beazley also pledged to respond to the issues that middle Australians are discussing around their kitchen tables.

With its cautious, small-target strategy, Labor appears to have backed away from Shorten-era hints that it might address some of the industrial relations policy failures of previous Labor governments, including Keating-era enterprise bargaining policies and the Rudd–Gillard government’s outlawing of pattern bargaining on an industry-wide basis. While Labor has been loath to acknowledge the problem explicitly, its own policies actually contributed to the wage stagnation that Labor now pledges to tackle.

So the industrial relations challenge for Labor is not just to deal with Coalition policies but also to tackle its own past. While it has kept the Shorten-era promise to tackle precarious work — an issue that the pandemic has brought into even greater prominence — in other respects it often seems to be returning to an earlier model. In its attempts to repair the damage that Shorten’s attacks on the big end of town inflicted on the party’s relations with business, it has ended up placing less emphasis on issues of economic equality.

For his part, Morrison is threatening to make waterfront industrial relations a major issue, echoing the Howard government’s targeting of the Maritime Union of Australia more than twenty years ago. The government has also been returning to past Coalition election strategies in its suggestions that Labor is soft on China.

Culture-war issues are also being raised, most recently with the introduction of the government’s religious freedom bill. While this legislation is close to Morrison’s heart, he also sees it as an opportunity to wedge Labor. He has incorrectly implied that the lack of protection against religious discrimination — alongside laws against sexual or racial discrimination — represents a failure of the left. But it was conservative Christians who campaigned for years against laws to protect religious freedom, including when the previous Labor government considered introducing such protections. Those Christians were concerned about these protections extending to non-Christian religions and the possible implications for Christian religious instruction and state aid to church schools. The problem for the left lies not in protecting people of faith against religious discrimination but in dealing with arguments that “religious freedom” should enable believers to discriminate against others.

True, predicting the political future is even harder than usual. Time and time again the virus has refused to cooperate with politicians’ best-laid plans. But those who hoped that the post-Covid world would see a radically “better normal” seem destined to be disappointed. In the lead-up to the next election, both Labor and Liberal have so far reverted unimaginatively to previous policy perspectives. Despite the pandemic, much of the next election seems likely to be fought on familiar ideological ground. •

The post Back to the old normal appeared first on Inside Story.

One popular one is that by-election wins portend general election results. They simply don’t, because by-election voters aren’t deciding who will form government, and that frees them to be influenced by all sorts of other things. But while commentators might understand this at one level, many still can’t resist overlaying by-election swings onto state or national pendulums to produce high drama.

Another is that leaders’ personal ratings in the polls matter more than voting intentions. As in “that 53 per cent lead is well and good, but you can’t win with such a low preferred prime minister/leader satisfaction rating.” It’s rubbish. In fact, if there is a relationship it’s the other way around: for a given voting intention figure it’s better for the leader to have a low personal rating than a high one, because the latter can artificially inflate party support. But this one too won’t go away. Very often it is wielded by a leader’s internal enemies.

(Just one federal Australian election in polling history might be cited to support that view: Bill Shorten’s low ratings in 2019. But the surprise of Labor’s defeat was an opinion poll fail; the polls were simply wrong, right up to election day, and we don’t know how long they’d been wrong for.)

Another classic: “Disunity is death!” Except when it isn’t (in 2019, for example).

And that voters “reward” governments for jobs well done. This is pertinent in the Covid era, of course, when all our governments have accrued goodwill. But I reckon voters look forwards, not backwards, and that a fine performance is only relevant because of what it suggests about the future. With Covid, it’ll be about what is happening at the time of the election, and what looks likely in the months and years ahead.

Like by-elections, plotting state election results onto the federal pendulum is a pointless pastime, too. But again it makes good copy.

Which brings us to the persistent idea that popular state premiers generate support for their federal counterparts. Right now, some expect rampaging Western Australian Mark McGowan to deliver votes for Anthony Albanese at the next federal election — perhaps enough for that state alone to deliver a Labor victory.

Just this year McGowan clocked up the biggest election win — federal, state or territory — since Federation. His zero-tolerance attitude to border crossings in arguably the country’s most parochial state (Queensland and Tasmania are also in contention) has delivered both low case numbers and, along with Commonwealth largesse, economic health. While the other states are mostly slowly relaxing their boundaries, Western Australia’s remain sealed. In the ongoing stoush with the feds (who want McGowan to quickly join the rest of us) there’s no doubt on whose side the WA majority sits.

On top of that, Scott Morrison’s standing over there is dire, so it is said, and come March, April or May, voters will back their guy against the prime minister.

Do the polls support this expectation? Nationally, they tend to have the federal opposition on 53 or 54 per cent after preferences, a swing of about five percentage points since the last election. In Western Australia the number is also around 53 or 54, or a swing of around nine points. (See Pollbludger on the most recent Newspoll.) So that’s some mild evidence for the idea, although it’s nothing like state Labor’s 69 per cent eight months ago.

But there are opinion polls, and then there are elections. They are not the same thing. One is trying to estimate the other by asking people to imagine a certain ritual, known as an election, is held today. In some circumstances the response to that hypothetical is more realistic than in others.

In the thirty-nine federal elections since preferential voting was introduced, Western Australia has given Labor a majority of the two-party-preferred vote just eight times. And five of them were when the party was led by someone perceived as one of their own — John Curtin in 1943 and 1946, and Bob Hawke in 1983, 1984 and 1987. For a similar reason, the party in opposition didn’t do too badly in the state under Kim Beazley in 1998 (49.5) and 2001 (48.4). But it’s been downhill from there, fuelled by the mining boom, and in 2019 Labor recorded a miserable 44.5. (At the 2007 Kevin Rudd landslide the party only managed 46.7 per cent.)

Generally, across all jurisdictions, the electoral record shows that the idea of a popular local leader bringing votes to their federal counterpart is bunkum. To the contrary, the two have often worked against each other. In the Howard years, for example, we saw soaring Labor premiers, often with record wins under their belts, alongside comfortable Coalition victories federally. After the Rudd government took office in 2007, state Labor governments started dropping.

Queensland’s Peter Beattie in 2001 and South Australia’s Mike Rann in 2004 clocked up their state parties’ biggest wins in history, achieving two-party-preferred votes in the high fifties. It didn’t stop those states thrashing federal Labor in the same years, giving them 45.1 and 45.6 per cent respectively. In both cases the federal vote took place months after a state contest in which Coalition parties had been reduced to a rump.

These are extreme examples. But popular premiers delivering the goods for federal counterparts? It. Just. Doesn’t. Happen.

The historical polling record offers some evidence that those high-flying locals boost support for federal counterparts. But only in the surveys, and it can crash as the federal campaign starts and minds start to move towards the contest at hand, and matters such as economic security.

And so, by the time of the election next year, if the new Omicron strain allows it, Western Australia’s borders will again be reasonably porous. Covid restrictions will largely be scaled back and cross-jurisdictional bickering mostly a thing of the past.

As usual, the Coalition’s key message for sandgropers will be about Labor’s secret plan to steal their mineral royalties, force them to quickly decarbonise, and perhaps dud them on the GST to boot.

Voters will know that McGowan won’t take any nonsense from Scott Morrison, but would he stand up as aggressively against an Albanese government?

So expect Labor’s WA surge to dissipate as election day approaches. Off such a low base last time, there should be a decent swing to the opposition, but not enough to even hit the 50–50 vote mark.

A federal Labor victory, if it comes, will be off net gains spread across most of the states. •

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Among journalists, a slightly weary discussion is beginning about how the campaign should be reported. Few thoughtful journalists are entirely happy with the routines and rituals of political reporting in this country, yet the same tropes repeat themselves every time an election comes into view.

One thoughtful observer is Sean Kelly, whose new book about Scott Morrison is best understood, I think, as an essay on politics. It seems to be largely addressed to the journalists who have, on Kelly’s analysis, helped create the “flat character” of “ScoMo.”

The title of the book, The Game, sums up Kelly’s diagnosis — a political system and a country deprived of meaning and purposeful dialogue, making it unable to solve problems or harness opportunities. A country, in fact, that has become a “flat character.”

Political scientist Rod Tiffen highlighted the recurring problems with election reporting after the 2019 poll. Political parties were much better at learning from past poor performance than were the media, he said, which displayed “little learning… about how they might cover elections better.”

Research by the Shorenstein Center in the United States suggests that journalists’ emphasis on political tactics and strategy builds voter cynicism, thus increasing the appeal of “outsiders,” who can seem like a breath of fresh air. This kind of reporting helped to build Donald Trump’s support.

Cynical, clichéd reporting also makes people angry with the media, and fuels distrust. When journalists devalue the political process, they undermine their own effectiveness because most people care about their country, and their politics.

Adding to this, surely, is what Tiffen describes as journalistic “superiority signalling”: the practice of treating “the voters” as though they are wholly divorced from the audience for journalism. Too often “the voters” are assumed to be ill-informed or in some other way defective. Journalists hold themselves above the fray, describing the election contest as boring or devoid of content, rather than taking on their responsibility to make it interesting and relevant.

Now is as good a time as any to think about how it might be done better, not because the ideas are new, but because the need is urgent.

In their book Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t: How Journalists Sideline Electoral Participation (Without Even Knowing It), Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-Hye Han show how reporting that implicitly devalues the power of a vote depresses people’s participation and increases their anger with the media. What kind of reporting do they mean? They target reporting that is poll-driven, and reporting that concentrates on political strategy and tactics rather than issues.

In this country polls have dominated political reporting since at least the 1980s. This is partly because media outlets often commission the polls, and the results give them a neat exclusive. Historically, it is also because polls have been broadly accurate, therefore carrying the appeal of a glimpse into the crystal ball.

But poll-driven reporting paradoxically tends to devalue the power of a vote. It suggests the contest is already decided. And it takes away from a sense of active participation around issues that matter. It emphasises the game — the horserace in which all that matters is who is ahead.

Recent contests have cast doubt on whether the polls can still be trusted. During Australia’s 2019 campaign they were all manifestly wrong, and in similar ways. Yet political reporting has barely responded. Polls, some with a tweak or two, remain at the centre of coverage.

Tiffen suggested political reporting could be improved by concentrating more on frontbenchers than on leaders. If the media sponsored debates between ministers and shadow ministers, we could see Marise Payne facing off against Penny Wong on foreign affairs, Angus Taylor  and Chris Bowen on climate change, Josh Frydenberg and Jim Chalmers on the economy, Greg Hunt and Mark Butler on health, and Alan Tudge and Tanya Plibersek on education. We could better assess the talents of the teams, as well as their approach to the issues.

One of the most radical, but no longer new, ideas for improving political reporting came from the American journalism academic Jay Rosen, who led a movement in the early 1990s, “public journalism,” that attracted a passionate following among journalists and helped reshape some of the leading US newspapers. Rosen suggested that journalists had lost their connection with the public — that they were always gleefully cataloguing problems but not offering any solutions. The public retreated, and without that public, journalism “must die.”

The model Rosen proposed didn’t involve commentators preaching to the audience, but rather a conversation. The job of journalists, the movement suggested, was to help make democracy work. By the late 1990s hardly a news organisation in the United States hadn’t been influenced to some extent by the ideals of public journalism.

Media outlets involved typically held public forums to discuss matters of community concern and then tried to build collaborations to sort things out, letting community voices steer the reporting. Journalism was reconceived as a kind of “public square” or “town hall” in which people could meet to deal with their common business.

The Virginian-Pilot, for example, decided in 1995 to try a different method of covering elections for the state legislature. Its editors informed candidates that the paper would be basing its coverage on a citizens’ agenda: a list of priorities culled from interviews and roundtable discussions with residents, which would then be reported on in depth. Candidates would be asked for their views, whether or not those issues were on their preferred agendas. What the paper wouldn’t do, the editors said, was report personal attacks, stories about political strategy, and comments on who was ahead and who was not.

In other words, the paper would report politics as though it actually mattered. There would be no talk of how things might “play” in the electorate, and very little commentary based on backroom chats or the office gossip of politics. The assumption was that the audience had a stake in the news. The resolutions transformed both the newspaper and the conduct of the campaign.

Did the public journalism movement work? Philip Meyer, then professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, together with other researchers found that people in towns served by newspapers oriented towards public journalism had a better knowledge of candidates’ stands on issues, greater trust in the media, more social capital and more trust in government. But he also found the key element was the culture of the news organisation — its commitment to civic journalism values — rather than any specific intervention. The public journalism movement altered newsroom cultures — and that was powerful. Other research examining specific election interventions was more equivocal.

As with all ideological movements, the fervour didn’t last — partly because it was overtaken by the hard reality of the collapse of the media’s business models. Many of the local papers in the vanguard of the movement no longer exist. And the towns that have lost their local newspapers are also those where misinformation and conspiracy theories have the tightest grip.

Public journalism left Australia relatively untouched. Our concentrated media ownership favours the mining of market advantage over innovation.

The only conscious experiment I am aware of was the Sunday Age’s Climate Agenda, launched in 2011, which used online forums to gather ideas and questions to steer its climate change coverage. A senior investigative journalist was dedicated to seeking the answers to audience questions. (Declaration: I was marginally involved in this, as part of my academic research.)

Rosen was also influential at the ABC, with then managing director Mark Scott picking up on the “town square” rhetoric in framing the appropriate role of a public broadcaster. Scott was optimistic about using social media as part of this push. In our own time much of that optimism has faded, and in recent weeks journalists have taken to expressing contempt for users of social media and announcing their withdrawal as though it were a point of professional pride.

I worry about that move. It too easily becomes another form of superiority signalling. It assumes that the journalists and their audiences are a more knowing and elite group — somehow separate from the citizens who will soon vote, the majority of whom are social media users.

Social media has allowed a wider range of voices to be heard in political debate. That is both its curse and its blessing. If journalists leave the field, the bad actors have a free run. On the other hand, if journalists participate well and effectively, then both social media and political reporting could be better.

How else might political journalism be improved? I hear from Labor contacts that the strategy for the forthcoming election is twofold. “Don’t be hated” and “win the marginals.” Doubtless the Coalition has a similar strategy.

That means the day-to-day contest will take place out of sight for most of us. Do you think Albanese isn’t cutting through, or that Morrison is seen as a liar? Perhaps, but perhaps not — in the dozen or so electorates where their efforts are concentrated.

A combination of lockdowns, reduced media travel budgets, hollowed-out local reporting, highly targeted political messaging on Facebook, and a cleaving to Canberra by our most senior political journalists means that election journalism is not, or at least not yet, giving us a window into how people in the marginal electorates are thinking.

Imagine how that might change if there were reporters at the school gates, and in the hospital waiting rooms, and chatting to the dog walkers in the park.

Is it naive to hope for change?

Probably. Journalists, like everyone else, are weary after two years of pandemic. Some would welcome innovation and experiment, but resources are thin. Proprietors and managements are conservative and lacklustre.

But we can hope, and I think we should. The ideas for improvement have been around for decades. What we need is implementation and experiment, because business as usual is not really cutting it if the aim is a healthy democracy. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Here we go again appeared first on Inside Story.

But it wasn’t always so. For the first eight years an even bigger star was Parramatta.

After the Coalition’s landslide 1996 victory, the fourth estate craved a compelling yarn about the whats and whys. Liberal apparatchiks provided one: John Howard, this down-to-earth everyman, had stolen Labor’s base. Ordinary, blue-collar, working-class Australians, fed up with Paul Keating and his grand visions about the arts and Asia and Indigenous affairs, had flocked to someone they recognised as one of their own.

And for the first few terms the legend was exemplified by that electorate with the instantly recognisable name. Most people, even in other states, had heard of the seat’s best-known suburb, Parramatta, around twenty-three kilometres west of Sydney’s CBD. It conjured (in 1996 at least) flannelette shirts, hotted up cars doing burnouts — you know, westies. The Liberals had stormed Labor’s heartland; it spawned a thousand opinion pieces.

Buried in the fine print was the fact that the electorate had mostly been won by the Liberal Party and its conservative predecessors since it was created at Federation; indeed, none other than Howard’s immigration minister Philip Ruddock was the local MP from 1973 to 1977. But over its life it has often been drastically reorganised by the redistribution knife, moving this way and that, favouring one side and then the other.

The Liberal candidate who won in 1996 was the religious, morally upstanding (at least publicly) and occasionally outspoken Ross Cameron. For the next eight years he was cast as the archetype of the Liberal MP the battlers now craved, a symbol of the new electoral landscape.

An unfriendly redistribution before the 2001 election threatened to send Cameron packing, but in the event didn’t. Shortly before the 2004 poll, though, he revealed that he’d had an extramarital affair, and “reporters in Canberra immediately ran with further details of Cameron’s private life, unleashing stories they’d been sitting on for years.” He was done for.

Parramatta moved back into the Labor column. The scandal had almost certainly made the difference.

With that seat gone, the focus on “Howard’s battlers” moved much further out, to Parramatta’s former understudy, Lindsay, around Penrith. (Fine print: created in 1984, it is best characterised as the kind of outer-suburban seat that tends to go to whoever forms government.) It was a much longer traipse for CBD-based journalists, but the tale thrived: values, conservativism and, best of all, the “Lindsay test”!

These two very different electorates serve nicely to illustrate the confused media presentations of “Western Sydney.”

Journalists’ sketches of this exotic species tend to oscillate. One day Western Sydney voters are all “aspirational” — (white) working class made good, often in well-paid trade jobs and perhaps owning a McMansion, many of them having fled to Sydney’s fringes.

The next day Western Sydney might signify immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds. They also aspire to good things for themselves and their families, of course, but they tend to have lower incomes, and the stereotype emphasises a religiosity and social conservatism that draws them to the Liberals. Recall Western Sydney’s relatively high No vote in the 2017 marriage equality survey.

The first cliché applies most of all to Lindsay, with one of the lowest populations from non-English-speaking backgrounds in Sydney. But the bulk of Western Sydney — Banks and Barton (southwest), for example, and Blaxland, Chifley, Fowler, Greenway, McMahon, Reid, Watson and Werriwa — more closely approximates the second (and most of those electorates still vote Labor, albeit not as reliably as decades ago). See this AEC map.

Multicultural Parramatta, like neighbouring Bennelong, can be seen as West meets leafy North Shore. The Liberals do best in the wealthier northeast, near the border with deep blue Liberal Berowra. (Lindsay, by the way, supported marriage equality 56 to 44 per cent. Parramatta opposed it 62–38.)

Enough scene-setting. Last month Julie Owens, Parramatta’s Labor MP for the past seventeen years, announced her upcoming retirement. The seat last experienced one of those massive redistributions before the 2010 election, when Owens lost almost half her voters to Greenway and took in a big chunk of Reid’s. That added 3 per cent to her estimated notional margin, which came in very handy in 2013 when Tony Abbott led the Coalition to a big victory and Owens held on by just 0.6 per cent. A smaller redistribution in the next term added another 0.7.

The upshot is that Parramatta is currently very Labor; and this chart suggests that under today’s boundaries the seat would probably have remained in Labor hands throughout the Howard years. (Several caveats apply, including demographic changes.)

Like much of Sydney’s west, Parramatta swung relatively strongly to the Morrison government in 2019. But then again it had swung to Labor (by even more) the election before.

I was expecting this piece to contain a rave about Owens’s big personal vote — she seems the type to have one, and since her announcement several colleagues have enthused about her enviable door-knocking prowess — but the evidence from the House-minus-Senate Labor votes doesn’t support that. The chart, in particular the gaps over time between the adjusted Parramatta line and the NSW one, lends at best modest support.

These are imprecise measures, but if it’s true that her personal appeal is not responsible for much of the 2019 Labor vote, that’s good news for her party, because the smaller her personal vote, the less it will be missed.

So the Liberals will certainly include Parramatta in their hit list (they routinely do), but it seems an unlikely gain.

Unless something unexpected happens in that part of Sydney overall. If we’ve learnt anything at recent elections, it’s that the unexpected should not be unexpected. •

The post Whose heartland? appeared first on Inside Story.

During the first half of the year, it had the Coalition and Labor running neck-and-neck on the two-party-preferred vote. Over the same period, the Coalition’s primary vote averaged a healthy 40 per cent.

From the middle of the year, though, the Coalition’s primary vote started to fall. In the latest Newspoll — released on 24 October — the government’s primary vote had fallen to 35 per cent.

More significantly, the two-party-preferred vote has been 53 or 54 per cent for Labor since July, and 46 or 47 per cent for the Coalition. That’s six Newspolls in a row, and a possible electoral wipe-out for the Morrison government.

But strangely — because journalists ordinarily love polls — this hasn’t turned into much of a media story. It hasn’t been “factored into the narrative,” as the cliché goes. So why haven’t we been reading headlines like “Poll Pressure Has Morrison in Policy Panic”?

First up, Newspoll is published in Rupert Murdoch’s anti-Labor flagship the Australian. If Newspoll had found that Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party was generating opinion poll numbers like Scott Morrison’s government, I think we might have heard more about it.

Picture the front page of the Daily Telegraph: “Albo’s Poll Agony Continues.”

And second, the polls, including Newspoll, got the 2019 election wrong. Journalists have been a bit gun-shy about highlighting good figures for Labor since Morrison’s “miracle” election victory that year.

Opinion polls ain’t elections, of course. They are fallible snapshots of voting intentions taken at a particular time in the electoral cycle. But as long as you don’t imbue them with mystical powers they’re useful tools to make guesstimates about what’s going on in Voterland. My guesstimate is that Anthony Albanese is doing something right and, more importantly, Scott Morrison is doing an awful lot wrong.

In just four months’ time we’re likely to be in the middle of an election campaign. In the meantime, Anthony Albanese is receiving plenty of gratuitous strategic advice from media commentators. And some of them are very unhappy about his small-target strategy.

Conventional wisdom asserts that Labor only wins government with a hefty program of reforming policies. But what does history say?

In the postwar period Labor has won government from opposition just three times: in 1972 under Whitlam, in 1983 under Hawke, and in 2007 with Kevin Rudd as leader.

Whitlam had the famous program, but he also faced the egregious Billy McMahon, whose government had already taken a battering in 1969. Whenever Australian prime ministers are ranked in order of greatness McMahon always comes stone motherless last.

When Hawke won office in 1983, he brought with him the Accord agreement with the unions. But he also had an opponent in Malcolm Fraser who was struggling with a recession, growing unemployment and record interest rates.

When Rudd prevailed in 2007, he won against a prime minister who had been in office for eleven years, had provoked all-out warfare with the union movement and had run out of tricks. John Howard, locked in interminable battle with his treasurer Peter Costello, even lost his own seat.

It’s true that Whitlam and Hawke were charismatic, reforming leaders who ran on ambitious policies voters recognised were necessary. But Rudd’s big carrot for the voters was a promise to spend less than John Howard.

So what do our three Labor heroes have in common? They faced tired, dysfunctional Coalition governments. Are the Newspolls telling us that Morrison has hit the wall? When Australians voted for him in 2019, they didn’t really know him. Now they do.

Albanese would probably agree he’s no Whitlam or Hawke, but he’s as experienced as Kevin Rudd, and without the obvious flaws. He was one of the few senior Labor figures, for example, to come out of the destructive Gillard–Rudd years with his standing enhanced. Though he opposed the coup against Rudd, he then dedicated himself to making the whole sorry mess work.

It looks like we’re in for an election substantially about climate change. Morrison has placed his cards on the table: he says he’ll get to net zero by 2050 basically by crossing our fingers.

Albanese has yet to declare his hand. And why should he? The Murdoch press will go berserk no matter what he comes up with.

But we already know the key question facing voters at the coming election: who are you going to trust to bring Australia through the tricky transition to a decarbonised economy?

If Albanese can paint Morrison as a fabulist on climate change policy and make a credible case that Labor will help those affected by these essential changes to our economy, he’s in with a very strong chance. And if there is a hung parliament, he’s better placed than Morrison to make it work.

Scott Morrison has just arrived home after the most disastrous prime ministerial trip since Robert Menzies went to Egypt in 1956 and failed to solve the Suez Crisis. Meanwhile, the next Newspoll looms large. •

The post How Labor wins appeared first on Inside Story.

It is easy to be cynical about such pessimism. Doom prophets are as old as the sun. But even if you don’t go in for crisis chatter, you would be hard-pressed to deny that some of the world’s most mature democracies are facing some serious headwinds. Many of the culprits are so familiar that they need no more than a passing mention: competing varieties of right-wing populism led by the totemic shocks of Trump and Brexit; new forms of authoritarianism stifling opposition in Hungary, Turkey and Brazil; crude ethnic nationalism gaining electoral traction in almost every European country, a kind of domino theory for our time.

Jan-Werner Müller, a political philosopher from Princeton, knows his way around this public end-of-democracy seminar. In fact, he was one of the first cabs off the rank with his 2016 book What Is Populism?, one of the most clear-sighted early attempts to identify the many family resemblances among the new “Populist International.” It is his view, then and now, that what ultimately connects figures as diverse as Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi and Hugo Chávez is their rejection of political and cultural pluralism. In Müller’s conception, wrote one critic, populism is democracy’s “anti-pluralist, moralistic shadow.”

Naturally, then, Müller’s new book, Democracy Rules, turns the mirror around. Rather than opine further about the shape of populist threat, as most of the doom prophets have done in recent years, he attempts to shift the focus back onto democracy’s own first principles. If we choose to think seriously about what democracy actually is, he implies, we might see more clearly what it is that we are trying to defend. The ultimate question for our times is not “what is populism?” but “what is democracy?”

Of course, we don’t need to frame all our ideas about democracy as a response to the new “autocratising regimes.” But neither can we deny that it is the existence of these regimes that is bringing such urgency to the latest wave of democratic soul-searching. One of the features of the new right-wing populism, after all, is the way it presents itself as being fundamentally democratic. Unlike “paradigmatic” twentieth-century fascism, to which it is typically compared, populism is much less openly hostile to democracy itself. Populists instead seize power by exploiting democracy’s institutions, if only so they may undermine them. This is democracy’s paradox and its fatal flaw: it is a system that tolerates its opponents.

Taking that logic to its extreme, the new authoritarians claim they are actually arch-democrats reflecting the will of the people. At this point, the debate is enveloped in a fog of partisanship. Trump, for example, never openly entertains the idea that he is subverting democracy: he simply won the 2020 election. His opponents saw illiberalism everywhere they looked: friendly appointments, political favours, wall-building. Figuring out whether populist political movements represent genuine threats to democracy seems to be more art than science. But even so, says Müller, there must be a nonpartisan way to draw a line between ordinary democratic friction and pernicious polarisation.

The answer, in his view, is to maintain a fundamentally democratic idea of “the people.” Put simply: you cannot expel or disenfranchise citizens, or attempt to limit their participation in the political process. This is democracy’s “hard border”: cross it, and you pose a threat to democracy itself. Governing on behalf of a particular constituency or political coalition might be a normal part of the democratic process, but framing your political rivals as enemies of the state and stripping them of political rights is the threshold at which the backsliding begins.

What ultimately protects democracy against itself, argues Müller, is its “critical infrastructure”: political parties and the media. In an ideal world, these institutions act like shock absorbers for new political demands — as a means by which citizens can participate in the political process and affect political outcomes. And crucially, they provide a way to define the boundaries of political debate in increasingly complex modern societies. They create the “visions of divisions” over which elections are typically fought.

For Müller, the health of democracy is directly tied to the accessibility and smooth functioning of these mediating institutions. This is unfortunate, because both parties and the media have been experiencing a crisis of legitimacy for a while now.

Major political parties have begun to resemble oligarchies. Rather than functioning as “laboratories” for new political ideas, in the Gramscian sense, many are proscribing certain ways of thinking and limiting internal dissent. In some countries, too, dark money floods the political system, creating drastic inequality at the level of political influence. All of this breeds further cynicism and compounds democracy’s crisis.

The advent of social media, meanwhile, has blown up traditional ways of delivering news, put a price on “virality” and turbocharged the fragmentation of the public sphere. Accurate and “assessable” facts are getting harder to come by. Certain types of politicians exploit the situation, peddling disinformation and manufacturing confusion (or, as Steve Bannon puts it, “flooding the zone with shit”).

Müller proposes a number of fixes for these problems, none of which really sets the heart racing. On the issue of dark money, for example, he explores the idea of a voucher system: large donations would be banned, and every citizen would instead receive an equal amount of money to be allocated to the party or candidate of their choice. This seems practical and achievable. Applying the same concept to the media, however — creating a constellation of “transparently partisan” non-profit news co-ops — seems beyond my own personal Overton window.

We can haggle over the details, but the underlying rationale of such schemes is nevertheless sound: to encourage political participation, and to discourage passivity, cynicism and the suspicion that the game is rigged. Both political parties and the media have become increasingly unresponsive to the changing demands of societies — that is, they have become less democratic — and as such they have begun to lose their legitimacy. If we want to protect democracy, we need to find ways to re-democratise its mediating institutions.

Ultimately, though, democracy can’t be protected by laws and decrees alone. It needs believers — and enough of them to keep the game going. All of us have a role to play. There are such things as “democracy-enhancing” behaviours, Müller thinks, acts of generosity and good faith that can create virtuous cycles of political engagement and reciprocity. Reading this, I could not help but think of Barack Obama, a democratic true believer, whose insistence that there be no red states and blue states was exploited mercilessly by his intransigent opponents. Obama’s good faith, say his critics, was simple political naivety. Politics is not for nice guys.

Müller is not so cynical. There are always the examples of figures like Martin Luther King and Edward Snowden, rule breakers who sought to restore the “spirit behind the rules.” But the defenders of democracy nevertheless find themselves in a difficult position. If your only response to the illiberalism and bad faith of your opponents is high-minded platitudes and good-faith gestures, you risk losing it all. Democracy-enhancing behaviours appear to be of little use to the systematically disenfranchised opponents of the Hungarian and Turkish regimes. But to do the opposite — to meet illiberalism with illiberalism — risks undermining the very principles you are seeking to defend, and there may be no coming back.

This is not to engage in bothsidesism or to suggest that prominent left responses to right-wing populism in recent years are themselves illiberal. In fact, the idea that politicians like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn represent some kind of left authoritarianism is grossly overstated. Rather, both are healthy examples of the political party as laboratory: a partisan political organisation that shifts and reshapes its agenda in response to internal dissent. Neither Corbyn nor Sanders formed new parties, but instead sought to reform existing ones. Both relied heavily on real grassroots support, and neither sought to exclude or demonise particular groups from the political process. They did in fact lead highly democratic movements.

By contrast, the new populists are intensely undemocratic. They project muscular, uncompromising personas. Some maintain autocratic control over their own parties. (Geert Wilders’s far-right party in the Netherlands has two members, both of whom are Geert Wilders.) They aim not just to defeat their opponents but to keep defeating them, to dominate. Like mafiosi, they rig the game. True winners, they believe, don’t need to pretend their opponents have anything worthwhile to contribute. As Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and Trump enthusiast, is known to say, “competition is for losers.” To compromise or show sympathy is weak and effete. It’s loser talk.

For Müller, this is exactly the point. Democracy is for losers. It is “a political system in which parties lose elections” (although, he adds, it is not one in which the same party loses elections). In a functioning democracy, the losers can always plausibly entertain the idea that they will one day win. To defend democracy, they must defend the right of winners to rule over them, and the winners must defend the right of losers to continue to participate in the political process. Both sides must accept the fact that their opponents are in some way legitimate. You can be against the government, but you cannot be against the political system.

It is often said that the new populists thrive on division, but what they really crave is the opposite: predictability and control. Conflict and disagreement, on the other hand, breed uncertainty — especially when combined with regular elections. And that, for Müller, is all democracy is: “institutionalised uncertainty.” Electoral outcomes cannot be preordained. Citizens must accept disagreement in perpetuity. Priorities change, the losers regroup, and everyone tries again. The movie never ends — it goes on and on and on and on. •

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Any discussion of this topic needs to first extract itself from a fallacy that befalls so many debates about voting rules (compulsory voting is a fine example): that the United States is the only other country in the world. And look at how terrible things are over there!

Voter ID has a long and ugly history in America, and has become deeply embedded in the ideology wars. Australian partisans tend to inhale these battles as if they’re happening here. But the world contains many functioning democracies.

Yes, America has a ridiculously decentralised voting system (state legislatures decide rules for national elections; local councils do their own thing) that’s riddled with partisanship. Australia does not. In fact, with a permanent national body that conducts elections — the independent Australian Electoral Commission — we are at the opposite end of the spectrum. (Most liberal democracies have national election laws administered by public servants and local government employees.) So let’s leave America out of it.

Our centre-right parties have been itching to introduce voter ID for decades (although John Howard didn’t when he had his 2005–07 Senate majority). While some current advocates of voter ID spend too much time on American right-wing websites, the reaction from opponents of the idea can actually be worse. No less than Labor’s national secretary, former treasurer Wayne Swan, has tweeted that it involves “rigging elections.” (He accuses the Coalition of “Trumpist” behaviour, but claiming your opponent will steal the election is actually part of the Trump playbook.)

But it’s true that Australia doesn’t have a problem with voter impersonation. In Antony Green’s much-quoted words, voter ID is a “solution in search of a problem.”

And yet…

The fact is that most countries do have voter ID laws, including most of those we would compare ourselves to: longstanding liberal democracies with advanced economies. But then, most of them are in (western) Europe and have national ID cards that people must carry around anyway. Of the more comparable nations — New Zealand, Canada and Britain — all without civic registers, only Canada requires voter ID for national elections.

Still, being in the minority is not a good reason to change. In this case, there is really only one good one: public perceptions. Most Australians support voter ID because it just makes sense, and it seems strange you don’t do it already. In the pre-Netflix era, advocates would point out the apparent incongruity of needing ID to rent a video but not to employ that precious possession, your vote.

The answer then and now is that enabling nearly all people to exercise this right — as might be the case with voter ID — is not good enough. As a society we don’t want voting to be restricted to the 80–90 per cent who have no trouble producing ID. Elections are supposed to be the big leveller; all our voices should count equally.

But the public confidence factor can’t be dismissed.

The last federal election’s jaw-dropping outcome, dramatically contradicting all published opinion polls, produced a dollop of social media conspiracy theorising — but no more than that. Virtually everyone accepted that it was a genuine result. We want to keep it that way. Perceptions matter.

When Queensland’s Newman government brought in a voter ID law in 2013, I gave it a single thumb up. If we were going to have such a thing, this one seemed pretty innocuous. If you didn’t have ID you would fill in a declaration vote to be checked later. It was used at one general election, in 2015, before the new Labor government repealed it.

Anecdotally, Queensland’s experiment produced longer queues. As Graeme Orr notes, turnout dropped, but turnout fluctuates between elections anyway, and cause and effect can’t be reliably identified. Still, it wouldn’t be surprising if voter ID laws turned a lot of people off. And it also produces another possible excuse for not voting. While “I don’t have ID” might not, strictly speaking, be a reasonable defence, it’s likely the Electoral Commission of Queensland was lenient.

(Data from ECQ annual reports mildly supports this. The 2012–13 annual report says $5 million was paid in non-voting fines in that financial year, “the majority… in connection with the two major electoral events conducted in 2012” — that is, before the new voter ID laws. Its 2014–15 and 2015–16 reports, covering the first election under voter ID, recorded just under $1.5 million in total.)

The planned federal legislation, which at time of writing hasn’t been seen, looks as if it will be like Queensland’s, but with the added feature that you can get someone else on the roll to vouch for you if you’re without ID. Not mentioned in current media reports is whether the AEC will send all voters a letter that could be used as ID (as happened in Queensland).

The fine print is that little checking of those declaration votes was done in Queensland. If the claimed voter was on the electoral roll, the vote was counted, because logistically it wasn’t feasible to check if their name was already crossed off one of the many copies of the roll. So for all intents and purposes, that voting paper might as well have gone straight into the ballot box in the first place, along with all the IDed votes.

The Queensland rule was really just a disincentive to vote fraudulently. And, of course, a means to maintain a perception of electoral propriety.

Technology has changed since 2013, too. Increasingly, electoral rolls are being accessed electronically by officials on election day. As far as I know the rolls are not yet live at federal elections, which would facilitate the immediate cross-off of names across all copies of the roll. But even then, under the Queensland arrangements, nothing would have stopped someone impersonating someone they knew wasn’t going to turn out.

So much of this discussion is very twentieth century. Technology is changing the way we live our lives; letters and paper ID are becoming obsolete. Most people don’t receive utilities bills in the post. Not everyone has a printer. It is, of course, impossible for postal voters to show original identification. Widely used internet voting will come eventually (but not soon, fear not).

If the federal government’s ID plan becomes law, the AEC will require extra resources. There will be teething problems. It’s probably easy to overstate the contribution to public trust. Conspiracy theories about electoral malfeasance could take root regardless, and would be likelier in the event of a Labor win. (Already the AEC has to deal with wacky social media disinformation.) The loophole described above creates plenty of space for feverish speculation.

And while the Newman government in 2013 enjoyed a massive majority in its single chamber of parliament, the current legislation must pass the Senate to become law. That’s quite a hurdle. •

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Commonly described as an oligarch, Babiš is the Czech Republic’s second-richest citizen, with interests in agriculture, forestry and construction. He also owns the country’s two largest newspapers and its most popular radio station.

Tellingly, the citadel of Babiš’s empire, his conglomerate Agrofert, started life as a state-owned company called Petrimex, which Babiš privatised in the post-1989 era with the aid of some mysterious Swiss investors. Today his personal fortune is estimated at over US$4 billion. Not bad for a former member of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party.

Just two years after he bought his little piece of paradise in the south of France, Babiš decided to have a crack at democratic politics. In 2011 he established a political party called ANO, an acronym for Action of Dissatisfied Citizens, and the Czech word for Yes. Babiš says he founded ANO “to fight corruption and other ills in the country’s political system.”

Perspicacious readers may see where this is heading.

Mr Babiš is a politician in the mould of that other moneyed European statesman Silvio Berlusconi. In a controversial article published in 2015, Foreign Policy magazine christened him “Babišconi.” And, like the former leader of Italy, Babiš’s career in business and politics has been punctuated by scandals.

Despite being a strident critic of the European Union, for example, Babiš was charged with misappropriating millions in EU subsidies for his private use. (Parliamentary immunity saved him in that case.) And although he denied for many years that he was an agent of communist Czechoslovakia’s State Security Police, a Czech court ruled in January 2018 that he had in fact been an agent under the codename “Bureš.”

In 2017, despite this track record, Babiš parlayed his wealth, media influence and growing political power into becoming prime minister. It was a premiership of firsts. Babiš was the oldest and richest PM in the Czech Republic’s history. And he was the first holder of the post to have been charged with a crime.

Then, just a week ago, elections were held for the 200 seats of the Czech Republic’s lower house, and Babiš’s purchase of Chateau Bigaud came back to bite him on the bum.

Every few years the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists somehow manages to orchestrate a worldwide mega-leak of financial shenanigans the world’s rich would much rather remain secret. This year’s blockbuster, the Pandora Papers, is based on nearly twelve million leaked documents that expose how the rich and powerful use secret offshore companies to conceal their wealth.

Unfortunately for prime minister Babiš, his carefully camouflaged real estate deal in France had a starring role in Pandora’s revelations.

Up until this point in the campaign, his anti-migrant, anti-Europe rhetoric seemed to be doing the trick on the hustings. But then the Chateau story dropped and dominated the last five days of the election.

Babiš denied any wrongdoing, of course — but the political damage was done. “So, it’s here,” the outraged prime minister tweeted. “I had expected them to pull something out on me just before the elections in order to harm me and influence the Czech elections.”

What had looked like an assured victory for ANO turned into a humiliating — if narrow — defeat. A coalition of three liberal-conservative parties called (naturally enough) Together, or Spolu in Czech, scored 27.8 per cent of the vote, just pipping ANO’s 27.1 per cent.

Rubbing salt into the wounds, another coalition, this time of the centre-left, scored 15.6 per cent of the vote. This grouping is made up of the Pirate Party, a pro–civil liberties anti-corruption party, and STAN, a coalition of mayors and independents.

In the Czech system the party with the largest popular vote usually gets first crack at establishing a government. So, Together, with the Pirates and STAN, should trump Yes. (And if you can’t appreciate the wonders of democracy after reading a sentence like that, you’re not trying hard enough.)

As to the significance of the Chateau factor, there is some debate, but as the respected Czech political commentator Jiří Pehe has said, “If you look back, it’s one scandal after another with Mr Babiš and perhaps even his own voters might have thought, ‘this is enough.’”

A poll conducted by Czech television suggested as much. It found that 8 per cent of ANO voters had shifted to other candidates late in the day.

Babiš has one last chance to cling onto power: his friend and ally, the Republic’s president Miloš Zeman, has the say on who should get the first chance to try to form government. But Zeman is gravely ill and may not be capable of intervening; and anyway, Together’s leader, Petr Fiala, has already ruled out talking to Babiš, preferring to parley with the Pirates and STAN.

Are there any positive lessons in this parable? Let’s be optimistic and say ano. Right-wing populism works — until it doesn’t. Particularly if some key elements of civil society — campaigning journalists, independent judges and free elections — remain in place. •

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Of course, it’s the two-party-preferred vote that decides elections in Australia. But the declining major-party primary support increases the chances that minor parties or independents will pick up seats. And so it is that the current parliament boasts a crossbench of six out of 151 MPs, a postwar record.

Will that number grow again in 2022?

In the case of Labor-held electorates, the chief threat remains the Greens, although since 2013 the Coalition has alleviated the pressure by routinely preferencing its main opponent ahead of the minor party. This has left the Greens with mostly Coalition-held electorates in their sights, or at least ones that they envisage winning with the help of Labor voters’ preferences.

“Preferencing,” of course, is simply a recommendation on how-to-vote cards. Evidence suggests these can sway a third or more of major-party voters.

For the Coalition, Labor’s preferencing habits take the sting out of the One Nation challenge outside the cities. That leaves a threat from independents in the bush, and a more recent insurgency from urban independents in hitherto-safe Liberal electorates.

Most House of Representatives crossbenchers have tended to arrive one of three ways. They move from the state arena (see Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, and before them Ted Mack). Or, like Bob Katter, they enter parliament as a major-party MP and then spit the dummy. Or they get over the line with the help of a major party’s how-to-vote cards.

Labor how-to-vote cards got Helen Haines elected in Indi in 2019. If Labor had preferenced the Liberal candidate, or run dead (say with a two-sided card), the Liberal would have won. Haines’s predecessor, Cathy McGowan, also relied on Labor cards for her initial win in 2013, but not her 2016 re-election.

Adam Bandt and Andrew Wilkie have Liberal how-to-votes to thank for their initial 2010 victories in Melbourne and Denison respectively, and then used the benefits of incumbency to make sure they no longer needed them. In Bandt’s case that’s just as well; the Liberals haven’t preferenced him since.

Katter (these days leader of the Katter Australia Party) has only needed Labor’s help once since his 2001 departure from the Nationals: in 2013, after he cozied up too much to newly installed Labor leader Kevin Rudd. Election night’s 16 per cent swing to the Nationals gave him the fright of his life; Labor cards very likely saved him.

Those cards also got Kerryn Phelps over the line at the 2018 Wentworth by-election. But Zali Steggall’s 2019 win in Warringah was big enough not to need them. And the victory in Mayo in 2016 of Rebekha Sharkie — a member of the Nick Xenophon Team/Centre Alliance but from her electorate’s point of view an independent — couldn’t have happened if Labor had preferenced Liberal MP Jamie Briggs. (Had they preferenced neither, it could have gone either way.) Sharkie easily survived the 2018 by-election, and again in 2019, needing no help from Labor (though she received it anyway).

On the back of Phelps and Steggall comes the “Voices for” or “Voices of” movement. Actually, they claim they’re not a movement — that they use the word “voice” but there’s no connection. McGowan, formerly of Indi, has told Nine papers that “there is no franchise in place and any group using the ‘Voices for’ tag has chosen to do so quite separately,” but the mere fact that she has knowledge of it suggests… something. The Liberals have asked the Australian Electoral Commission to investigate.

Former high-profile Liberal “wet” Ian McPhee, best-known in the 1970s and 1980s, has endorsed Voices for Goldstein (his old electorate). Malcolm Turnbull is a fan.

What kind of electorate are “Voices” after? Safe (against Labor) high-income Liberal ones that find their party too (socially) conservative, particularly on climate change, but baulk at opting for the party of unions. Labor support needs to be low, because the independent wants to beat it into the two-candidate-preferred count. And the other crucial ingredient, so far anyway, has been an unpopular sitting member.

Sophie Mirabella was in her electorate Indi’s bad books in 2013, assisted by a ferocious campaign by a local newspaper. Briggs had been dropped from the ministry in late 2015 after allegations of creepy misbehaviour.

Wentworth 2018 was an empty electorate, a by-election, whose residents had witnessed their representative dragged out of the prime ministership by his own colleagues. Highlights of the campaign included a government Senate vote in favour of a white nationalist slogan and the Alan Jones horse-races-on-the-Opera-House-sails fiasco, which saw both prime minister Scott Morrison and the man destined to be Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, instinctively side with the far-right radio announcer. And Kerryn Phelps was a local with a national profile.

Tony Abbott was on the nose in Warringah in 2019 (he had been in 2016 as well), thanks mostly to his destructive behaviour after losing the prime ministership and his increasingly strident utterances on climate change.

Going into 2022, does any Liberal MP fit that bill? One that comes to mind is Christian Porter, assuming he runs again in Pearce. A Voices of Pearce is up and running, though the seat is not quite in the leafy blue-ribbon category.

Can previous election data point us towards vulnerable MPs? In Abbott’s case, yes: 2016 saw a big 9 per cent drop in his primary vote, double-digit support for independent candidate James Mathison, and the Greens elevated to the two-candidate-preferred count.

In Mirabella’s case, the 2010 data doesn’t particularly add up to writing on the wall. And Indi, of course, is not urban, let alone particularly wealthy.

Ranking the difference between their own and their parties’ performance in the House and the Senate respectively can give an imprecise idea of MPs’ relative personal votes. On that score, the vulnerable Sydney Liberals are Jason Falinski in Mackellar and Trent Zimmerman in North Sydney.

Mackellar was the site of Labor speechwriter Bob Ellis’s 1994 “swing” against Bronwyn Bishop at a by-election (not really a swing; he hadn’t contested before), which was credited with ending her leadership ambitions. Several times in recent weeks Falinski has responded via Twitter to his Coalition colleague Matt Canavan’s climate change cynicism. An independent, Alice Thompson, hit double digits in 2019 (which accounts for Falinski’s low showing on the table linked above).

North Sydney was the home of long-running independent state MP Ted Mack. In 2019, though, former NSW upper house Democrat Arthur Chesterfield-Evans got only a modest 4.4 per cent.

John Alexander’s low placing in Bennelong is partly a reflection of his high-profile Labor opponent, Brian Owler. Next on the list is Julian Leeser in Berowra.

Down in Victoria, Oliver Yates had a red-hot go in Kooyong last time, but was overshadowed by a high-profile Greens candidate. The Greens are perennially hopeful in Higgins, and Voices would be too. Tim Wilson in Goldstein seems torn between the ideologically charged Institute of Public Affairs identity that earned him preselection and his electorate’s decidedly Turnbullesque leanings. The electorate has a Voices page.

Individually, each of the MPs mentioned above is likely to survive, but the chances are good that one or two Voices candidates will pop up somewhere.

And if we’re after an indicator on social progressiveness, maybe we can go no further than the 2017 marriage-equality survey results. Wentworth was fourth out of 150, Warringah tenth and Indi sixty-fifth. Start from the top, zero in on Liberal-held seats, and watch those spaces. •

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