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)

The post Dunkley’s Rorschach test appeared first on Inside Story.

To be sure, it is a familiar enough sight in Australian politics more broadly — ours is a political class obsessed with infrastructure boondoggles — but for the Andrews government major projects were more than a recurring theme; they were the state religion. The premier performed the rites of sod turning and site inspecting as regularly as Mass and recited figures on level crossings removed or hospitals built like counting rosary beads.

And he backed up these prayers and incantations with billions of dollars. As of the last budget, Victoria had approximately $200 billion in projects under way, and was planning to spend an average of almost $20 billion a year over the coming four years on its infrastructure program.

So big was the Big Build — fiscally, politically, physically — that it competes with the state’s traumatic lockdown experience as the dominant element of Daniel Andrews’s legacy. The psychological scars of that time will stay with many of us for a lifetime, but Andrews’s projects are the very fabric of our daily lives. Millions of Victorians use the infrastructure built over the past nine years several times a day. They envelope Melbourne and wind out into the regions, many of them dominating our skylines or otherwise rearranging our neighbourhoods. It is a legacy inscribed in the physical, in concrete and steel; Danist monuments in nearly every quarter of the state.

But what does this tangle of level crossings and tram upgrades, flyovers and tunnels, hospital wards and transmission cables add up to? What, beyond a personal message from Dan to “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” does all this stuff actually mean? What is the Andrews infrastructure legacy?

The first thing to say is that the Big Build’s message isn’t coherent. The Andrews government has never adopted a formal, public, long-term infrastructure strategy. It has published documents that claim to put the state’s many and various projects together, but these are retrofilled scrapbooks based around projects chosen with little consideration of how they all work together. As I have argued previously, the Big Build is ad hocery writ large. That makes the program especially vulnerable to the seductions of the boondoggle — projects that look impressive on paper but don’t work out to be all that helpful in practice.

These problematic projects are easier to catch out in the framework of a long-term plan — new schemes only get in if they actually fit into the bigger picture, meet the overarching goals, work well with the other elements. Andrews’s Big Build fails to do this. At best, it speaks of expedience and pragmatism — build now; don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. At worst, it is cynically opportunist — build something, anything, and we will get the political dividend. Who cares if it works in the long run? They might as well be pyramids.

And, in many cases, unfinished pyramids at that. The Melbourne Metro, the megaproject Andrews spruiked on his way out the door, is one of vanishingly few projects running ahead of schedule — and even that project has run billions over budget. Others have been bigger fiascos: the West Gate Tunnel, meant to be a simple project to better connect the Melbourne’s port with road freight, has become a quagmire — ensnared in complicated disputes over contaminated soil, three full years behind schedule and in the neighbourhood of $4.5 billion over budget, or almost double the initial price tag.

The Melbourne Airport Rail, meanwhile, due to connect Tullamarine Airport to the metro rail system in 2029, has been put on pause, alongside the Geelong Fast Rail, pending the federal government’s infrastructure review findings. The Suburban Rail Loop’s total cost has been estimated by the Parliamentary Budget Office at double the original forecast — more than $100 billion for the full project, which isn’t due to be fully complete until the 2080s. These half-built, might-never-be-complete projects stand as monuments to the government’s naivety, its impatience, its imprudence.

Finally, the Big Build tells us interesting things about the role of the state under Andrews. Labor brought with it a renewed commitment to an active and interventionist state — a profound step away from the neoliberal model that had dominated state politics since the coming of Liberal premier Jeff Kennett in 1992. This more active posture has held across a broad range of policy domains, including housing, energy, domestic violence, industrial relations, TAFE, early childhood education, and health product subsidies. The Big Build is the big outlier.

True, the government’s infrastructure program constitutes public investment on a scale unseen for a generation. But the Big Build has also been big business. If Daniel Andrews’s rail bridges and road tunnels, hospital wings and prison expansions had credits chiselled into them, top billing would not belong to the State of Victoria but to private contracting companies, private consultancies, private financiers and toll road operators.

They have been the ones actually doing the building, often at considerable profit. Billions upon billions of public dollars have helped engineering firms, design consultancies, contract lawyers and construction companies not only keep afloat but expand massively. At times, private companies have also been the ones to own the assets at the end — or else new public infrastructure has been financed by the sale of old public assets, as with the Port of Melbourne sale that funded many level crossing removals.

More than this, the private sector is also deeply involved in planning, assessing and even suggesting major projects. These are all roles that were once the domain of the public service. Yes, they have been increasingly outsourced since the Kennett era — it is not a wholly new phenomenon. But under Andrews the trend towards contracting policymaking out has accelerated rather than abated. The private sector now intrudes further into the process than ever before.

Some of the Big Build’s biggest projects have been devised from their earliest stages by the likes of PwC and Transurban. It is companies like this that are setting the priorities, developing ideas, planning routes, proposing programs — policymaking on a vast scale, with an eye-watering budget and long-term consequences for millions of people, devised by private, profit-driven, non-transparent and unaccountable businesses.

The Big Build, then, illustrates the profound alliance Daniel Andrews has forged with big business. While he may have brought back a more interventionist state in many realms of Victorian life, he has also given over swathes of the state’s treasure and territory to the private sector. RMIT politics scholar David Haywood calls it the rise of the Rentier State.

Did it all come to an end this week? Does the exit of Dan, alongside the recent departure of his longstanding infrastructure tsar Corey Hannett, and the end of the cheap finance that fuelled the infrastructure boom, spell the end of the Big Build? We should doubt it. In her first press conference as Labor leader yesterday, Jacinta Allan pointed to her experience as the minister for infrastructure as one of the things that prepared her for the premiership. The projects have been as much hers as Dan’s. When Andrews has been on site, in hi-vis, Allan has been at his side, hardhat fastened. The Big Build will plough on.

But can Allan use the chance of a leadership reset, and a faltering budget situation, to rein in the Big Build’s excesses — to transform it from boondoggle city to a coherent plan that prioritises the needs of the public over the profits of the private sector? Or will she simply continue digging the hole deeper? •

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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.

That would be a stunning swing of 8 per cent against Dominic Perrottet’s government — a government one could argue is the most progressive and competent the Coalition has produced in the past decade, certainly relative to its counterparts federally, or in Victoria or Queensland.

Four days later, a Resolve poll for the Sydney Morning Herald came up with roughly similar findings, though on those figures the swing seems to be more like 6.5 per cent. It would still be curtains. The bookies give the Coalition’s last government on the mainland just a 20 per cent chance of holding onto office when the voters deliver judgement on 25 March.

If that proves right, it would be a dramatic illustration of how far the Liberal Party has fallen. At its peak in 2014, the Coalition ran every government in Australia except for South Australia (where it won the election on votes but lost it on the seats) and the ACT (where it hasn’t won an election since 1998).

The Abbott government’s 2014 budget of broken promises marked the turning point. Since then the Coalition has lost one government after another.

Three of those governments fell after a single term. Six months after Abbott’s budget, Victoria led the way, following four years dominated by the Coalition infighting that brought down premier Ted Baillieu. Queensland followed two months later, with premier Campbell Newman, the hero of its 2012 election win, losing his own seat in a 14 per cent statewide swing.

The polls suggested Abbott’s own government would also be booted out after a single term, but Liberal MPs forestalled that by dumping him and installing Malcolm Turnbull to win them the 2016 election.

Coalition governments continued to fall: Northern Territory voters dumped the Country Liberal Party government in 2016, leaving it with just two seats; the following year Mark McGowan began his remarkable reign by ousting the Coalition government in Western Australia.

In South Australia, by contrast, the Liberals finally broke through after sixteen years in opposition to win power in 2018. But that government too lasted just one term, and Labor emphatically returned to power last March — two months before voters finally sent the federal Coalition on its way.

But the NSW Coalition government should surely be less vulnerable. While the Morrison government showed no appetite for tackling climate change, NSW treasurer and energy minister Matt Kean has been a national leader in pushing the pace of decarbonisation. No government in Australia is more subject to integrity watchdogs than the NSW government is to its own ICAC. And, with some exceptions (water, for instance), it has been more a reformist government than a reactionary one. On gambling reform, it is far more progressive than Labor.

But this election cycle has become merciless for the Coalition parties. They began it with seven of Australia’s nine federal, state and territory governments. They now have just two, and if the NSW government falls on 25 March, they will be left with just one.

It’s worth recalling that latest cycle, and what it means for the Coalition parties. South Australia’s Liberal government fell in March last year, the federal Coalition government was voted out in May, and the Victorian Liberals received another thrashing from voters in November. In 2021, the Western Australian Liberals were left with just two seats in the Legislative Assembly and the Nationals replaced them as the official opposition.

2020 saw Queensland’s Labor government re-elected with an increased majority, leaving the Liberals with just five seats in Brisbane. The Labor–Greens government was given a sixth term in the ACT, while in the Northern Territory Labor was re-elected for a second term.

The one victory for the Coalition in that time was in Tasmania, where former premier Peter Gutwein called an early election in 2021 and narrowly retained his majority. If Dominic Perrottet loses in March, Gutwein’s successor, Jeremy Rockliff, will lead Australia’s only Liberal government. He doesn’t have to face the voters until early 2025.

Being out of government makes everything harder for political parties. They have far fewer staffers to call on, few public servants to provide policy assistance, less fundraising power and a bigger challenge finding things out. Talented people don’t waste their energies on a party destined for opposition, so the opposition parties are left with rusted-on supporters and branch stackers’ recruits.

But cycles change. In the last years of the Howard government, Labor controlled every state and territory government in Australia. Then, with the Rudd government still at the peak of its popularity, Western Australians voted out their Labor government. Two years later Victorians did the same, and by early 2014 Labor had only two governments left.

The next political cycle began with the Andrews government taking power in Victoria in November 2014. If the Perrottet government is voted out, that cycle will culminate on 25 March.

But would that also imply that Labor is now at the top of its cycle? That it will be all downhill for Labor from here, and the Coalition will soon start taking back the governments it has lost?

Not necessarily. A looming Coalition revival would be a reasonable expectation if you assumed that its losses of government reflected cyclical factors alone: bad luck, changing political fashions, one-off factors, and in the NSW case, the wear and tear of twelve years in government.

But if that were so, we should be seeing signs of it in the state that was first to switch its allegiance to Labor. And those signs should have been apparent in November’s election there. As we shall see, though, there was little if any sign of a Liberal comeback.

It’s early days yet for the Albanese government. We’ve seen many governments enjoy an extended honeymoon before crashing — the Rudd government, for example — but eight months after the election, all the polls suggest it’s the Coalition that has lost a lot of ground.

Labor won the 21 May election with a tad over 52 per cent of the two-party vote. The latest Resolve poll in Tuesday’s Age/Sydney Morning Herald implied that the figure has jumped to 60 per cent since the election. Peter Dutton’s poll ratings remain far behind Anthony Albanese’s.

In this Labor cycle, the Coalition lost its first state government just eight months after reaching its peak of running seven of the nine governments. But the Coalition’s next cycle might not begin anytime soon.

After New South Wales votes it will be almost a year and a half before the next election anywhere in Australia, and then there will be a bunch of them: the Northern Territory, the ACT and Queensland in the second half of 2024, and then Western Australia, Tasmania and federally in the first half of 2025. While you’d think the Coalition will surely win one of them, it could face a long wait before its own cycle gets going.

Why?

First, since 2000, the Coalition has mostly been in government in Canberra, but Labor has dominated government at state and territory level. So far this century, in the states and territories, Labor has been in power for roughly three-quarters of the time, and the Coalition for just one-quarter. Outside New South Wales and Tasmania, Labor has become the natural party of government, and the Liberals/Nationals/LNP/CLP the natural parties of opposition.

In Victoria, the Coalition has been in power for just four of the past twenty-three years. In Queensland, three. In South Australia, six. In the Northern Territory, five and a half, and in the ACT, the Liberals have had less than two years in office and twenty-one in opposition.

Maybe that’s logical. The federal government’s main jobs are economic management, social security and foreign relations — and on two of those, voters have a conservative bias. The states, by contrast, are mainly responsible for running the services we rely on: hospitals, schools, roads and public transport. On those issues, voters have a bias towards improving services. Keeping the budget in the black seems to have gone out of fashion.

But former NSW premier and federal Liberal president Nick Greiner put it well when he said the Liberals’ problem is that its activist base is well to the right of its voter base. (Just as the Greens’ activist base is well to the left of its voter base.) And the longer a party is out of power, the more deep-seated that becomes. Failure breeds more failure.

Take the ACT Liberals. In its first twelve years of self-government the ACT mostly had Liberal governments. Red Hill pharmacist Kate Carnell was parachuted in to become party leader. She won two elections, presenting a moderate, modern face that Canberra voters could relate to. But in 2001, the Libs lost office, went into opposition, and stayed there.

By 2023, it’s come to feel as though the Labor–Greens coalition is the permanent government of the ACT, and the Liberals are the permanent opposition.

Could the same be happening in Victoria? There, the Coalition parties have won a majority of Victoria’s seats in just one of the last sixteen elections, federal or state. For a Liberal Party that once governed the state alone for twenty-seven years straight, defeat has come to be seen as normal.

The Coalition’s one victory was at the 2010 state election under another moderate, modern Liberal, Ted Baillieu. But in truth they were not ready to govern, were profoundly disunited and had no coherent agenda. When voters turfed them out in 2014, there was little to show for their four years in power.

Love him or loathe him, Daniel Andrews has been full of ambition to do things, above all investing in transport infrastructure and tackling cutting-edge social issues. In 2018 Labor was returned with a massive majority — so large that we all assumed 2022 would see a swing back to the Coalition.

That assumption seemed certain after the government’s mishandling of Covid. It imposed harsh, unpopular lockdowns that effectively closed down Melbourne for eight months, then changed course 180 degrees and dropped all controls as the death toll from Covid soared. More than one in 1000 Victorians have now died of the disease — 76 per cent more than in the rest of Australia.

Surely the 2022 Victorian election should have been the start of a new cycle of Liberal renewal. But no. At face value, the Libs made no progress at all. Labor had fifty-five seats in the old Assembly, the Coalition twenty-seven, and the Greens and independents three each. In the new one, Labor has fifty-six, the Coalition twenty-eight (assuming it retains Narracan at Saturday’s delayed election), and the Greens four. Labor won easily — and while the Nationals gained three seats, the Liberals went backwards.

But there are nuances to that narrative — and in politics, nuances matter. One reason why the Albanese government is riding so high is that it has the freedom of having a clear majority in the House of Representatives. But that majority came so close to being a minority.

If fewer than 500 votes in the relevant booths had changed hands, the Liberals’ Andrew Constance would have won the federal seat of Gilmore from Labor, the Greens’ Steph Hodgins-May would now be the member for Macnamara — and Labor would be a minority government, negotiating every bill with the crossbenches or the Coalition. Small changes, big difference.

For Victoria, nuance one: The pre-election redistribution of boundaries, on the Victorian Electoral Commission’s estimates, gave Labor a net gain of three seats (because Melbourne had grown rapidly, and Labor held most of the seats with swollen enrolments). That was the real starting point: so Labor lost two seats, and the Coalition gained two. Not much difference, sure, but there was some movement the Coalition’s way, however inadequate.

Nuance two: As in the federal election, Labor was lucky. A shift of just 350 votes in the relevant booths would have seen the Greens take Northcote and the Liberals win Pakenham and Bass. Instead of the seats going from 58–26–4 to 56–28–4, they would have ended up as 53–30–5. Not much difference there either, but it would have shown clear movement from Labor to the Coalition.

Nuance three: On the votes, there certainly was movement. For the eighty-six seats contested by both sides at the last two elections, Labor’s share of the two-party-preferred vote fell from 57.5 per cent in 2018 to 54.8 per cent this time. That’s a swing of 2.7 per cent to the Coalition.

But in the twenty-five marginal seats — those where the election is decided — it was a very different story. The average swing from Labor to the Coalition there was just 0.3 per cent. The Coalition won four seats that were notionally Labor’s on the new boundaries (Caulfield, Hawthorn, Nepean and Morwell), while Labor won three seats that were notionally the Coalition’s (Bayswater, Bass and Glen Waverley).

(Labor also lost Richmond to the Greens and the Coalition won Shepparton from independent Suzanna Sheed. That’s why, in net terms, Labor lost two seats, and the Coalition gained two).

Mostly, the big swings to the Coalition were in safe Labor seats in Melbourne’s western and northern suburbs, where it had no chance of winning: seats like Greenvale (15.1 per cent swing to the Liberals), Mill Park (13.5), St Albans (12.4), Thomastown (11.4) and Kororoit (11.1).

Across the nineteen middle and outer suburbs northwest of the Yarra, the average swing to the Coalition was 7.1 per cent. But it won none of them, and even after those swings, only two of them were even mildly marginal.

To win a majority in the Assembly, the Coalition needed to make a net gain of nineteen seats. On the traditional pendulum, admittedly a rough measure, that required a swing of 10.4 per cent.

At the 2026 election, to win a majority, it will need to make a net gain of seventeen seats. On the pendulum, that would require a swing of 8.1 per cent. No opposition has gained a swing of that size since 1955, when Labor split in two.

The start of a cycle that will see Australia swing back to Coalition governments? I think not.

At this election, twelve Labor seats were marginal against the Coalition. At the 2026 election, only eight will be. Most of the seats it needs to gain to win office will need to be won by swings of 6 to 10 per cent.

These are normally classified as “fairly safe” seats. If Labor is still riding high with voters in 2026, they won’t be threatened. But if it loses support in the next four years, as governments often do in their third terms, some could come under threat. Labor would have far more territory to defend.

Nuance four: A significant development was lost in the focus on Labor’s triumph and the Liberals’ woes. This election saw the Greens almost double their territory. Richmond was the only seat they picked up, but they came close to winning five other seats: Northcote (lost by 0.2 per cent), Pascoe Vale (2.0), Preston (2.1), Footscray (4.2) and Albert Park (4.5).

One in ten seats in the Assembly, all in the inner suburbs, are now either held by the Greens or within their reach. That’s a position they’ve never been in before, anywhere in Australia.

In the Legislative Council, they now hold the balance of power, winning four seats, up from one in 2018. Labor will have to negotiate with them on any legislation the Coalition opposes.

Their first-preference vote rose just slightly, from 10.7 per cent to 11.5. But there’s a simple reason for that which media commentators ignored: at this election there were three times as many minor-party candidates as last time. Animal Justice and Family First ran in every seat, and the Freedom Party in most of them. Those candidates took votes from all other parties. As the table shows, the minor parties’ vote more than doubled, from 5.2 per cent last time to 11.7 per cent.

Note: while the independents’ vote fell by 0.6 per cent, the Liberals by 0.8 per cent and Labor’s by 5.8 per cent, the Greens’ vote rose by 0.8 per cent. They clearly did the best of the major players.

We can compare apples with apples by looking at the vote for the three main parties after minor-party preferences. The comparison is limited by the fact that only in twenty-seven seats were Labor, Liberals and Greens in the final three in both 2018 and 2022 and the commission distributed everyone else’s preferences between them. (The VEC has promised that this time it will eventually distribute all preferences in all seats. Thank you, at last.)

When just Labor, Liberals and Greens were left in those twenty-seven seats, the Liberal vote was unchanged from 2018. But Labor’s vote was down 3.2 per cent, while the Greens’ vote rose by 3.2 per cent. In the new marginal seats of Footscray, Pascoe Vale and Preston, the swing from Labor to Greens was three times that size.

But isn’t that just because the Liberals changed their preferences from Labor to Greens? No. These are three-party figures: the Liberal preferences hadn’t been distributed at this stage. And note: when they were, they didn’t change the outcome in a single seat, not even Richmond. As the VEC has repeatedly shown, most inner-suburban Liberals don’t follow their party’s how-to-vote card.

Where Liberal preferences were distributed, they lifted the Greens’ two-party vote by an average of 4.5 per cent. The Greens were slowly expanding their territory even when the Liberals preferenced Labor, but in 2026 that 4.5 per cent would make it far easier for them to keep doing so. And conversely, Labor would breathe a huge sigh of relief if the Liberals preferenced them instead.

In war and politics, they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Helping the Greens win Labor seats brings the Coalition no closer to government, as the Greens would always support Labor. But making Labor fight on two fronts dilutes its campaign resources: and of Labor’s thirteen most marginal seats after this election, in five its opponent is the Greens. If the Liberals redirect preferences to Labor in 2026, the only one Labor need worry about would be Northcote.

The Greens often declare war on themselves, and do or say silly things that discourage you from taking them seriously. But they have stood up for principles that matter to many Australians — tackling climate change seriously, treating refugees humanely, ending persecution of whistleblowers — which is why they have become the first party since Federation to establish itself as a lasting independent alternative to the two major parties.

The Country Party, now the Nationals, began as an independent group but abandoned that to form what has been a permanent coalition with the Liberals. In the last term of the NSW Coalition government, their one public stand on principle seemed to be to defend the interests of land developers against koalas.

The DLP and the Australian Democrats each lasted a generation and won significant support as independent alternatives to the two majors. But neither established a territorial base that could win them lower house seats, and eventually they withered away.

The Greens have carved out their own territory by making themselves the party of young voters in the inner suburbs. In those nine seats in inner Melbourne, they won 38.7 per cent of the three-party vote this time, ahead of Labor with 38.4 per cent and the Liberals with 22.9 per cent. At the federal election, they also won all three seats in inner Brisbane.

And the young, and the inner suburbs, just keep growing. It’s a good constituency to have.

New South Wales has become the Greens’ weakest state. At the federal election they polled just 10 per cent there, compared with 13.3 per cent in the rest of Australia. While they are now competitive in nine state seats in Melbourne, in 2019 they were competitive in just two seats in Sydney (Balmain and Newtown, both safe Green seats) and two in the hippie north of the state (winning Ballina, just losing Lismore). This state election will test them too.

For Victoria, the bottom line is that the Liberals have lost not only the 2022 election but probably the 2026 one as well. What happens then will be determined by the events of the next four years, and how voters respond to them. But things would have to go very badly for Labor for the Coalition to emerge with a majority.

For Australia, the bottom line is that if the Coalition loses what many see as its best government of recent years then it could be a long road back to power. And if the Greens’ MPs, senators and activists manage to avoid alienating their potential voters, it’s possible that the ACT will not be the only parliament in which the successor to a Labor government is a Labor–Greens one. •

The post The turn of the electoral cycle could be a long time coming appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

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.

Yet Andrews’s years in power — and especially his record-breaking pandemic lockdown — has divided the state more bitterly than those of any premier since Kennett. He’s a typical political strongman: quick to decide what he wants to do, determined to carry it out, and contemptuous of anyone who gets in his way. In the homeland of Aussie Rules, he’s the standout resourceful tough guy who bursts through the pack to deliver what his fans want from him.

In his first term, the fans liked seeing him deliver the transport infrastructure Melbourne had been deprived of for so long — particularly when he got rid of all those level crossings that stopped traffic whenever a train came through. In his second, they admired him as the strong leader whose readiness to take tough decisions kept them safe during the pandemic.

But many other Victorians hate him, with a passion not seen since Kennett ruled the roost. Daniel Andrews oozes arrogance. He can’t take criticism, and contemptuously dismisses or ignores adverse reports or anyone disagreeing with him. Many of those tough decisions he made during the pandemic were foolish, even harmful ones — such as banning children from playgrounds, closing schools, or locking up thousands of residents in public housing towers without warning.

Whatever you think of his policies, he is darn good at politics. The polls put him way ahead of Liberal leader Matthew Guy as preferred premier, and a third four-year term — which he says he intends to serve out in full — seems a formality. The most recent published polls were taken in September, but even the closest found Labor ahead by a whopping 56–44 majority in two-party terms. A month-old Morgan poll released last week put the gap at 60.5–39.5.

Yet, for a leader so dominant, he is not well understood. After eight years as premier, we at last have a biography of him: albeit one he did not cooperate with and, since he hates being criticised, by an author he definitely would not have chosen.

Sumeyya Ilanbey is a trailblazer, the first Victorian political reporter in a hijab, and one of an outstanding group of journalists now covering state politics for the Age. Her account of the premier, Daniel Andrews: The Revealing Biography of Australia’s Most Powerful Premier, doesn’t let you down: it really is an inside story. Andrews refused to be interviewed but Ilanbey talked to many of his colleagues, past and present, and collected a lot of revealing stories and perspectives, even if most of them are passed on unsourced.

She pulls no punches. Daniel Andrews emerges from the book as a highly successful, hard-working, utterly determined, socially progressive despot — with little respect for people who get in his way or for the democratic infrastructure in which he has to operate.

Andrews, we learn, is a boy from the bush who developed a relentless work ethic and a talent for political infighting, which took him from stacking Labor Party branches in his youth to becoming premier at forty-two, and dominating state politics in a ruthless autocratic style unlike any Labor predecessor.

So far it hasn’t hurt him. Yet Victoria is used to premiers being nice blokes — Dick Hamer, Lindsay Thompson, John Cain, Steve Bracks, John Brumby, Ted Baillieu, Denis Napthine — or once, a nice woman, Joan Kirner. Andrews clearly doesn’t fit in either group. From Ilanbey’s portrait, he belongs squarely in Victoria’s minority of authoritarian leaders: Henry Bolte, Kennett, and himself.

All three have been lucky to rule against weak opposition. The Bolte government ran Victoria for seventeen years, but Bolte was realistic enough to tell his last biographer, Tom Prior, “I don’t think I ever won an election. Labor lost them.” Kennett and the Murdoch media left Labor winded for years by getting Victorians to blame the 1990s recession on the Cain–Kirner government when it was clearly the result of an awful policy overkill by treasurer Paul Keating and the Reserve Bank.

Ilanbey’s focus is naturally on explaining Daniel Andrews, and she does it very well, highlighting the diverse and contrasting aspects of his personality: he presents himself as the daggy dad who likes nothing better than relaxing at home with his wife and kids, yet is nonetheless a workaholic control freak. But it’s also important to note how much the poor quality of his opposition (including Murdoch’s Herald Sun) has contributed to his success.

Since 1996, Victorians have voted in fifteen federal or state elections, and have preferred the Liberals in just one of them. Why? The party has been controlled by ultraconservatives who have used that control to narrow the broad church Menzies created to a small congregation of what seem like cranks and fogeys who react against anything more modern than the world they grew up in. Victorians have moved into the 2020s, but the Victorian Liberals stay put, digging deeper trenches and waiting for the voters to come back to them. It could be a long wait.

Their one win was at the 2010 state election, after a succession of mistakes by the Brumby government allowed the lofty small-l liberal Ted Baillieu to break through on a platform of integrity in government. But his government floundered among sabotage from within; Baillieu quit and Denis Napthine took over; and that instability helped Andrews to lead Labor back into power in 2014. Since then the Liberals have obliged him by stepping up factional warfare and, with their Murdoch partner, running crude, simplistic campaigns that appeal to their narrowing base more than the mainstream. Andrews has had a dream run.

Daniel Andrews grew up as a bright boy in a working-class family that experienced a ghastly bit of bad luck and responded by moving to the country and working long hours to get back on top. It’s fair to assume that some of his hyperdetermination and mania for control comes from that upbringing.

Like so many male politicians, Daniel was a firstborn son (that probably explains a bit too). He was born on 6 July 1972 in Melbourne, where his parents, Bob and Jan Andrews, owned and ran a milk bar on Pascoe Vale Road. One night when Daniel was ten, an arsonist blew up the supermarket next door, taking out the Andrews’s shop with it. It was underinsured, and they were suddenly left with next to nothing.

The family made a fresh start by moving to Wangaratta, where his parents bought a house on a two-hectare block on the outskirts of town. Bob began rising at 4am every day to deliver Don smallgoods throughout the region, while Jan got the kids off to school before going to work as a teller at the Commonwealth Bank. They were churchgoing Catholics, and Daniel was schooled in the faith: mass every Sunday, school under the Marist Brothers at Galen College.

His parents’ influence perhaps deserves more attention than it gets in Ilanbey’s story. Bob Andrews was clearly a man of ability and determination. As his business grew, he took on employees, became president of the footy club, and bought “Old Kentucky,” a nearby beef cattle stud around a century-old four-bedroom country home with wide verandas. One night at a meeting of the local Victorian Farmers Federation branch, the Labor leader’s dad stunned his mates by confiding, “I’ve always voted for the National Party.”

His son Daniel inherited Bob’s determination to achieve things. “Dan’s life started just out of Wangaratta on the family farm,” his website tells us. “His mum and dad — Jan and Bob — taught him life lessons that stay with him today: hard work, the importance of making a contribution, and that when you make a promise, you keep it.”

But Daniel didn’t inherit his father’s politics. School done, he headed to Monash to study arts — living at Mannix College like a good Catholic son, but joining the Labor Party, where he became deeply involved in the Young Socialist Left. His organising talents caught the attention of local left MP Alan Griffin, who took him on as a casual electorate officer.

Ilanbey tells us that Andrews developed quickly as a factional warrior: “He became known as Alan Griffin’s ‘numbers man,’ the main go-to guy for the Socialist Left’s branch-stacking operation in the south-eastern suburbs, a meticulous and detailed young operative whom Griffin trusted wholeheartedly.” Apart from student jobs selling hotdogs and driving trucks, it was his first real job.

His career since has been entirely inside Labor. At twenty-three, branch stacker in an electorate office. At twenty-six, assistant state secretary. At thirty, the new MP for Mulgrave and assistant minister for health. At thirty-four, gaming, consumer affairs and multicultural affairs minister. At thirty-five, health minister. At thirty-eight, Labor leader and opposition leader. At forty-two, premier. He is now fifty.

From a young age, he clearly stood out from the pack in the eyes of those who mattered. We can debate whether he’s a good premier, but he’s certainly a highly successful one. Other than having weak opposition, what makes him such a hit with Victorian voters?

Ilanbey keeps coming back to his punishing work ethic, his political instincts that anticipate so well how developments will play out, his readiness to back his judgement and take a risk — although he can be extraordinarily stubborn about backing down when he gets it wrong — and the systematic way he analyses the game. He is capable of being warm and supportive to colleagues in trouble, but it doesn’t happen very often. They are more likely to find themselves in trouble with him, and being cast into “the freezer” — a state of being coldly and completely ignored — from which some never escape.

Political biographies sometimes market themselves through their scoops. But Sumeyya Ilanbey’s real scoop in this biography is her compilation of a devastating dossier on how Daniel Andrews treats those who “disappoint” him — particularly, as several colleagues told her, if they are close to him. He cannot take criticism. Once he has made a decision, he cannot tolerate disagreement with it. That inability to listen probably explains why his second term has seen so many bad decisions.

One telling example. Gavin Jennings was an older leftie, and already a minister, when Andrews entered parliament. Ilanbey describes him as “Andrews’s closest confidant in government… to whom he would turn to fix his problems and sort out his political headaches”:

Labor MPs often described Jennings as Andrews’s conscience, and as one who would do the premier’s dirty political work… It was Jennings who would talk to colleagues on behalf of the premier; it was Jennings who was asked to fix any political mess the premier found himself in.

But as Andrews grew into his leadership, he began to grow tired of Jennings, who saw his role as playing devil’s advocate, questioning policies and the government’s intentions. Andrews did not like this, and came to view Jennings as an agitator and a hindrance to his agenda. Where Jennings saw his role as improving a policy by focusing on its deficiencies, Andrews saw it as a nuisance. The relationship was slowly becoming toxic.

According to multiple sources, [Jennings] started questioning Andrews on the billions being poured into the government’s mammoth transport infrastructure agenda. Andrews’s once-close relationship with his mentor had disintegrated.

Many in the Labor Party point to the deterioration of Jennings and Andrews’s friendship as evidence of the premier’s crash and burn style; and of his contempt [for] those around him. If that friendship broke down, they said, what hope is there for the rest of us?

In March 2020, as Covid-19 broke out across Melbourne, Jennings quietly quit politics. Andrews seized the opportunity to announce that to handle the crisis better, he would create a crisis council of cabinet, comprising himself and eight senior ministers, as a top-level executive body.

A few months later he sacked one of them, health minister Jenny Mikakos, making her the scapegoat for Covid getting into the community from quarantine hotels. That December the widely respected attorney-general Jill Hennessy quit cabinet to “spend more time with her family.” In June this year, deputy premier James Merlino, health minister Martin Foley, police minister Lisa Neville, industry minister Martin Pakula and planning minister Richard Wynne all announced that they too would quit politics at this election.

That’s some turnover. The only members left from the nine-member Covid crisis council are Andrews himself, his new deputy and heir apparent (but not anytime soon) Jacinta Allan, and veteran treasurer Tim Pallas.

The upheaval could be seen as recognition of the need to bring fresh blood into the senior portfolios — after all, most of those retiring had been ministers for twelve years. Or it could be seen as a sign that the Andrews cabinet is not the happiest place to work. In eight years, sixteen of the twenty-two members of his original ministry have either quit or been sacked.

Throughout the Victorian bureaucracy, it has been a similar story. Political loyalty — to Andrews — seems to be a prerequisite for running a department or agency. After the revelation that thirty-three Victorians in the last year died after their calls to triple-zero went unanswered, the Age reported that the former chairman of the service, Roger Leeming, warned ministers and officials back in 2016 that it was critically underfunded, and was rewarded by being told to quit. Two former Labor staffers were then appointed to the board.

These things have serious consequences. Before the pandemic, the government received repeated warnings from below that Victoria’s public health services were severely underresourced. The advice was unwelcome, so it was ignored — until Covid arrived, when it was too late. The ineptness of Victoria’s pandemic response reflected the reality that it didn’t have experts trained to handle it.

Andrews’s response was to double down on a futile crusade to eliminate Covid. His government imposed the most severe lockdowns in Australia, and the longest ones. Mildura and Mallacoota, more than 500 kilometres from the capital, were locked down because there were Covid cases in Melbourne. Schools were closed and the premier closed his ears to expert advice on what having no school would mean for the mental health and educational development of children.

One could go on, but Chip Le Grand’s book Lockdown and a fine report published last week by the Paul Ramsay Foundation say it better than I could. The bottom line is clear. So far, 877 of every million Victorians have died of Covid, as against a toll of 506 deaths per million in the rest of Australia. Victoria’s death rate has been 73 per cent higher than in the other states. It is ludicrous to argue that Andrews’s hard line kept Victorians safe.

The Andrews who emerges from Ilanbey’s book is a complex man, with real achievements to offset those failures. His first term was more impressive than the second. The government doubled investment in Melbourne’s transport infrastructure, wisely focusing on removing the level crossings that caused daily traffic jams in most suburbs of Melbourne, but also pushing ahead with a short but expensive underground line (Metro 1) from North Melbourne through the city to South Yarra.

Andrews stayed in the background but lent his support as Jill Hennessy and Gavin Jennings shepherded Australia’s first assisted dying legislation through parliament. A pioneering royal commission was held into domestic violence — albeit one that focused on looking after its victims rather than stopping it from happening. He and his government were rewarded with an electoral landslide in 2018, one of Labor’s three best in Victoria.

The second term has been less impressive. Covid saw two years of grossly excessive restrictions followed by a year of “let it rip”: in both stages, Victoria’s death toll was the worst in Australia. An official inquiry by former justice Jennifer Coate into how Covid escaped from quarantine hotels was derailed by dissembling — or worse — by the premier and senior officials, who all seemed unable to remember who had decided to put private security firms in charge.

Now we have the so-called Suburban Rail Loop: in reality a twenty-seven-kilometre underground line in an arc between Cheltenham in the south and Box Hill in the east. Tunnels are very expensive, and the government estimates that this one will cost more than $30 billion — an amount that, even with an ill-advised $2.2 billion donation from us taxpayers via the Albanese government, will use up funds that would otherwise have built better projects like the Metro 2 line to Fishermans Bend.

The project stinks of the worst kind of political cynicism. There is no demand for it. The idea did not come from rail experts but from Andrews’s political staff. The line would run almost entirely through marginal Labor seats. The government committed without submitting the plan to Infrastructure Victoria, supposedly its adviser on infrastructure priorities, and without waiting for a business plan. When the latter finally appeared, it claimed the project would have a positive benefit–cost ratio — but it got that figure only by breaking the Victorian Treasury’s rules for such analysis. The auditor-general has since found that applying those rules, it is likely to cost Victorians twice as much as the benefit they get from it.

With scores of examples, Ilanbey shows us a leader whose decision-making has become warped by a self-indulgent culture of cronyism, surrounding himself with yes-men and yes-women, making snap decisions and ignoring warnings about their consequences. She depicts Andrews as a narcissist who thinks he’s the smartest man in the room and ignores any questioning of his decisions. He decides issues on political grounds and treats their merits as secondary. His decision made, to question its logic is to challenge his authority. It’s then a matter of who’s running the state.

The long-term consequences for Victoria could be serious. The Labor governments of Steve Bracks and John Brumby (1999–2010) were fiscally cautious to a fault. So was Andrews at first, but he quickly warmed up. In the past five years, Victoria has gone from repaying debt to running up $29 billion a year of net new borrowing. The state has lost its AAA credit rating and the Liberals are right when they warn that within four years, on current projections, Victoria’s net debt will exceed that of New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania combined.

Crossing the entrance hall of Victoria’s lovely old Parliament House, you pass a mosaic with a line from the Book of Proverbs: “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.”

That beautiful, poetically worded Jewish folk wisdom still resonates. But that’s not how Victoria’s government now operates. Rather, its people have one counsellor with a multitude of staffers.

It can’t have been easy to write a book like this about someone so powerful and hostile to criticism. Sumeyya Ilanbey has been courageous, persistent and thorough in interviewing so many of Andrews’s colleagues, asking the tough questions and collating their answers into this coherent, convincing, fair-minded but always hard-headed account of what drives him and how he runs Victoria. This book justifies her sources’ trust in her. She deserves our thanks. •

Daniel Andrews: The Revealing Biography of Australia’s Most Powerful Premier
By Sumeyya Ilanbey | Allen & Unwin | $32.99 | 312 pages

The post What drives Daniel Andrews? 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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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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Ignore all the frustrations bursting out on the streets of Melbourne, on talkback radio and on the letters pages of Murdoch’s Herald Sun — and right now, of the Age as well. The polls tell us that if an election were held today, Victorians would re-endorse the man the Murdoch empire calls “Dictator Dan” with a thumping majority.

Newspoll reports that polling last week found Victorians would have re-elected Labor with a two-party vote of 58 per cent to the Coalition’s 42 per cent. That’s effectively unchanged from the 57.6 per cent Labor won in its landslide victory in 2018.

Another poll a week earlier by the Roy Morgan group reported an identical two-party split — although 15 per cent said they would vote for micro-parties or independents, compared with just 9 per cent in the Newspoll. Morgan’s figure sounds more plausible.

The Coalition scored 36 per cent of first preferences in Newspoll, but only 31 per cent in the Morgan poll. Labor got 44 per cent in Newspoll, 43 per cent in Morgan, and the Greens an unchanged 11 per cent in both.

Really? So two of the most tumultuous years in Victoria’s recent history have left the electorate unmoved? So unmoved it proposes an exact replica of the status quo?

To outsiders, that sounds implausible. On almost every count, Victoria has had the worst outcomes of any Australian state during the pandemic. It has 26 per cent of Australia’s population, but 66 per cent of all Australian deaths from the disease. It was home to 58 per cent of all the people infected in Australia: more than 110,000 of them, one in every sixty people in the state.

And to try to contain the virus, Daniel Andrews made Melbourne the most locked-down city in the world: for eight of the past twenty months, shops and schools were closed, and people required to stay at home except for a handful of reasons. You’d think that surely wasn’t a policy the voters warmed to — and when Melbourne alone, even now, is still developing 1000 new cases a day, it clearly failed to meet its objectives.

Not surprisingly, Victoria also suffered the worst economic costs. Last week the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that Victoria’s economic activity has shrunk more than that of any other state.

In the year to June 2021, Victoria’s real output per head was 2.25 per cent lower than it was two years earlier. Adjusted for inflation, spending by households and business fell 7 per cent over the two years. Only the stimulus of a 13 per cent jump in government spending kept the slump from being deeper.

The Victorian economy has suffered real damage. Only time will tell how well it can recover, but it’s optimistic to think Melbourne will go back to being the same as it was before the lockdowns.

Yet if the polls are right, none of this has turned Victorians against Labor.

Perhaps that’s to be expected. In our part of the world, every government facing the voters since Covid arrived has been comfortably returned: in New Zealand, Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory.

But in 2022 the election outcomes could be less friendly to governments. The Morrison government has been trailing in most recent polls; the bookies have now installed Labor as favourite. The Marshall government in South Australia is no certainty to be returned in that state election on 19 March. And there are other signs that the Andrews government’s grip on power could at least be loosened when Victorians go to vote again.

For Matthew Guy, the ebullient forty-seven-year-old conservative who returned as opposition leader two months ago by successfully challenging Michael O’Brien, there’s no good news in these numbers. But Guy is an optimist by nature, and he will find other reasons for hope.

First, he has been here before. He was opposition leader in June 2017, when the Herald Sun headlined: “Victorian voters would dump Andrews government today, Galaxy poll shows.” Galaxy, a stablemate of Newspoll, reported that the Coalition was trouncing Labor by a 53–47 margin. A year and a half later, however, in the real election, Labor trounced the Coalition by 57.6 to 42.4 (adjusted to include Richmond, which the Coalition didn’t contest). In other words, polling this far out is not a reliable guide to the election outcome.

Second, while no poll in Victoria since 2018 has shown the Coalition ahead, other polls in recent months have suggested some movement its way. Two polls published when Melbourne was locked down again in June reported swings of around 6 per cent: not enough, but close to what it needs to get. A Resolve poll published in the Age in October failed to provide any figures for the two-party vote, but it implied a small swing the Coalition’s way.

Polling on state voting intentions is irregular, but Victorians have a decent proxy in the Essential Report’s frequent polling for the Guardian on what voters think of their state government’s handling of Covid-19. While the numbers bounce up and down depending on lockdowns, the Victorian government has consistently ranked last since July 2020, except for a few weeks in August and September when Sydney’s outbreak hit its peak.

In the second half of 2021, on average, only 49 per cent of Victorians thought their government had done a good job of handling the crisis. That compares with 51 per cent of voters in New South Wales, 63 per cent in Queensland, 65 per cent (but sliding) in South Australia and a stellar 81 per cent in Western Australia.

Source: Essential Report

On those figures, you wouldn’t expect Labor to get back with its majority intact. As the fourth wave now sweeping western Europe reminds us, a lot can happen in a year, and it can be unpredictable and uncontrollable.

Scott Morrison and his government are lead in the saddlebags of the state Liberals: Newspoll’s federal voting averages for the September quarter reported a 5 per cent swing to Labor in Victoria. Matthew Guy might be secretly hoping they lose office in May, so that by November any animosity towards the federal government will hurt Labor, not his team. Daniel Andrews might retire. Anything could happen.

Third, the timing of these polls didn’t help the Coalition. While they were being taken, the anti-vax street protests, with their extremist language and props — those notorious nooses and death threats directed at Andrews — virtually shoved mainstream voters in Labor’s direction, especially when some Liberal MPs featured as speakers.

To some extent, that was offset by Andrews’s authoritarian pandemic bill, which allows the premier to bypass parliament and normal legal processes during a pandemic. That certainly risks alienating voters who care about civil rights and the importance of having checks and balances to prevent governments misusing their power. But Essential’s recent finding that even 62 per cent of Coalition voters “strongly oppose” the anti-lockdown protests could cancel out fears about the government having too much power.

But the most important reason to take the polls with a grain of salt is that Andrews’s recent decisions to end the lockdown, open the borders and remove most restrictions — even before new cases had begun to turn down, and long before Victoria was out of trouble — suggest strongly that he was feeling under pressure, probably above all from his pollsters.

Melbourne exited lockdown when the state was recording 2000 new cases a day. A year ago, the Andrews government wanted lockdowns to continue until there were fewer than five new cases a day. Even now the state is still averaging more than 1000 new cases a day.

Andrews argues that the state’s high vaccination rate — 89 per cent of those twelve and over are now double-dosed — means opening up no longer carries the same risks. True, and it’s important to remember that vaccinations protect us from death and serious illness better than they protect us from infection. But Europe’s experience is salutary: countries with highly vaccinated populations such as Germany, the Netherlands and even Denmark are now experiencing bigger outbreaks than ever before. Whatever Andrews says, I’ll bet his decisions to open up were not based on medical advice.

Given Labor’s complete dominance of the Victorian scene, there has been little interest in the redistribution of state electorates, finalised late last month. Victoria’s state redistributions are usually done much better than the federal ones, and the latest is no exception.

It boldly takes the axe to no fewer than three electorates in the middle southeastern suburbs — Ferntree Gully (Liberal), Keysborough and Mount Waverley (both Labor) — to create new seats in the outer southwest, northwest and southeast (all Labor). It also bites the bullet to fix one of the anomalies of the past, by bringing all the Latrobe Valley towns into one seat (Morwell), which increases the odds that Labor will win it back from independent Russell Northe.

All up, Antony Green estimates that Labor would notionally gain two seats, one from the Liberals and one from Northe, giving it fifty-seven seats in the eighty-eight-member parliament. The Coalition would drop to twenty-six (twenty Liberals, six Nationals), the independents would drop to two, and the Greens would remain on three.

Our friend Antony further estimates that of the twenty-six Coalition seats, nine are held by 1 per cent or less, and fifteen by 5 per cent or less. That puts the Coalition very much on the defensive, and in a weak position to launch an attack.

On the other hand, a uniform swing of just 6 per cent against Labor would cost it its majority, leaving it with just forty-four of the eighty-eight seats. While the Liberals and Nationals would require an implausibly large swing to win office, it is just plausible that if things go their way in 2022, they could push Labor into minority government. But they’re a long way from that now.

One key issue that will come to a head in the last months of this parliament is the future of the voting system for the Legislative Council. Will Victorian Labor continue with the system that allows voters’ preferences to be decided by backroom deals between the parties?

In Western Australia, Labor is now moving to abolish “group ticketing” after this year’s state election saw the Daylight Saving Party win a Legislative Council seat with just ninety-eight votes. That will make Victoria the last jurisdiction in Australia that has yet to reform a system that denies voters the right to decide their own preferences.

One assumes the original aim of the major-party bosses was to give themselves the power to decide voters’ preferences. But as micro-parties have mushroomed, the system has been taken over instead by the “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery. He has made an art form of working out deals that allow micro-parties to win seats with tiny votes by directing preferences to each other — no matter how remote they are ideologically.

At the 2018 Victorian election, Druery excelled himself by delivering his clients nine of the forty seats in the Council. At the time, he was working for Derryn Hinch, so Hinch’s Justice Party won three seats with just 3.75 per cent of the vote, whereas the Greens — excluded from Druery’s system — won 9.25 per cent of the vote but ended up with only one seat.

In the Eastern Metro seat, the Greens with 9 per cent of the vote lost out to Transport Matters with 0.6 per cent. In Southern Metro, the Greens’ 13.5 per cent was defeated by Sustainable Australia’s 1.3 per cent.

The system cost Labor itself a seat in Northern Metro when Fiona Patten, co-founder of the Reason Party, organised her own preference swaps to upstage both Druery’s team and Labor. The Coalition lost three seats it would have won had voters been allowed to direct their own preferences, and the Greens between two and five.

Even with its landslide 57.6 per cent of the two-party vote in the lower house, Labor could win only eighteen seats in the forty-member Council. Still, with eight separate minor parties with whom it can deal issue by issue, it has found the Council malleable to its wishes until now. But its failure to consult most of them over the pandemic bill left it vulnerable when disgraced Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek, after a long absence, decided to return to the Council to cast his vote against giving Andrews any more power.

Negotiations on the bill are now proceeding with the previously ignored micro-parties, through gritted teeth on both sides. It must focus Labor’s mind on reform of the voting system. The Liberals and Greens, who combined to push through the federal reform in 2016, would be willing partners. But you would not expect Labor to show its hand until as late as possible, since it still depends on the minor parties to pass its legislation.

The Greens and the Coalition were the main losers from Glenn Druery’s artwork last time. But if Labor does lose ground next year, it could become the main victim. A 5 per cent swing in Council voting could cost it as many as five seats, making the upper house almost unmanageable.

Difficult as Labor and the Greens find it to cooperate in Victoria, where they fight an endless war for control of inner Melbourne, it would be in their mutual interest to change to a voting system that allows the voters to decide their own preferences, and stop Glenn Druery doing it for them. •

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The question “Who were the convicts?” has long been central to Australians’ sense of self, and the answer has shifted over time. The convicts have been characterised as hardened criminals best forgotten; as innnocent victims of a brutal regime; as the makers of mateship and the Australian legend. And these shifts have reflected our changing relationship with “the mother country”: as despised colonies where Britain dumped its waste; as an experiment in making a new society; and now, often, as a national success story despite the Poms.

The historian Janet McCalman has bought into this old argument with the publication of Vandemonians. “Vandemonian” was the unflattering term applied by free-born immigrants to the ex-convict men and women who came from Tasmania — Van Diemen’s Land — to Victoria in the 1840s and early 1850s. These migrants from across Bass Strait — more than 40,000 of them — have been largely ignored by other historians; as McCalman says, “they were not meant to be part of colonial Victoria.” She promises that her study will both rewrite the history of Victoria and help us to better understand “the impact of convict transportation on the making of Australia.”

Janet McCalman is one of the best Australian historians writing today. No one can equal her record as a social historian. She has found new ways to document the action of class and gender in shaping the experience of ordinary lives. Her passionate, often compassionate, concern has been to reconstruct the lives of those who have suffered history rather than made it. Her works have pioneered new methodologies and made new uses of old ones: local history, oral history, ethnographic history and, above all, prosopography, defined in McCalman’s words as “group biographies collated from diverse sources” that “can create a new picture of the past and liberate the mute in the historical record.”

The convicts have provided a rich source for prosopographical historians. The convict administration recorded every detail of their lives, and even of their appearances. We know the height and build of many convicts under sentence, their hair colour, eye colour and complexion, every scar and tattoo — and convicts had lots of tattoos. Often we know the work they were set to do each day, their behaviour on the job, their infringements of discipline and their punishments.

The ready availability of these records online — the result of pressure from family historians — has allowed historians to count and to compare. Economic historians have counted the occupations of convict men and women, and discovered that they were more skilled and more literate than those they left behind in Britain. Historians of women and family have used marriage and birth records to argue that convict women were not “damned whores” but mothers, “god’s police.”

Most recently Grace Karskens has brought together prosopography, land records and family history to write a group biography of the ex-convicts who settled before 1820 on the rich river flats of the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney. Her prize-winning history, People of the River, explores convict family fortunes and “the people’s pleasures”: drinking, gambling, prize-fighting, horseracing. She describes a culture that was “carnivalesque, loud and often violent,” “a culture of resistance.” Her reading sits comfortably with Jack Thompson’s delight at finding that his forebear was not just Australian royalty, but a royal who owned a pub.

McCalman tells a very different story about a different “population.” Karskens’s Hawkesbury settlers were fortunate in arriving in New South Wales before 1820, when land grants and independent living were still freely available to emancipists. McCalman’s convicts were transported to Van Diemen’s Land, mostly after 1840, when the island became a vast outdoor jail. Her subjects are drawn from a massive database of all the convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land; and then from a subset whose lives before and after sentence have been reconstructed from British and Tasmanian sources. The research team working with McCalman added more layers of biographical detail, including descendants where these existed, and in some cases following through to grandchildren and great-grandchildren who served in the Australian Imperial Force during the first world war.

McCalman’s narrative does offer an alternative history of Victoria, and a grim one. She first follows the Vandemonians to 1840s Melbourne, where many ended up living in tiny cottages in filthy, refuse-strewn lanes between Bourke and La Trobe streets. “It had taken just a decade for the new settlement of Melbourne to develop backstreet slums,” she comments. After 1850 she follows them to the goldfields around Bendigo and Ballarat. Muscles counted far more than manners on the fields, and many became briefly rich, only to blow their money on drink and celebration. Back in Melbourne they were feared as potential criminals and despised as what McCalman calls “cashed-up bogans.” “Diggers’ weddings” saw hired carriages rattling though the streets, carrying champagne-drinking diggers and their temporary brides “dressed out in the best satin, lace and flowers which Melbourne can produce!”

McCalman describes in painful detail the brothels established in the 1850s by ex-convict men and women in the slums of Melbourne, Ballarat and Bendigo, and the trade in young women that fed them. Prostitutes and pickpockets continued the trades they had practised in the port cities of England. These “unruly, unceasing offenders” were not typical of the Vandemonians, merely the most visible. Many more settled in working-class suburbs and disappeared among the local poor. These suburbs were no more healthy places to live than the city slums.

McCalman doesn’t spare her readers. In Collingwood “filth abounded: excrement of humans and animals, decomposing dead creatures, food remains, fish heads and entrails left by hawkers, all languishing in large pools of stagnant water.”

A very few of the Vandemonians — less than a score — succeeded in the conventional sense of the word, dying wealthy and respected. McCalman proposes a different criterion for success — the founding of a lineage: “a household that can nourish and protect children so that in their turn they can produce their own offspring.” Even among those Vandemonians who found a husband or wife, most seem to have failed this test. McCalman finds that her subjects started the race with a heavy handicap. They “disproportionately came from fractured families where one or both parents were dead or absent.” “Few had experienced love, security and trust” and “only a minority would succeed as mothers and fathers.”

McCalman is clear that this was as much a social failure as an individual one. She understands the national impact of convict transportation in terms of “class relationships, and the inculcation of shame and a feeling of inferiority that has always been the mental mark of being poor.” She believes that “What matters most about the Vandemonians’ story is not any Australian legend or ‘hated stain,’ but the persistence of poverty over generations, of fragile families, of the silent pain of being a nobody.” There is no place for ironic references to Australian royalty here.

Vandemonians offers its readers a deeper understanding of the complexity of our convict origins, and how these still shape the nation. In times like these we need to listen to Janet McCalman. •

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At the company’s AGM, directors faced a barrage of questioning from gambling reformers. One asked how much Crown and Packer knew about the experiences of those harmed by gambling, and particularly gambling on poker machines. Packer professed to be sympathetic: Crown endeavoured to be a good corporate citizen, he said, “but we are not perfect.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Shonica Guy’s case against Crown didn’t succeed, but the allegations of machine tampering (which Packer labelled “a lie”) led to a fine of $300,000 by the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation. At that stage, this was the largest fine ever imposed by the Victorian regulator. The China accusations and Crown’s allegedly poor treatment of staff would continue to haunt the company for years, all the way to the Victorian royal commission, led by Ray Finkelstein QC.

Yet Packer remained upbeat. His confidence in the success of the Barangaroo development on Sydney Harbour was growing daily, he said. Crown’s well-cultivated political connections and network of influence appeared impregnable.

Then, in mid 2019, long-circulating rumours about Crown’s operating practices coalesced into a series of sensational media reports in the Nine newspapers and TV network that alleged extensive money laundering, poor treatment of Crown’s staff in China, and criminal infiltration of the casinos in Melbourne and Perth.

Crown denied these reports, going to the extent of taking out a full-page advertisement in major newspapers signed by the board. Nonetheless, it was clear that the company had a case to answer. In Sydney, the resulting Bergin inquiry lifted the lid on money laundering and criminal infiltration; as a result, Crown’s Sydney casino has yet to open.

The bad press continued this week when Adrian Finanzio SC, senior counsel assisting the Victorian royal commission into the casino and casino operator, made his final submission. In his view, it was open to the commission to conclude that Crown was not suitable to operate the casino and that it was not in the public interest for it to do so. In effect, he was saying that Crown should lose its licence on multiple grounds.

Unlike the Bergin inquiry, which concentrated on Crown’s money laundering record, Victoria’s royal commission expanded its gaze to include issues such as Crown’s application of its Responsible Gambling Code of Conduct, its breaching of the Casino Control Act by allowing patrons to convert credit card purchases into gambling chips, the underpayment of gambling tax, Crown’s combative relationship with the regulator and other authorities, and the doubtful feasibility of the reform program that Crown has initiated.

As to money laundering, Finanzio argued that “the preponderance of evidence is that Crown has significant, current vulnerabilities to financial crime and only a basic or preliminary state of preparedness to counter money laundering and financial crime.”

It was also clear that Crown failed to produce documents for the Bergin inquiry until months after they should have been provided. Finanzio applied the analogy of an “accused in a criminal trial standing behind the onus of proof and taking every point to avoid conviction” — except that Crown has an obligation to meet a test of character, honesty and integrity. In fact, Crown had demonstrated the opposite, even quite recently, and some employees who had clearly failed to meet those standards remained in the organisation.

Finanzio also pointed out that the Bergin inquiry had been confined somewhat narrowly to certain aspects of Crown’s activities when it outlined potential reforms. The Victorian commission had found a much deeper set of problems “of culture and risk… through more levels of the organisation than the Bergin inquiry could ever have anticipated.” Indeed, everywhere the commission had looked “it has unearthed behaviour that is deeply troubling and obviously ingrained.”

Bergin associated Crown’s culture and governance problems with the influence of James Packer and his company CPH. Because of this, Packer, who retains a significant slice of the Crown shares, is prohibited from exercising his influence via CPH until at least 2024. Finanzio went further, submitting that no shareholder in Crown Melbourne should exceed a 5 per cent interest without permission from the regulator. The Packer influence, if it remains, looks to be further diluted.

Now that its initial hearings are over, the royal commission has two basic questions to deal with. Is Crown a suitable entity to operate the casino — and if not, could it become one? And is it in the public interest for Crown to continue to operate the casino as its licensee?

There is a strong case that Crown is not a suitable operator. Bergin found that the path to reform would be difficult and uncertain. To say this has been reinforced by the Victorian evidence and submissions from counsel is to put the situation mildly. Finanzio also saw many impediments to Crown’s rendering itself suitable, not least the continued tenure of Helen Coonan, current executive chair, and Xavier Walsh, chief executive of Crown Melbourne.

And the public interest in taking away Crown’s licence? Adrian Finanzio argued strongly that many matters need to be considered. Employment and state revenue are significant, but so too is the loss of confidence among many stakeholders, not least the people of Victoria. What action Crown could take to restore that confidence is difficult to imagine.

It’s hard to see how anything other than a loss of licence could convince anyone that gambling regulation is taken seriously in Victoria, or Australia more generally. Crown’s longstanding disregard for its responsibilities, and its recurring misconduct and breaches of regulation and legislation are breathtaking, and at the most serious end of the spectrum of misconduct.

As Finanzio put it, “It is open on all of the evidence for those regulating Crown Melbourne’s affairs to doubt whether they could ever trust Crown Melbourne again. The Casino Control Act demands that a licensee is suitable, rather than one in transition to or on a journey to suitability. The Casino Control Act contemplates that the casino licence is reposed in a person who is capable of maintaining the trust and confidence of the community and the credibility, integrity and stability of those operations. Crown is neither of those things.”

Crown (and other parties with leave to appear) will have its chance to argue its case when the commission reconvenes on 3 August. With premier Dan Andrews pledging to accept the commission’s recommendations, the stakes are high — not just for the company’s value and credibility, but also for the future of Australian gambling regulation. Politically, it would be difficult for the government to do anything but accept Finkelstein’s advice.

Whatever else occurs, the seemingly impregnable edifice of Crown, constructed from influence, compliant political and regulatory institutions, and a disregard for public perceptions, has been breached. There is a good chance it may end up as a monument to failed ambition, hubris, greed and arrogance. We shall see. •

The post Can Crown go down? appeared first on Inside Story.

Nine days after federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg unveiled a pre-election borrow-and-spend budget, Victorian treasurer Tim Pallas brought down another big-spending budget, but one that adds taxes to the mix — taxes targeted almost exclusively at big business and large landowners.

It was not the only thing worth noting in his budget. Pallas proposes another huge (and clearly inflationary) increase in what is already a record level of infrastructure spending. In government services, mental health is the top priority for new spending. The budget funds Australia’s first truth-and-justice process, a mostly Aboriginal commission to examine the state’s history and shine the spotlight on the dispossession and injustices that followed white settlement.

The budget plans to give 4000 women a year access to low-cost public IVF treatment. It funds innovative early-intervention programs, such as the Rough Sleeping Initiative by the Sacred Heart Mission, which proposes to work with newly homeless people to try to find them housing, social networks, job training and employment, so as to prevent them becoming chronically homeless.

And on the same day that the Bureau of Statistics reported that Victoria’s unemployment rate is now a smidgeon lower than Australia’s, the budget poured even more stimulus into a state economy it projects will grow by 6.5 per cent in the coming financial year. It’s fun to be pouring out the cash as Frydenberg and Pallas are doing, but ultimately someone has to pay for it — and that someone will be the kids.

Most of this new spending is unfunded, resulting in another big deficit by state standards: $11.6 billion on the budget estimates, down from $17.4 billion for the financial year just ending. And that excludes infrastructure spending, which is forecast to soar 67 per cent next year, from $14.5 billion to $24.2 billion.

“There is much to praise in this budget, but also much to regret,” I wrote of last year’s Victorian budget. That seems to apply to every budget the Andrews government produces.

Debate on this one will be dominated by the fact that, unlike its federal counterpart, it had the courage to raise taxes to finance some of its new spending — and is making business pay them.

The new taxes were so audacious, they were startling. Once in place, Treasury estimates, they would raise more than $1.5 billion a year, a not insignificant amount. But just $115 million of that would fall on the general public, mostly from higher fines and taxes on gambling. The rest would come from a range of tax hikes on developers, large landholders and people buying expensive properties (almost $600 million a year), and from payroll tax surcharges on big business, to raise $800 million a year earmarked to finance mental health programs.

That “mental health levy” could be tricky. Pallas said eligibility for the surcharges would be determined by the size of companies’ national payrolls. Those with national payrolls of more than $10 million a year would pay an extra 0.5 per cent on their Victorian payroll, while those with national payrolls of more than $100 million would pay an extra 1 per cent.

It seems cunningly designed to reduce the incentive for business to shift jobs out of Victoria. But it does not remove that risk — and it may provide fertile ground for a legal challenge. Might the High Court rule that Victoria is effectively trying to tax jobs in other states? The lawyers will be giving deep thought to this tax bill.

You couldn’t imagine a Labor government anywhere else in Australia, except perhaps the Labor/Greens coalition in the ACT, targeting higher taxes so directly on those they see as the rich rolling in money. But in 2018, Labor won a stunning 57.6 per cent of the two-party vote; as long as Covid stays under control, it is hard to imagine it losing next year’s election. The Age reports that enough crossbenchers support the tax rises to get them through the Legislative Council.

The biggest tax hike on property would introduce similar surcharges on land tax for property holdings worth more than $1.8 million — primarily hitting land developers, big rental investors and commercial property owners, since homes and farms are exempt. And with Australia now experiencing a massive inflationary boom in house prices, property sales of more than $2 million will attract an extra 0.5 per cent on their stamp duty bills.

“You don’t get that much in inner Melbourne for $2 million,” an old friend laments. Core Logic reports that housing prices in Melbourne have already risen 10 per cent since the state’s lockdown ended, with even bigger rises in regional towns (partly from city investors outbidding local residents). This surcharge could put some brake on price rises at the top end.

Developers will also have to pay a windfall levy equivalent to half of their gains when land is rezoned in their favour. Pallas was unable to give a convincing answer when asked why the government didn’t impose similar windfall levies on owners of the shopping centres who will benefit if Labor ever builds its scandalously wasteful so-called Suburban Rail Loop.

You could not imagine any previous Labor government in Victoria contemplating hits on business like this. John Cain, Steve Bracks and John Brumby all ran essentially centre-left governments that put a high priority on keeping business happy so it kept generating jobs. But Daniel Andrews is no centrist. He is a self-confident, skilful leftie who dominates Victoria’s political stage and gives the impression that keeping business happy is not high on his priority list.

If his government gets away with this one, it would be thanks to Brumby, the last government leader in Australia to pursue a Hawke–Keating agenda of economic reform. As treasurer and then premier, Brumby pursued jobs rather than votes, cutting Victoria’s payroll tax rate across the board to 4.9 per cent, the lowest rate in the nation for most of the businesses Andrews and Pallas are now targeting.

An economics graduate, Brumby’s goal was to simplify and streamline the tax structure and minimise the impact of taxes on economic activity. This government has the opposite goal: it is run by social engineers, who want to make every tax or spending measure discriminate between those they see as underprivileged (who will benefit) and those they see as privileged (who won’t).

The silliest of yesterday’s tax increases would exclude “gender-exclusive” clubs from the land tax concessions available to all other clubs. It is aimed at the Melbourne Club, of course, but why bother? Treasury estimates the measure will raise the grand total of $600,000 in four years. Wow.

Andrews has been out of sight for the past two months after falling downstairs at a holiday home and suffering spinal damage. But close observers say he still keeps in touch from home, and would have been calling the shots on key decisions in this budget — such as making the mental health reforms its centrepiece, and soaking the rich to pay for it.

The row over financing should not obscure the importance of the government giving priority to mental health reforms. Like the federal government’s aged care reforms, they follow a royal commission that highlighted how widespread mental illnesses are, and how few resources and programs we have to tackle them.

“Around half of Victorians experience a mental illness at some point in their lives,” Pallas told parliament. “Around one in five are struggling with it right now. They are our children, parents, partners and friends. They are us. But in our worst moments, we turn to a system which is clearly broken.”

The budget rolls out a wide range of programs designed to meet the needs of particular groups, from primary students up. From the stories you hear, you do wonder how much difference it can make without overcoming the shortage of psychiatrists — which presumably would require their professional college to lower the bar which blocks other doctors from entering their specialty.

In all, the budget proposes $19 billion of additional spending on services over the next four years, with sizeable dollops to fix Victoria’s under-resourced ambulance service, attract more filmmakers to Victoria, rebuild and better protect bushfire-hit communities, build and repair more schools, and build a new sporting centre at La Trobe University to be the new home of the Matildas. Most of this will be ongoing new spending, added to a budget already in structural deficit.

On the definition used by Victoria and other states, the budget will still be in deficit in 2025 — that is, revenue won’t pay for government services, or make any contribution to new infrastructure — and that would be after four years of recovery. Precisely because its tax rises are so narrowly targeted, they cannot raise the revenue needed to close the gap and create a surplus to pay for some of the infrastructure. Net borrowing is projected to continue at $18 billion a year into the blue horizon.

I am no deficit fetishist, but running a deficit in a booming economy is weak government. Victoria’s economy is booming. Treasury projects it to grow by 6.5 per cent in the coming financial year before settling back in its long-term groove: high population growth, relatively high economic growth, and wages rising faster with each year.

Yesterday’s jobs figures from the Bureau of Statistics show that even the end of JobKeeper hasn’t derailed the state’s remarkable comeback from last year’s massive job losses. In April Victoria squeezed past New South Wales to claim the second-lowest unemployment rate of any state, bettered only by Western Australia. Pallas proudly points out that since the long lockdown ended, most of Australia’s job growth has been in Victoria.

No one expected that to happen when last year’s budget planned a 25 per cent growth in Victorian government spending. It seemed appropriate then, and Pallas and Andrews can fairly claim their share of credit for the exceptional rebound since. The government hired unemployed women as tutors for struggling schoolkids, hired tradies to build social housing, and hired jobless blokes to repair roads all over the state. It handed out subsidies so groups and businesses could hire people themselves. It helped restore confidence, which has proved as infectious as Covid.

In the end, it looks like spending growth in 2020–21 will be 19 per cent: the government spent a bit less than it planned on services and a lot less than it planned on infrastructure — despite substantial hikes in the estimated cost of works such as the Melbourne Metro tunnel (now $12.25 billion), the Monash Freeway upgrade, regional rail upgrades and so on. Yet the government has responded by rolling the undone works into an even bigger package, and projecting a 67 per cent rise in infrastructure spending in the coming year.

Get real. Infrastructure spending is already at record levels as a share of the Victorian economy: roughly 3 per cent of gross state product. Andrews and Pallas now propose to raise that to almost 5 per cent — despite evidence throughout the state that the resources just aren’t there to carry out the work. A home-building recovery is getting under way, partly through the state’s own laudable program to build social housing. Andrews and Pallas don’t need to aim for the sky — and they can’t reach it anyway.

Their government has been applauded and re-elected for having lifted Victoria’s infrastructure spending off the floor. It has used these years of low interest rates to build projects that previous governments found too hard: the replacement of fifty level crossings in suburban Melbourne, building the first metro line under the city, planning the North East freeway link, and many lesser but locally important projects throughout the state.

Rather than trying to increase spending by another 67 per cent, it should consolidate and focus on the quality of projects rather than the quantity. Labor is still locked into building the Suburban Rail Loop, a very expensive underground tunnel to take a small number of passengers between six stations in marginal seats in southeast and eastern Melbourne. It was dreamed up in Andrews’s office, and it’s the lemon that makes other lemons taste like oranges.

One remarkable thing to note about Labor’s infrastructure program is that, both next year and in the long term, it plans to spend more on rail than on roads — and the roads budget includes spending on new trams and replacing level crossings. (This government spends very little on buses, even though they serve its outer-suburban voters, and its own surveys find they have the highest customer satisfaction of any public transport mode.)

Victoria’s net debt, once negligible, will reach 20 per cent of gross state product next year and 27 per cent by 2025. As the budget papers remind us, it has been much higher in the past, so that’s no cause for alarm. But nor is it a good thing. With the economy entering a boom, Labor should be moving quickly into surplus, allowing current revenues to make a substantial contribution to current infrastructure investments.

This should have been the budget that flicked the switch from stimulus to consolidation. Pallas and his team did make some efforts to do that — $2.9 billion of spending in the next four years was “reprioritised,” the annual indexation of departmental budgets was reduced, saving $1.9 billion, and $1.7 billion of savings were found from “departmental efficiencies.”

Yet even so, the bottom line is that now that the need for stimulus has gone, the Andrews government plans to spend $20 billion more in the next three years than it had last year when stimulus was needed. It is as economically dumb and politically driven as the same strategy is in the Morrison government’s budget.

Victorian Labor, like the federal Coalition, is giving us more of what was appropriate last year, not what is appropriate now. Yes, you can always increase jobs now by borrowing from the future. But that just means future generations will lose jobs whenever the bills have to be paid.

There’s a country that has tried out this strategy extensively in the past. Its name is Italy. It is the only country in the Western world that is now poorer than it was twenty years ago. Italy may be a role model in many areas of life, but fiscal policy is not one of them. •

The post This year’s budget, last year’s spending appeared first on Inside Story.

O’Brien is intimately connected to the project, of course — it was his decision as treasurer to fund the immediate commencement of the project in 2013, despite a pending court challenge and Labor’s commitment to dump it, and his decision to issue a special letter to the contractors promising as much as half a billion dollars in compensation if the courts found the project to be invalid.

But personal vindication is not the only attraction for the Liberals. Shadow roads minister Tim Smith points to the $4 billion in federal dollars still on the table for the project that amounts, he says, to a “free road” for the state, something an O’Brien government could begin building “immediately” if elected. Indeed, he wrote in Melbourne’s Herald Sun, the Andrews government’s obstinance over the freeway “borders on pathological.”

Smith’s claims provoked the predictable responses from the Andrews government, which laughed off the project as a waste of money, and from public transport activists, who asked why, having pledged to build the project in 2014 and 2018 and lost both elections, the Liberals might see some political capital this time around. If anyone had a pathological obsession with East West Link, they implied, it must be Victoria’s Liberals.

Both criticisms are worth examining. Even if we accept the opposition’s optimistic appraisals of the project’s economic worth — and we probably shouldn’t — it’s clear that construction would not be the breeze it imagines. Since coming to power in 2014, the Andrews government has sold back many of the homes compulsorily acquired in the first run at East West Link, removed all the planning overlays and approvals that had been granted, and amended heritage protection for large inner-city parks. Building the road would require totally new approvals and acquisitions. That kind of process usually takes at least a year and a half — hardly an immediate start.

Then, in late 2019, the Andrews government nominated a section of Melbourne’s Eastern Freeway for heritage status. The opposition saw this as East West monkey-wrenching, and with some justification: the section nominated is the bit that would require major surgery to connect to an East West tunnel.

None of this makes the building of (some kind of) East West Link impossible, but the booby traps and uncertainties would undoubtedly drive up the time and cost involved. The contracting market is likely to cost in these problems, as well as the broader political risk of the project’s being overturned again.

Even if the market has not tarred the whole state with a “sovereign risk” label — as O’Brien claimed it would back when he was state treasurer warning voters off Labor and its plans to cancel the project— East-West Link would undoubtedly have one attached to it. Recall that even the first time around, in 2014, O’Brien needed to offer the private sector half a billion free dollars just to get the contractors to sign on — and that was before any governments had invalidated any contracts. A second attempt could come with truly eye-watering costs — blowing out even the most optimistic cost–benefit equations.

With that said, I’m not so sure actually building this project matters deeply to the Victorian Liberals. Having seen the debate on East West Link evolve over many years, I’m not convinced the opposition is promising to build East West simply because it believes passionately in its merits, or that the Liberals are so persuaded of its overwhelming utility that they cannot bring themselves to talk about any other projects.

East West Link is not a normal election boondoggle — it is infused with political venom, with outrage and resentment and suspicion of political enemies. It has become a kind of political totem, a symbol caught up in the culture war. A promise to build East West Link isn’t so much a serious public policy proposal but rather a pledge to hoist clan colours over the rivals’ battlements. It is a rallying call — and I’d suggest it is one pitched primarily at a Liberal Party audience.

Lord knows, the state opposition could use a little rallying. Victoria’s Liberals have been enduring a long and gruelling bout of civil strife — something I have written about on these pages before. It is the kind of thing exacerbated by lousy electoral prospects. Polling is infrequent at the state level, but Ipsos put Daniel Andrews’s approval rating at a net positive nineteen points in October last year, when Melbourne’s intense stage four lockdown was in force. The same poll had Michael O’Brien at minus twenty-four approval, and put Andrews thirty-five points ahead as preferred premier.

A month later, perhaps owing to elation at the restrictions ending, Roy Morgan had Victorian Labor with 58.5 per cent of the state’s two-party-preferred vote — better even than the 2018 “Danslide” election, and an indication that things could get worse yet for the state’s Liberals.

A mortifying example of such a fate was soon offered up by Western Australia: there, the state’s Liberal opposition was all but obliterated by Mark McGowan’s Labor government — leaving it with just two seats and the loss of official opposition status. It is little wonder that, two days after the WA election, a leadership spill was attempted in the Victorian Liberal Party — though one that didn’t quite come off.

Hence the chant of East! West! Link! It helps the state’s Liberals focus on Labor instead of themselves. While many Victorians will hear the pledge and ask if we are not, perhaps, past this issue, the intended audience will see the chant as synonymous with “wanton Labor waste” and the notion that Daniel Andrews is somehow captive to the inner-city “cultural left.” East West Link is a rallying cry, a morale booster; it is a skin to pull tight across a war drum — worn, but still making music for the troops who need to hear it.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the Liberals wouldn’t try to build the thing if they somehow plucked the rabbit out of the hat and returned to government sometime soon. Plenty of massive, expensive, disruptive, ineffective, even idiotic infrastructure projects get built mainly for their symbolic value. Many projects are built not as a means to an end — getting people in and out of the city efficiently; power to homes; clean water to taps; homes connected to fast internet — but rather as political shrines, built for the statements they make, the values they embody, the memories they honour or the causes they glorify.

But I wonder if a freshly elected O’Brien government would be willing to expend so much financial and political capital on such a project, simply to shove it up inner-city lefties, build a shrine to its abhorrence of Daniel Andrews’s alleged recklessness, and rehabilitate the one-term Baillieu–Napthine government that commissioned the thing in the first place. I would not be totally surprised if, notwithstanding the beating of the East West drum, that government discovers other pressing priorities. That, or it will be built as a tomb in which to bury a one-term O’Brien government. •

The post The chant of East West Link appeared first on Inside Story.

With no ready-made NSW Liberal to replace or succeed Morrison, perhaps the federal leadership will return to the Victorians when the next vacancy occurs. Josh Frydenberg is the obvious candidate and at the moment he isn’t putting a foot wrong. The prime minister, meanwhile, is having difficulty putting one right.

Do the Victorian Liberals deserve the leadership? After all, their recent record in state politics is woeful. This month’s failed and pointless leadership challenge highlighted the diminished state of the party room after the electoral drubbing of 2018. No one within the Victorian organisation appears to be in charge. The factions — which don’t officially exist — fight so hard over preselections and positions in the organisation that Labor is having an untroubled run through the Covid-19 crisis, implanting an agenda that would have scared yesterday’s Liberals into unity. Meanwhile, the deep wounds associated with personalities who ought to have had their day — namely two-time divisional president Michael Kroger and former premier Jeff Kennett — continue to linger.

Federally, the story is happier. The Victorian and NSW Liberals contributed similar percentages of seats in their respective states to the 2019 federal election result.

But does any of this really matter?

At every stage of its history, the Liberal Party has struggled with the internal problems that emerged in the mid to late 1940s. Instead of parroting myths about its origins and genuflecting before the Menzies shrine, it might profit from deploying a few officials to read the party’s records to find out what actually happened then. They might be surprised to learn three things about the Liberals’ more remote past.

First, Menzies was not the founder of the modern Liberal Party; no one qualifies for the definite article. True, the party might not have been formed as it did if he had returned to legal practice. But he played no role in forming the South Australian division, which was already in existence as the Liberal and Country League. The Queenslanders made it clear that he was unwelcome in their state. Bill Spooner did more than Menzies in setting up the NSW division in 1945, and Menzies was asked to stay away from the 1947 state election. After his failed first prime ministership, many Liberals across the country believed that “you can’t win with Menzies.”

Second, and more importantly, the key party problems the Liberals tried to solve in the postwar years remain unresolved seventy-six years later. The same issues keep cropping up: the relationships between the organisation and the state and federal parliamentary parties, between the federal and state organisations, between the organisations and the branches, between the Liberal Party and business, and between the Liberal Party and the Country/National Country/National Party. Anyone reading the party’s papers on these subjects or the continuing debates over the purpose and methods of preselecting candidates might conclude that there are no permanent solutions for any of them.

Third, it is remarkable how the Liberal Party spends little time reviewing its successes yet a great deal of time on the losses, much of it producing the same or similar explanations for every electoral defeat.

Take for example the loss of the winnable 1987 federal election. The “Joh for Canberra” campaign was a one-off disaster, but what other explanations did the official review offer? Answer, the usual suspects: advertising, finance, the federal secretariat, the organisational structure, the lack of consultation between the federal parliamentary party and the organisation, candidate selection, and relations with the Country/National Country/National Party. That list provides a good starting point to explain the next electoral failure, and much of it could be written before the event.

How then does the party explain success?

Sir Henry Bolte, the long-term Victorian premier (1955–72), loved to boast that Victoria was “the jewel in the Liberal crown,” just as he liked to remark after another of his state victories that the result showed the “sagacity” of the Victorian people. He rarely dwelt on two of the critical factors that underlay his success: the strength of the conservative Democratic Labor Party in Victoria, with its disciplined allocation of preferences; and the left’s control of the Victorian Labor Party, committing it to maintain ideological purity seemingly at the expense of electoral success.

Liberals who know their own history would be aware that the Bolte and Menzies years of supremacy were those of good luck as well as of good management. The cold war, the Labor split and the long postwar economic boom delivered the right circumstances for a prolonged non-Labor hegemony. This reality check makes it easier to explain why Labor held office in New South Wales without much difficulty for all the postwar years until 1965.

Liberal Party officials in the 1950s to the 1970s were not misled by the hyperbole of the politicians. They also knew that factional and personal wars of one kind or another had been endemic since the party was formed in 1945.

The destructive personality clashes are riveting. Unfortunately, one of them is not down on paper. It concerns two strong men in the 1950s organisation who knew how to bring Menzies to order. Both bore the same surname, Anderson. William (“Bill” to his friends) Anderson was the party’s Victorian president and later federal president. John (better known as “Bill”) Anderson was the Victorian state president.

Anderson the federal president, a Shell company director, could walk into Menzies’s office any time he chose and would periodically tell the “Great White Chief” what he should be doing or what he was not doing well. The other Anderson, a former second world war commando, told Menzies at the time of the 1954 election that if he (Menzies) refused to go to the Ford motor works in Geelong to campaign for the local member, Hubert Opperman, then he (Anderson) would pull the entire state organisation out of the election. A disgruntled Menzies, expecting to be harangued and abused in Geelong and wanting a quiet Saturday in the Windsor Hotel, finally agreed. Cheered after one of his best electoral performances, he turned to Anderson and mischievously remarked, “It was a good idea of mine to come here.”

The Andersons had just one problem: they could provide the kind of leadership notably missing from the present Victorian organisation, but they spoke of each other in terms the less-than-friendly Kroger and Kennett would have recognised.

One party official in the 1970s spoke more than a half truth when he said that three types of people joined the Liberal Party: the mad, the ambitious and the lonely. In later years, more of the lonely obtained comfort by staying home to watch television. The ambitious could prove difficult if insufficient positions or parliamentary seats existed to accommodate them. The mad — that is, the ideologically charged rather than the clinically disturbed — constituted the main problem: they had to be calmed down, outvoted, diverted or eased out.

Over the past seventy-six years a number of the mad and the ambitious, along with some newcomers and some decent and concerned Liberals — possibly with a business or legal background — would come together every three or five years to reform the Liberal Party and solve its unsolvable problems. A committee would be formed, a review conducted, a report prepared, and a recommendation taken to state council. Leaving aside the probability that the proposal involved an exercise in common sense — and was therefore likely to be rejected by state council or fail because of a rule requiring more than a simple majority — the striking thing about these processes was that they so often began with the assumption that a new idea was being contemplated. Even a quick appraisal of internal arguments in the 1940s and 1950s will show that almost every subsequent idea for reform was first raised back then.

So, the party that does not know its own history resolutely repeats it.

Reading the Liberal Party’s files might depress unwary party officials. Yet it should not. Federally, the Liberal Party has been in government for fifty years since its formation. All the failures of reform, all the dire predictions, didn’t get in the way of election victories. To the annoyance of those driven by what Neville Wran called “the vision thing,” the Liberal Party in practice rarely thinks beyond the next election. It does, however, expect and require the leader to win it.

If the past has anything to offer it is that while the relentless search for solutions to recurring problems will continue to be unsuccessful, it need not prevent the federal parliamentary leader from doing his (no “her” is presently in sight) job of winning the next election. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Let that soak in. This year, Victorian government spending will grow by more than 25 per cent. The additional spending will amount to close to $3500 for every man, woman and child in the state. That’s roughly $70 per person, per week, in new spending.

There are tax cuts too, but they are dwarfed by the new spending. If the Morrison government’s budget relies too much on tax cuts to stimulate consumer spending and business investment, the Andrews government’s budget does the reverse: just as its coronavirus strategy was an extreme in top-down control, so is its economic strategy.

Most of that is genuine stimulus: one-off measures in response to the economic devastation of the state by months of lockdown, such as a single line item in the budget papers, with no further breakdown, assigning $2163 million to “business support.”

Some of it is transport and other investment proposed for other reasons, but brought forward as a stimulus to economic activity in a year in which Victoria’s gross state product, even on optimistic assumptions, is projected to be 4 per cent lower than a year earlier. That includes $2.7 billion in this fiscal year that will rapidly, if only briefly, scale up the previously pitiful level of state investment in social housing.

And some of it is not stimulus at all, but uses the cover of stimulus action to step up Victoria’s routine budget spending in areas that interest Labor activists, and to commit to long-term infrastructure investments that would almost certainly fail a genuine cost–benefit analysis.

In short, there is much to praise in this budget, but also much to regret. That includes the government’s commitment to build the worst transport project Melbourne has ever seen: the so-called Suburban Rail Loop, in reality a twenty-six kilometre tunnel under the middle southeastern suburbs from Cheltenham to Box Hill. Tunnels eat money, and the demand for this one is likely to be small. No business case has been produced, and no cost–benefit analysis, but it will cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

It is not the first lemon a Victorian government has tried to sell to voters. The Andrews government won power in 2014 partly because the Liberals thought it would be a great idea to spend $7 billion of taxpayers’ money to build a 4.4 kilometre tunnel under the inner suburbs to link two freeways; the taxpayers disagreed. But the Suburban Rail Loop is the lemon that makes other lemons taste like oranges.

Not surprisingly, the ratings agencies yesterday implied that this budget could lose Victoria its AAA credit rating. Standard & Poor’s said there was a 50–50 chance that the state could be downgraded, and this would happen if it came to the view that “the state’s financial management has weakened.”

Well, with respect, it clearly has: as far out as 2023–24, well past the time for stimulus, the budget projects $3.6 billion a year of new routine spending — $1.6 billion of it net of spending cuts and contingencies allowed for in the budget — plus roughly $6 billion a year of additional investment in assets.

Stimulus is certainly what Victoria needs right now, and this budget delivers it. But it has to be paid for, just as investments in roads, rail, schools and hospitals all have to be paid for one day. Governments should be brave and bold about delivering stimulus at this time. On that front, this budget succeeds admirably.

But equally, governments should be wary about the long-term costs of doing so, knowing that the bills will come in at some point, to be covered either directly or through permanently higher interest bills. They should not use the cover of stimulus to smuggle in a step-up in spending levels, and they need to prioritise asset investments that will deliver most bang for buck. This budget fails on both counts.

A bit of background is necessary here, because Twitter gives me the impression that many Victorians have little idea how different their state’s economic position is from that of the rest of Australia. Not only was Victoria home to 90 per cent of the Australians who died of coronavirus, but even after the unexpectedly large rebound in jobs last month, the state accounted for 94 per cent of Australia’s net loss of jobs in the year to October: 124,000 jobs lost in Victoria but just 8000 in the rest of Australia.

Female employment year on year grew by 24,000 in the rest of Australia, but shrank by 105,000 in Victoria, where hospitality and entertainment were largely shut down. For the same reasons, employment of workers aged fifteen to twenty-four shrank by 4000 in the rest of Australia, but by 92,000 in Victoria.

We won’t know the full devastation of lost businesses until JobKeeper ends, but the intensity and duration of Victoria’s lockdowns make it likely that it will also lose more workplaces than the rest of Australia combined. Even with that massive increase in state government spending, projections by the Victorian Treasury and its federal counterpart together imply that while Victoria’s output this fiscal year will be 4 per cent lower than a year ago, output will be only marginally lower in the rest of Australia.

And even that forecast relies on the government’s huge spending increase igniting an extraordinarily rapid recovery. The budget projects that real gross state product will grow by 9 per cent over the course of 2021, the sort of growth rate normally claimed only by China. And most of that would happen in the first half of the year — assuming no more coronavirus and no more lockdowns. As financial market insiders would put it, the risks in that forecast are on the downside.

The level of stimulus is extraordinary, however, and it’s welcome. Unlike the Morrison government, the Andrews government is doing as economists have suggested. In response to the slump in housing construction, it has introduced several new policies, but the big one is a crash program of building social housing, for which waiting lists now extend many years. The promise of another 9000 homes for some of those unable to afford secure and suitable housing in the private market is a marriage of good economic and social policies.

One hopes the government will not then just revert to the inadequate investment levels of the past, as the Gillard government did when Kevin Rudd’s 2009–10 public housing stimulus expired. In fairness, this depends even more on what the federal government is willing to do — which, at present, is not much.

The budget also commits $250 million to the Grattan Institute’s proposal for a two-year program to hire tutors to help struggling schoolchildren catch up, particularly those most affected by the lockdowns. While most stimulus programs, including new infrastructure, provide jobs for blokes, this one will provide much-needed jobs for women.

The budget also envisages lifting the current level of infrastructure spending by almost half, which would be welcome if it also included a transparent, independent way of selecting priority projects. No such luck. In Victoria, as elsewhere, the choice of projects is driven by what the government thinks will give it the most political bang for buck. What will give Victorians the most social/economic bang for their buck is irrelevant.

The Victorian Liberals are still clinging to the East West Link as their branded project, even though it has twice been rejected by the voters and three times by cost–benefit analyses. Labor has done much better with its branded project of removing level crossings, but with that scheme now growing familiar, Andrews has been keen to find a new project.

The federal Liberals have focused on getting a train line built to Melbourne Airport. It might not be needed — it will offer no more than Skybus already provides, except easier access from other suburban lines — but the polls show it is the top project among voters. Saturday’s agreement between the Andrews and Morrison governments means it will now become reality, with the two governments adopting the cheaper of two alternative proposals. The cost is pencilled in as $10 billion, and the completion date as 2029.

Andrews’s own new branded project, however, is the Suburban Rail Loop. It appears that this emerged from his political circle rather than from the railways, let alone transport economists. As originally presented, it was intended to run for ninety kilometres around Melbourne’s middle and outer suburbs, largely in tunnels, with a number of stations in the southeast but very few in the west. The cost was claimed to be $50 billion, which no one believed.

But the government is now proposing to build only the southeastern quarter of the loop, running underground from Southland shopping plaza through Monash and Deakin universities and selected suburban shopping centres (which developers own the redevelopment rights, I wonder?) to Box Hill station in Melbourne’s Chinese heartland.

The budget commits $2.2 billion to the initial stages, primarily for planning, land purchase and so on. Treasurer Tim Pallas promised that a business case will be presented next year, and no contracts for construction would be let until the voters have their say at the 2022 election.

Even the cost of this twenty-six kilometre tunnel might well be $50 billion: no one knows, including the government, which has committed to build it regardless. It is economic lunacy to choose infrastructure projects in this way. Infrastructure Victoria, which was set up to provide objective advice to the government on priorities, has been ignored and sidelined.

No government can build every project we want: it has to prioritise, and select which projects will give the community most value for money. Building the Suburban Rail Loop means the government will not have the resources to take up other, more urgent projects such as the second line of the Metro, intended to run from Clifton Hill to the massive redevelopment site of Fishermans Bend.

Choices have implications. In the ACT, the Labor–Greens government had to shelve its hospital redevelopment plan for a whole four-year term to pay for its own branded infrastructure project, Canberra’s first tramline. The huge cost of building a long underground railway to meet scant demand will push many other projects to the sidelines, possibly for decades.

It would be welcome if, in 2022, the Liberals ditched the East West Link and promised instead to ask Infrastructure Victoria to carry out cost–benefit studies of the key infrastructure choices under discussion. Get the facts, then decide. By contrast, the Andrews government has taken its lead from the Queen of Hearts in the trial scene of Alice in Wonderland: “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.”

The Suburban Rail Loop is the prime example of a problem that afflicts not only the Victorian budget but also Australian politics generally. Just as the hard right sees every issue through the prism of its fixation on waging culture war, so governments focus on what they brand as their projects, and which projects are politically rewarding to announce, rather than on delivering services to us that provide the best bang for buck.

Then, once the political gains of the announcement have been banked, they lose interest in delivering outcomes. The $5 billion the federal government promised for projects in northern Australia, and failed to deliver, is a classic example. But all governments now make wide use of another form of it: financing new projects by “reprioritising” old ones.

This budget has a beauty: a one-line item “reprioritising” $1836 million (2 per cent) of government spending this year alone, and a similar amount over the next three years. It was obscured so well in the budget papers (as one line in table 4.5 of Budget Paper 2) that as far as I can see, no one in the mainstream media reported it. It’s a way of saying: “Oh, by the way, $3.7 billion of the spending we promised you in past budgets won’t be delivered. But just look at what we’re offering you this time!”

There is no information on what past promises have been discarded in this way. It’s politically much easier to make spending cuts that are not announced than to make ones that are. This budget appears to have no announced spending cuts, but if you can cut 2 per cent from spending without announcing what you have cut, why go to the trouble of being transparent about it? This is an issue that oppositions and transparency reformers need to focus on.

One of the budget papers was also discarded: the old Budget Paper 4, the detailed statement of the government’s investment program. Treasurer Pallas blamed the rush of getting the budget ready, and promised it would be back for the budget next May. We have to take him at his word, but the issue matters.

Among other things, BP4 told us exactly how much the government has spent, is spending, and plans to spend on each project, and when it is expected to finish. It is the annual fessing-up to any blowouts in cost or completion dates. It is also a full account of the government’s investment priorities. It should be required by other governments as well, not least the federal government.

It’s also notable that policy commitments are now being made under increasingly long timespans, to make them look bigger. The budget papers tell us Victoria has now committed to $134 billion of new investments, which is roughly ten times the level of its annual investment up to now, and seven times the level projected from here on.

There is only one tax rise in this budget: the little tax on electric vehicles ($250 a year for fully-electric vehicles, $200 for hybrids) to ensure that they pay something towards the cost of providing the roads they drive on. This has provoked predictable outrage, but I seriously question whether it will change anyone’s decision on whether to buy an electric car. Pallas said yesterday that Treasury assumes it will have no impact on vehicle demand.

Politically, despite all the problems it has/had created with Covid-19, the Andrews government remains dominant. This budget comes at the midway point of its four-year term, and the polls tell us Labor would comfortably win any election held now. The apparent eradication of the virus, at least while Victoria was isolated from the world, has turned a looming disaster into a political triumph.

Coronavirus is an ongoing story, with more twists and turns to come. Economic concerns have been ignored by Victorians and their government, but they will become more prominent as fears of the virus recede. This budget seems to leave out nothing in its willingness to lift the economy out of recession through government spending. But I did find one place where the government had exercised spending restraint.

On the same page as the commitment to spend $2200 million on the preliminaries of the Suburban Rail Loop, the government has committed to spend just $4 million over the next four years to improve bus services — the form of public transport that residents of the outer suburbs most rely on. •

The post Stimulus, and more, for Victoria appeared first on Inside Story.

But during those years I often thought that, notwithstanding Victoria’s image of itself as Australia’s most progressive state — which was in many respects true — there was nonetheless an authoritarian streak in its governments. And the most obvious illustration was their penchant, whatever their political complexion, for using the police as an adjunct to the State Revenue Office.

Anyone who has driven in New South Wales will know that signs tell you where the speed cameras are — so much so that if you do get caught by one, you really deserve to be booked for driving without due care and attention, too, because it’s that obvious. The police there also take double points off drivers who get booked on long weekends or public holidays. That’s because they actually want you to slow down… and if you don’t, they want you off the road.

Victoria, by contrast, has a lot more “road safety devices” (as they call them, with a nod to Orwell) — no fewer than seven on a short stretch of the Craigieburn bypass, for example — but they don’t tell you where they are, and they don’t take double points for offences on long weekends or public holidays. They also create lots more opportunities to catch you by having frequent speed limit changes over relatively short distances as you arrive in or leave country towns. And that’s because they don’t want you off the road as much as they want your money.

So it’s no surprise to discover that over the five years 2014–19 (the half decade before the pandemic) Victoria collected an annual average of $120.96 per head by way of fines. The all-states-and-territories average over this period was $89.95, and the only other jurisdiction that collected more than the average was the Australian Capital Territory, on $92.51.

Put differently, the average for all states and territories other than Victoria was $79.30, which is $41.66, or 34 per cent, less than Victoria. The NSW figure was $76.96, and in Tasmania, where I live, the police actually give you a warning for a first offence rather than take money off you — which helps explain the state’s figure of only $37.57. And remember, fines are intrinsically regressive — they hit poor people harder than rich people by taking a bigger share of their income.

Source: State and territory budget papers; ABS population data; author’s calculations.

Victoria’s approach carried over into the pandemic. During the first lockdown, when all states and territories were imposing broadly similar restrictions, Victoria collected almost $6 million in fines for breaches of lockdown restrictions, $2.2 million more than every other state and territory put together. Per 100,000 people, Victoria collected $89.90. The average for all other states and territories was $20.10 per 100,000 people. New South Wales, which had the same risk profile as Victoria — with Sydney and Melbourne being the principal points of entry into Australia for foreign visitors and returning Australians — only collected $15.90 per 100,000 people.

Source: Tammy Mills, “Ahead on Penalties: Victoria Leads Nation on COVID-19 Lockdown Fines,” Age, 28 May 2020; ABS population data; author’s calculations.

Were Victorians really four and a half times more likely than other Australians to breach lockdown regulations? Did Victoria really have four and a half as many people, relative to its population, who saw themselves as sovereign citizens exercising their constitutional (or God-given) right to gather in large numbers in defiance of health advice? Or did Victoria impose bigger fines than any other state or territory, deploy more police in order to detect the necessary breaches, and “fine first and ask questions afterwards” to a much greater extent than any other state?

While it seems unarguable that the main reason for Victoria’s second wave was egregious failures in the management of hotel quarantine, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the complacency that Dan Andrews detected among his fellow Victorians when the first lockdown regulations were eased wasn’t in some way a reflection of a sense of relief at getting out from under the most oppressive policing regime in the country.

And do you recall the Victorian government’s first action once it decided to lock down the twenty-eight public housing towers at the start of Victoria’s “second wave”? It was to send squads of police to surround the towers and fine anyone who might have been tempted to sneak in or out. It was left to volunteers to provide food and other essentials to the residents detained in those towers.

And when announcing the details of the renewed lockdown in early August, Dan Andrews openly bragged about the “opportunities” to impose “even bigger fines” on people who breached the new regulations. And of course this continued last week, when he proudly unveiled fines of $4957 (where do they come up with these numbers?) on people who attempt to breach the “ring of steel” between Melbourne and regional Victoria.

I’m not suggesting that laws or regulations imposed in the interests of people’s health shouldn’t be enforced, or that wilful or persistent breaches shouldn’t be penalised. But maybe, just maybe, there might be more effective methods than maximising the revenue gain to the state government.

The point is that Victoria’s heavy-handed, revenue-driven approach to enforcing lockdown regulations failed. It didn’t keep Victorians safe. The state government could have made different choices — not just about how it ran hotel quarantine, but also about how vigorously it policed lockdown restrictions, whether it instructed police to issue warnings for inadvertent or first-time breaches of lockdown regulations, the dollar amount of the fines it imposed, and so on. Other states, in particular New South Wales, made different choices — and also achieved much better outcomes. •

The post Victoria, a fine state appeared first on Inside Story.

But Morrison was having a lend at his Monday press conference when he repeatedly asserted that because his home town’s current fourteen-day new-case average is greater than five, “Sydney would be in curfew now if it was going on the same plan as Victoria.” Misleadingly framing an opponent’s position is par for the course in politics, and that’s what we’re back to: business as usual.

(His analysis is a furphy for at least the reason that it doesn’t take into account total active cases, which are what spread the virus. On Monday New South Wales had 139 known active cases, while Victoria had 1696. The NSW fourteen-day average of new cases was nine and Victoria’s was eighty-five. When Victoria gets down to nine, it will still have more than 139 total active cases — in fact, it will likely have several times that.)

Writing this from Canberra, which has never had many cases and has suffered relatively few restrictions, I don’t want to understate the misery Victorians, and particularly Melburnians, are experiencing. On and on it goes.

Expert opinion is split on the Victorian premier’s extended lockdown announced on Sunday, although hardly anyone seems to be saying it isn’t harsh enough. The critics point, among other things, to a geographic one-size-fits-all (or at least not enough sizes), too little consultation with business and unnecessary curfews.

You would expect any government to err on the side of caution, not least because it’s better to be able to announce down the track that restrictions are being relaxed earlier than expected than to have to do the opposite (which it did on Sunday). I’m not qualified to judge if it has struck the right balance, nor to assess the assertion that Andrews, having been either health minister or premier for seven of the eleven years since Melbourne’s limited tracing capacity was exposed by the 2009 swine flu, now has an aversion to exploring this continuing shortcoming.

But long before the pandemic, among committed Liberals, Andrews was the most loathed Labor leader in the country. They see him as the most “left wing” of the lot. In fact Victorian Liberal MPs, state and federal, seem to view his very existence as an affront, and many of them have quite evidently been bristling under the Covid-19 political détente. And parts of News Corp, not just Sky After Dark, have also whipped themselves into a “Dictator Dan” frenzy. Everyone’s spending more time these days on the internet, a place not known for its calming influence.

One of the peculiarities of political polling in the age of Covid-19 is that Morrison’s sky-high prime ministerial approval ratings have been accompanied by only modest voting-intention leads for his government. (The Coalition’s longevity in office probably plays a part in this.) The most recent Newspoll (and Newspoll is the pollster the political class obsesses over) had both parties on 50 per cent after preferences, down from a four-point Coalition lead the fortnight earlier. The PM’s personal ratings have also declined from a very high base (although not nearly as much as Andrews’s).

According to Phillip Coorey in the Australian Financial Review this week, “federal sources” attributed the Newspoll findings to “frustration with the Morrison government being unable to influence border closures and other state government impositions.”

A prime minister’s authority rests mostly on perceptions of electability among his or her colleagues. The lower a leader’s standing, the less able he or she is to withstand the demands of excitable colleagues. If you find it hard to believe a change in political rhetoric can be determined by small movements in opinion polls, you haven’t been paying attention to Australian politics in recent decades.

On Monday night Andrews told the ABC’s 7.30 he’s not remotely interested in the politics of the current situation, and that’s probably true in the sense that in the short term, public opinion is almost irrelevant. But he must at times, late at night, ponder his longer-term prospects. He would hope that Victoria will have returned to Covid normality (like the other states) well before Christmas, and all or much will be forgiven.

When the whole crisis is over, all our leaders will derive credit for their handling of Covid-19, but Andrews will always labour under his ultimate responsibility for that second wave. If there were no particular discernible reason for Victoria’s tragic outlier status, or one that was beyond the state government’s control, the mid-term politics would be pretty straightforward: strong leader takes difficult decisions and gets electorate through crisis.

But it’s hard to see Andrews still being premier at the next election in 2022, not (directly) because of Sunday’s or any other announcement, but due to that original sin — those hotel quarantine blunders — which has led to all these deaths and misery. That will always haunt him.

And as for Morrison, now that he’s shown he’s willing to take the gloves off, another political hotspot will demand attention: Queensland, where there’s an election on 31 October. He kept out of last month’s Northern Territory poll, but those days are long behind us.

In fact, as we press publish, that second front has just opened up. •

The post The gloves are off appeared first on Inside Story.

For an event so predictable, the Victorian government seemed strangely unprepared. The optics were all wrong — armed police swarming to block off the towers amid stories of families left without food and unable to get other supplies. It’s strange that no response plan was waiting to be activated, providing a team of community liaison workers who could coordinate interpreters and the provision of food and welfare support, discreetly backed by police and emergency personnel.

Victoria has geared its Covid-19 response around a tightly controlled system of testing, case notification and contact tracing, poised to swoop on an outbreak and close it down. What this paradigm neglects is the fact that communities are complex webs in which information, resources and responses circulate in unpredictable ways. Covid-19 is not a single-event disaster, it is an unfolding pandemic during which adaptive and ground-up responses need to be nurtured and brought into the decision-making structure.

While the official discourse has been that SARS-CoV-2 can spread among rich and poor alike, some official statements have conveyed a sense that the poor have somehow brought this outbreak on themselves. Officials have admonished us not to use the opportunity for discrimination but have also made coded references to ethnic difference by attributing spread to large family gatherings.

It is hard to imagine a hard lockdown being pursued in the same way if outbreaks had occurred in expensive Toorak apartment blocks. Indeed, outbreaks may already have occurred there, but they would be taken as isolated occurrences rather than a dangerous cluster. Public housing blocks are already problematic social spaces, and have long been the targets of health and welfare “interventions.” These blocks have a prior label as potential hotspots, so almost any multiple of cases of Covid-19, no matter how small, would be enough to trigger drastic action.

This is not to say that such concerns are unwarranted. One of the emblematic sites of the 2003 SARS epidemic was Block E of the Amoy Gardens in Hong Kong. SARS spread through this private housing estate extremely rapidly, with more than 300 infections almost overnight and an eventual toll of 329 cases and forty-two deaths. After the event, there was meticulous inspection of possible routes of transmission, with plumbing systems and airshafts found to be the main culprits. Although recommendations were made for reviews of indoor air quality and ventilation design, there was little appetite for change, as usual, once the crisis had passed.

Criticism has naturally been directed at Victorian premier Daniel Andrews for failing to prevent the outbreak. Much of that criticism is misplaced, given that most of the dynamics of the outbreak are purely chance and similar outbreaks will inevitably occur across Australia. But the corollary of political leaders claiming credit for how well their jurisdiction has handled the epidemic is that they should anticipate opprobrium when things don’t go so well. Now might be a good time for politicians to adopt a more modest tone in the face of the epidemic.

A striking rebuke to the politicisation of epidemic dynamics came last week from Scotland. Its record in curbing Covid-19 — with per capita infection rates five times lower than England’s — has not stopped prime minister Boris Johnson from reacting furiously to suggestions that Scotland might restrict movement from the English side of the border. Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon gave an impassioned and justified defence of her government’s response to the pandemic, slamming Johnson’s resort to standard political sniping and declaring that if she were ever to refuse to consider life-saving options for political reasons, that would be the day she stopped doing her job properly.

Ever alert to the left’s discomfort with the deployment of uniformed services, there have been predictable calls from the Victorian opposition to add to the police presence by putting military forces “on the ground to assist with the growing Covid-19 crisis.” Putting aside the wedge-politicking behind this call, the advantage of the defence forces in circumstances like this lies in their training and the command structure under which they operate.

The most forceful criticism of the Andrews government is that its use of private contractors to provide security services in hotels for quarantined returnees may have been a mistake. Security work is among the areas of semi-precarious employment that have grown enormously over the past few decades. Along with cleaning, catering and myriad other service roles that are essential to modern enterprises, these services have been contracted out at the lowest bid. At the bottom of the pile in this business model are the staff themselves, who are rarely rewarded for loyalty and competence. Little wonder, then, that gaps in training and following protocols have appeared when these services are called on in pandemic response.

Covid-19 will continue to emerge across Australia. Public sector response teams need to be created to deal with this inevitability. They need to recruit staff, invest in training and provide reasonable job security. This will be expensive, but if the past week has proved anything, it is that it will be much less expensive than the alternative. •

The post A lesson in humility appeared first on Inside Story.

Out of that intervention came Victoria’s current factional system, which found itself displayed on 60 Minutes last Sunday and the front page of the Age the following morning. The 1970s power-sharing scheme, designed to ensure that no faction dominated, helped create the incentive for aggressive branch stacking.

In electoral terms, today’s Victorian branch is a very different beast from that of half a century ago. Factional intrigue and bastardry (including accusations of branch-stacking on both sides) are never far away, but this didn’t stop Labor from becoming the natural party of state government in the early 1980s and, since then, a constant source of electoral strength for federal Labor. The occasional factional brawls have probably seemed irrelevant to voters more focused on issues such as health and education.

Inevitably, this week’s revelations raise the question of whether the current round of branch-stacking is different in kind or degree. Perhaps the main difference lies in the vulnerability of the perpetrators to state-of-the-art video and audio surveillance. Indeed, the quality of the evidence obtained by Nine and the Age would excite envy within the security services of some small nation-states.

Even the silliest politicians know that they are often just one indiscreet observation away from a surreptitiously recorded career-killer (think Hillary Clinton and the “deplorables”). But who would have thought that the same risks could attend a factional leader discussing a bit of branch-stacking with his closest (taxpayer-funded) comrades, with audio accompanied by video for good measure. You can’t trust anyone, can you?

The offence for which right-wing faction leader Adem Somyurek was dismissed is, of course, the least of his problems. A swearing politician is hardly novel, and while some of the boundaries he crossed may have brought back memories of Richard Nixon’s White House, quite a few MPs will be relieved that some of their own office outbursts have not (as far as they know) been recorded. Alas, emails can be equally revealing, as Somyurek’s factional colleague Anthony Byrne has discovered. Do you get the impression that these folks don’t delete many emails? This electronic warfare must be expected to continue.

Assessing how much of the branch-stacking and related activity constitutes criminal (as opposed to internal party) offences is best left to the legally trained, although the spectacle of a minister of the crown attempting to induce a party member to forge signatures might be characterised (in Sybil Fawlty’s words) as “a little tricky.” It is probably safe to assume that sufficient of the video and audio evidence would be admissible if charges proceed.

What the current turmoil may presage is a change in the Victorian electorate’s tolerance of factional warfare, since the loss of three ministers (at time of writing) would seem to fall into Oscar Wilde’s “careless” category. Voters prefer that the premier is in charge of the state, and suggestions that he was in any way beholden to Somyurek (who was able to indecently push his way back into cabinet three and a half years after his dismissal for sexist bullying in 2015) might raise uncomfortable questions.

In premier Daniel Andrews’s favour, the next state election is nearly two and a half years away. Indeed, another federal election will be held before Victoria goes to the polls, and the involvement of Victorian federal Labor MPs makes this Anthony Albanese’s problem too. It is virtually impossible to envisage Labor winning the next federal election without the usual solid contribution from Victoria.

Revealingly, in all of Somyurek’s colourful observations, there was nary a mention of policy or ideology: the agenda was completely about the acquisition and maintenance of power and control. The cliché about concern with “power for power’s sake” is no less true for being a cliché.

This should serve as a useful reminder that factional labels are not what they used to be. The days when left and right represented competing political philosophies and policies, to be accommodated within a broad church, are largely gone. Only senior citizens can recall battles within the party over communism and foreign policy, and those with memories of the passionate debate over uranium mining are no longer young either. Today, the nearest thing to an ideological breach is over asylum seekers.

Supporters of the factional system will cite its value in enabling its leaders to sort out behind closed doors any policy differences that do emerge, thus avoiding “party split” headlines. While this contention is not without merit, others would see value in a political party having an open and democratic exchange of views involving a wider range of participants.

If factions and factional control are often about patronage and the dispersal of the spoils of office, the problem has only been deepened by an important parliamentary reform in 2003. A restructured upper house has meant more winnable positions for Labor, tipping more safe seats into the “patronage pot” previously occupied solely by very safe lower house seats. The need to select electorally appealing candidates for marginal single-member upper house seat contests has gone.

In that context, a glance at Labor’s upper house membership reveals either a marvellous triumph of multiculturalism or an ethnic patronage system in which Somyurek was a master practitioner. Perhaps it is both, but it would be naive to ignore the role of branch-stacking in this outcome. And, of course, MPs are only a part of the picture: MPs have staff; ministers have even more staff. The tapes make clear that a keen interest in policy is not a key selection criterion for at least some of those staff positions.

Sunday’s 60 Minutes reminded viewers of the customary rationale for what some may criticise as ethnic patronage: “A disadvantaged community is empowered and Labor’s base is broadened” — presumably even more so if the new members are actually aware of their party memberships? In passing, one wonders whether, if an “Anglo” faction leader had been seen to be manipulating ethnic groups in the manner revealed, certain ugly questions might not have arisen.

Steve Bracks and Jenny Macklin seem suitable enough appointees to oversee the administration of the Victorian branch for the next three years, although the case for the work to be done by other than former politicians was not unreasonable. Bracks has already identified some of the obvious challenges — such as ensuring that people counted as members have actually made a conscious decision to join the party. The fact that as few as 16,000 members are on the books (not all of whom can possibly be genuine) is a timely reminder of how unrepresentative all political parties have become. The activities exposed in recent days almost certainly (partly) help explain why.

Preselection (for federal and state elections) will be a key issue in the administration period and a likely source of conflict. History tells us that an interregnum like this often favours the status quo, with sitting members re-endorsed. The obvious proviso is that any who are implicated in criminal activity might need to seek alternative employment.

Bracks and Macklin are not running a political science seminar, but it might be useful if they considered the realistic and desirable role of party branches and party members in the twenty-first century. A subset of that issue is the role of factions. The fit-for-purpose question looms large over this exercise. Finally, the role of electorate and ministerial staff also warrants consideration, perhaps more so given that they are publicly funded. An interesting three years beckon. •

The post Spoils of office appeared first on Inside Story.

Cain’s death on Monday, two weeks after suffering a stroke at the age of eighty-eight, is an opportunity to reassess his legacy, correct the distortions, and refocus on the achievements of this thoroughly decent man, a gutsy, principled reformer who led Labor in Victoria out of the wilderness to become the state’s longest-serving Labor premier.

By nature a loner, he nevertheless reached the top by working closely with and ultimately leading teams of talented individuals bent on following their own paths. Those paths often clashed with the views of powerful people and interest groups — not least, then-treasurer Paul Keating — but his government’s achievements speak for themselves.

As opposition leader during the 1990–91 recession, Jeff Kennett blamed Cain’s government for every business collapse in Victoria and branded Labor as “the guilty party.” Labor certainly made economic mistakes, but it also became the fall guy for mistakes made by others — the Reserve Bank, Keating himself, and the people running the businesses that collapsed. It was guilty of contributory negligence and poor budget management under pressure, but that was it.

Conventional history praises the Hawke–Keating government’s economic achievements, but forgets that the state that led the nation out of recession in the 1980s was Victoria — mainly because the state government stimulated economic activity, reformed its own role, created incentives for economic development and gave the state a coherent blueprint for growth.

When Australia headed into recession in 1982, the new Cain government moved into action, producing a big-spending budget financed by a combination of higher taxes and raids on money squirrelled away in “hollow logs” by state authorities. That budget and its economic reforms saw Victoria displace New South Wales as the state with the lowest unemployment. From 1983 to 1989, when unemployment averaged 8.5 per cent in NSW, it was just 6.75 per cent in Victoria.

Several years ago, renowned journalist and academic Philip Chubb began work on a new biography of Cain, focusing his sharp eye on the contrast between its idealistic, reformist, Keynesian approach and the Hawke government’s market orientation and often conservative political pragmatism. Keating resented alternative ideas from any direction, particularly from Victoria, and many of the Cain government’s problems were exacerbated when Hawke and Keating starved the states of borrowing rights and made them bear the brunt of federal budget cuts.

Chubb’s premature death from cancer cut his project short. Pity: it would have been a very interesting book.

The Cain government’s reforms ranged across virtually every area of government, though thirty years later most are barely visible through the overlay of changes by subsequent governments. No area of social policy was left untouched in its hunger to reform the state after twenty-seven years in opposition. It was the first government to build hospitals in outer suburbs, to get serious about occupational health and safety, and to reduce smoking rates. It liberalised trading hours and liquor licensing, legalised prostitution, ended the electoral gerrymander, developed low-cost outer-suburban housing and brought all public transport under one ticketing system. It forced the AFL to stage its football finals at the MCG, and built the Great Southern Stand to help house them.

Two physical legacies stand out:

• The Australian Open of today could not be remotely the tournament it is without the vision and speed with which Cain grasped the need for the Melbourne Park venue, and his political courage in pushing it through against a self-seeking coalition of noisy opponents, led by then opposition leader Jeff Kennett but also including rail unions, greenies and many others on Cain’s own side of politics. Kennett made his attack personal, dubbing Melbourne Park “Cain’s cathedral.” And so it is. Without him, it would not exist — and the Australian Open would be a minor tournament.

• The Southbank precinct was created under the direction of Cain’s planning minister and close political ally Evan Walker. It quickly became the symbol of a new Melbourne in which people could stroll over the Yarra to a complex of restaurants, shops and bars ranged along the river in an area formerly home to factories, warehouses and used-car yards.

If you want to see the legacy the Cain government left Victoria, that is where you find it.

Some politicians become accidental leaders. John Cain, by contrast, seemed marked out for leadership from birth. Even before he entered politics, he was being pointed out as a future Labor leader. Once he entered parliament, it seemed just a matter of time. And once he became leader, he led Labor to one of its biggest-ever victories.

Before he emerged, Labor’s longest-serving leader and premier in Victoria was his father, John Cain senior. A working-class activist, the older Cain was a commonsense, tough, honest Labor moderate, respected by the public and his opponents. Over his two decades as party leader, 1937 to 1957, he was twice elected to govern Victoria, and did so with some success. But each time he was felled by forces beyond his control — public anger over bank nationalisation in 1947, and the split in the Labor Party in 1955.

John Cain junior, born in 1931, was his only son. He grew up in an austere, grey Victorian home on Northcote Hill, looking down on the city. By the time he was six, his father was Labor leader. One suspects his childhood was a lonely one. He would certainly have stood out at Northcote High when his father was premier, and when he was sent to Scotch College it must surely have felt like enemy territory.

But the boy was bright and diligent. He sailed through a law degree at Melbourne University, became a solicitor in Preston, and was elected president of the Law Institute. He also became an activist in the Victorian ALP, then run by a dictatorship of left-wing unions fronted by state secretary Bill Hartley. Getting into power was not their priority; exercising power within the party was all they cared about.

Cain made common cause with white-collar union leader Barney Williams and a group of other aspiring lawyer-politicians — Xavier Connor, John Button, Richard McGarvie and Barry Jones, among others — to build support in party branches and lobby for the democratisation of the Victorian branch. Victoria was by far Labor’s most unsuccessful state branch: it had been out of power at state level since 1955, and its miserable performance cost Labor the 1969 federal election.

Eventually the federal executive intervened, dissolved the state branch, and reconstituted it in a way designed to prevent any one faction controlling it again. Cain’s group became the Independents, a small but influential faction holding the balance between left and right. In 1976 he himself became the MLA for Bundoora, and was immediately given a frontbench job as shadow planning minister. It was quickly obvious that he was the party’s natural leader.

But that didn’t happen immediately. In 1977, when state leader Clyde Holding decided to move to federal politics, his deputy Frank Wilkes was elected to succeed him. A stolid, self-disciplined man, Wilkes did his best, but the job was clearly beyond him, and he was comprehensively outshone by Liberal premier Dick Hamer. Cain’s first leadership challenge foundered on opposition from the left, but in August 1981, with an election drawing close and Hamer’s successor, Lindsay Thompson, off to a good start, the left dropped its opposition and Cain became leader.

Eight months later he led Labor to a smashing electoral victory. The party picked up seventeen seats, almost all in Melbourne, and won 53.8 per cent of votes after preferences. That victory was offset in the Legislative Council, however, where every two country votes had the same weight as three in the city. The Coalition would retain control of the council almost throughout Labor’s time in government.

Cain had become Labor’s first premier since his father had been defeated twenty-seven years earlier. Labor branches and policy committees still mattered in 1982, and the party came in with a massive reform agenda — much of it led by ministers from the party’s right faction, including Rob Jolly (treasurer), Steve Crabb (Transport) and David White (initially Water Supply, later Health).

It was a government of action. It set out economic plans in great detail, and seemed to be tackling every problem. Its Keynesian pump-priming clearly worked, and despite constant attacks from Kennett, newly elected as opposition leader — and a bitter controversy when Cain sacked the governor, Sir Brian Murray, for accepting a free flight to the United States — it appeared to be heading for a comfortable re-election in 1985.

That didn’t happen. Kennett’s sheer energy kept the Liberals in the contest, and in voters’ eyes he clearly had the better of Cain during the campaign. The Liberals and Nationals, running as a coalition in Victoria for the first time since 1950, won a 3.1 per cent swing and came close to victory. The Legislative Council outcome rested on the seat of Nunawading, which ended up as a dead heat — temporarily resolved when the returning officer drew the name of Labor candidate Bob Ives out of a hat.

That election exposed Cain’s limitations as well as his strengths. He was a warm human being in one-to-one conversation, but found that warmth hard to project to the wider public. To some, he came over as reserved and withdrawn, a stickler for probity, a man said to buy his own stamps for personal correspondence rather than use those provided by the taxpayer. His dismissal of the governor for the minor sin of taking a free flight cost him support among a class of Victorians already worried by the growth in the size and reach of government.

That same sense of probity made Cain refuse to take advantage of the fluke draw out of a hat in Nunawading, which gave Labor a temporary majority in the Legislative Council. Briefly, Labor had the numbers to end the Coalition’s hold on the council by bringing in Senate-style proportional representation (as Victoria has now). But Cain refrained from doing so until the courts had ruled (for a fresh election in the seat) and the voters had voted (electing the Liberal). The Coalition maintained its veto power on legislation and Kennett, for populist reasons, used it to block any tax rises in real terms — until he himself became premier years later.

This put the Victorian budget in a straitjacket. Labor had given priority to stimulating the economy rather than getting the budget back in balance; Kennett’s veto made it impossible to achieve a budget balance except by spending cuts, which the Labor family refused to accept. An inquiry by Melbourne University economist John Nieuwenhuysen came up with a sensible agenda for tax reform, but Kennett’s veto made it impossible to implement.

At the same time, the Hawke government was getting its budget into balance primarily by cutting grants to the states — while simultaneously limiting state borrowing to absurdly low levels. For Cain and his ministers, governing was no longer much fun: little reform could be attempted when there was no money to pay for it.

Cain won a third term in office in October 1988, but only just. The Coalition gained a further 1.2 per cent swing to win 50.5 per cent of the two-party vote. But Labor hung on to all but one of its marginal seats, scraping back with a 46–42 majority in the Assembly but again faced with a Coalition-controlled Legislative Council.

In hindsight, it would have been better for Cain’s reputation had he lost. Victoria was about to enter a whirlpool of financial disasters. The state government really had little or no responsibility for them; they were produced by a cocktail of poor management by executives and directors of the companies and Keating and the Reserve Bank’s terrible misjudgement in raising the cash interest rate to a crippling 18 per cent. At that level, firms were bound to crash, and it was mostly in Victoria that they did.

The problems escalated in early 1990 when the Geelong-based Pyramid Building Society collapsed — just months after treasurer Rob Jolly had assured Victorians it was solvent. In fact, the state’s regulators of building societies were too under-resourced to know what shape Pyramid’s books were really in. Especially in Geelong, depositors who had been lured in by Pyramid’s offer of high interest rates blamed the state government, not the directors, and demanded that their deposits be guaranteed. Cain, with no fiscal room to move, could not do so.

Worse was yet to come. At the government’s urging, the venerable State Bank of Victoria had acquired a merchant bank, Tricontinental, to lend to the flashy end of town, and had appointed a confident young finance guy, Ian Johns, to run it. Neither the bank’s senior executives nor its directors really understood the business or supervised it adequately. The entire Australian banking system was reckless in this era, but Tricontinental, under Johns, picked up the clients the banks had rejected. By the time the bill for losses came in, it was $3.5 billion — more than the State Bank’s entire capital reserves.

By then, Cain had thrown in the towel. Years of increasing party infighting and resistance to government actions had worn down his will to fight. The rail, tram and bus union kept calling wildcat strikes for which the government was blamed. Personal relations among ministers became frayed, former allies became enemies, and the government seemed almost visibly to be falling apart. On 7 August 1990, Cain resigned, and his deputy Joan Kirner took over.

Most political careers end in failure, but Cain’s end was particularly bitter. His government had crashed in the polls, his faction had crashed within the party, and he had few friends left. It was painful to watch the vitriol poured out against this decent man, with virtually no one willing to risk their standing by defending him. He remained a loyal team member, sitting quietly on the backbench until the election two years later; he would not cause a by-election that Labor might lose.

He had some satisfaction seven years later when one of his former staffers, Steve Bracks, defeated Kennett to lead Labor back to power — albeit, leading a far more fiscally cautious, middle-of-the-road government than his own. He returned to public life as chair of the State Library of Victoria and lent his support to fruitless moves within Labor to curb the power of the unions and factions.

Cain wrote his own memoir of his time in government: a typically candid one, which underlined his sense that by their third term in government everyone was looking after their own interests at the expense of the team’s — and that, indeed, the Labor team had more or less ceased to exist. Mutual trust had run dry.

For all that, the first two terms of his government were years of achievement and reform. In many ways, he and his colleagues followed on from Hamer’s reformist government, tackling the areas the Liberals had found too hard. They put a new focus on Victoria’s economic opportunities, and what government could do to foster them.

For better, for worse, they ended Victoria’s long history of autonomous state-owned enterprises and brought all government activity under political control. The public service became more professional but also more oriented to serving the government’s agenda. Ministerial offices grew in power — and so did many arms of the Labor Party that wanted a share of the action.

At the head of this somewhat chaotic body, John Cain set a personal example of stoic courage, integrity and altruistic endeavour. Had the seats at the 1988 election reflected the votes, he would have been remembered for those qualities and for his earlier reforms, rather than for the chaos of the last two years. He was one of the most admirable leaders Labor has produced. •

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When he was elected seven years earlier, in 1992, Kennett had inherited a state hit hard by Paul Keating’s “recession we had to have.” Government debt had gone through the ceiling, unemployment had spiked, a state-owned bank and a major building society had collapsed, the population was shrinking and all manner of services had been crippled by rolling industrial action. Though Kennett dealt with these crises with brutality and even callousness, and though many of his cures would later be seen as worse than the disease, Victoria had performed a remarkable recovery by 1999.

We might expect the electorate to reward the party presiding over such a recovery, regardless of how it had come about. That certainly seems to have been what the Liberals were banking on ahead of that year’s election. But despite the expectation of an effortless win, Victorians took the opportunity to dispatch Kennett and replace him with Labor’s Steve Bracks.

It’s easy to forget just how surprising that result was. Bracks went on to be an incredibly popular premier, retiring well before the electorate had the chance to turn sour on him. The Labor Party still wheels him out when it is feeling nervous — as it was before the 2012 Melbourne by-election, for instance. So it’s tempting to regard his rise as somehow inevitable. Of course his low-key approach was more attractive than Kennett’s combative style; of course people felt bruised and weary after six years of relentless reform; of course rural Victoria felt neglected and was ready to shift allegiance.

But it wasn’t “time” in Victoria in the sense that it had been time for Labor’s Gough Whitlam in 1972. Indeed, Bracks’s victory over Kennett very nearly didn’t happen; on election night, and on the night after, and for four whole weeks following polling day on 18 September 1999, it wasn’t clear who would lead the state into the new millennium. For a full month, Victorians had no idea whether the state was taking a breath before plunging into another few years of Kennett-era hyperactivity, or whether respite was coming with the more cautious, easygoing, no-surprises Bracks.

Kennett had been soaring in the opinion polls before the election — so much so that Labor decided there was little mileage in attacking him personally — and the Coalition had a healthy margin of thirteen seats in an eighty-eight-seat chamber. Channel Nine was so sure the election would be boring it decided to wrap its election night coverage around its Rugby League broadcast. (Sure, the Melbourne Storm were in the preliminaries for the first time, but still, this was footy-mad Victoria.) Journalist George Megalogenis reported that Bracks’s reaction to a poll in the Australian predicting a cliff-hanger result was a suspicion that “the Australian is on drugs.”

Quite early in the evening, though, it was clear something had gone wrong for the Coalition. Voters had swung against the government, particularly in regional towns, to a totally unexpected degree: by 7.2 per cent in Ripon, by 8.1 per cent in Bendigo East, by 9.4 per cent in Gisborne. Labor’s targeting of the regions had been much more successful than even it had anticipated. (“Victoria has a new Country Party,” said political scientist Brian Costar on ABC radio that night, “and its name is the Labor Party.”)

Even on the night, the future premier remained cautiously pessimistic, suggesting victory was many steps away yet. But across town, Kennett sounded remarkably like a man defeated. “I think the public has decided to return a Labor government,” he told supporters at the Hilton Hotel. “If that is the case I will accept that decision with grace and get on my white charger and ride into the sunset. In accepting responsibility I have always said they either love Kennett or they hate him. Looks as though the vast majority, or the majority, probably hate him.” The cream, as journalist Peter Coster remarked in the Herald Sun, had indeed been sucked out of the Kennett cowlick.

By next morning, though, it was apparent that the game was by no means over. At an impromptu press conference, Kennett said he was off the charger and back in his office, where he could see “a fair range of options… from a close Coalition win to a hung parliament to a Labor win.” The papers were reporting forty-two seats for the Coalition and forty-one for Labor, with forty-five needed for a clear majority. A clutch of seats remained too close to call: Mitcham and Carrum in the suburban southeast, Swan Hill up in the north, and Gippsland East.

And then there was Frankston East. On polling day, Trish McLellan, wife of the incumbent member, Peter McLellan, arrived at his unit to find her husband had died of a heart attack overnight. The fifty-six-year-old Liberal-turned-independent had been in high spirits on election eve: having managed to more than double his margin at the previous election, he felt he could capitalise on public antipathy towards Kennett now that he had gone independent in that close marginal seat. His death meant the electoral commission had to declare the Frankston East poll invalid, with a re-run to occur at a later date.

By the end of the week following the election, it seemed possible that Kennett could be back with a majority. An independent — abalone diver and first-time candidate Craig Ingram — had taken Gippsland East with a whopping 22 per cent swing, but the Nationals were edging ahead of another independent (and notorious Australian Rules ruckman), “Big Carl” Ditterich, in Swan Hill. What’s more, the count in Geelong, which had been in Labor’s column, had tightened tremendously: by the Friday, Labor’s Ian Trezise was just twenty votes ahead of Kennett’s housing minister, Ann Henderson.

If the Coalition could hang on to both Swan Hill and Geelong it would reach forty-four seats and push Labor back down to forty. With a win later in Frankston East, Kennett could grab a miracle majority; even if he lost that seat, Labor would find it impossible to form government without Geelong. With the full crossbench onside, Labor’s best-case scenario seemed to be forty-four seats apiece. That would almost certainly lead to a fresh election, at which voters who had wanted to register a protest vote rather than change the government would, Kennett assumed, come to their senses. It was, for a few days of close counting, a tantalising prospect for Liberals.

Overnight on Friday, though, Labor won Geelong. Trezise was ahead by sixteen votes, with only fifteen overseas ballots left to arrive, making it potentially a victory by just one vote. If the result survived a recount, the possibility of a Kennett majority was more or less foreclosed. Over the days that followed, Labor hung on to Mitcham and won Carrum, both by less than 400 votes.

And so the state’s political correspondents shifted their gaze to the three crossbenchers who might hold the fate of the state in their hands. To win, Labor would not only need the support of all three — it would also need to win the Frankston East re-run. Kennett needed just two of the crossbenchers — or one, if he could somehow wrangle Frankston back to his column. Those three independents — Susan Davies (Gippsland West) and Russell Savage (Mildura), both veterans, and first-timer Craig Ingram — exploited their newfound importance to the hilt by negotiating as a bloc with Kennett and Bracks.

On 25 September, as the Kangaroos walloped Carlton in the 1999 AFL grand final, the troika published a charter setting out their joint demands. The list included the reversal of some of Kennett’s most controversial policies, most notably his stripping away of powers of the state’s auditor-general, as well as a judicial inquiry into an ambulance services scandal and major reforms to the state’s upper house. Steve Bracks gave a more-or-less immediate in-principle thumbs up to the entire charter.

Kennett did not. Though he offered what can only be described as humiliating concessions through the first weeks of October — to deal with the ambulance scandal that had played out on his watch; to restore powers to the auditor-general; and to moderate his behaviour and be more consultative — he stopped short of accepting changes to the Legislative Council, offering only an inquiry. Constitutional reform was not something electors had been voting on during the recent campaign, he argued; there was no mandate for such a change. And he warned that, without the support of the Coalition, Labor could not reform the upper house — where the conservative side of politics held a strong majority — either.

In any case, it appears that Kennett never thought he could win over the entire bloc. His hopes rested on gaining the support of the two more conservative MPs in the group: Savage, the former police officer, and Ingram, the self-described conservative from a Nationals area. Susan Davies — a one-time Labor candidate who had described Kennett as a “bully” who needed to be stood up to — was never counted as likely to back Kennett.

The courting, especially of the politically inexperienced Ingram, grew more and more intense through October. Kennett, aided by Nationals leader Pat McNamara, promised to back Ingram’s wish for more water to be directed into the Snowy River. Bracks managed to get Ingram into a meeting with NSW premier Bob Carr, who had a key role to play in any Snowy deal. Although Carr made no promises, the access seemed to impress the as-yet-unsworn MP. Carr also released a letter from Kennett showing that not so long ago the Victorian premier had been less than enthusiastic about environmental flows for the Snowy.

All the while, anticipation built over the Frankston East re-run, scheduled for 16 October. To have a hope of forming a minority government, Labor had to win that Saturday. Its candidate, Matt Viney, a pollster for the party, pulled out all stops. He ploughed his own funds into a campaign video — an actual VHS tape to be delivered to every household in the district. The party dispatched a young Daniel Andrews from the state office to oversee the ground operations. Steve Bracks’s face appeared on billboards up and down the shopping strip — something the man himself seemed visibly squeamish about when he visited the seat, according to the Age’s Sandra McKay.

Jeff Kennett, meanwhile, promised a $39 million funding boost for Frankston Hospital. Members of Victoria Police’s 160-strong Force Response Unit were sent down to Frankston for high-visibility foot patrols, eliciting outrage not only from Labor but also from Police Association assistant secretary Paul Mullett, who told the Age that the timing was just a little too cute. Trish McLellan announced that, days before his death, her late husband Peter had endorsed the Liberal candidate, Cherie McLean, and a leaflet circulated quoting the freshly buried MP as saying, “If I don’t win I hope Cherie does.”

The desperation in both campaigns was palpable. The whole state was watching. Under normal circumstances, Frankston East was a fairly natural if marginal Labor seat — but no one knew how local voters would respond to having the casting vote on which party would form government.

And even if Frankston East went for Matt Viney and Labor, would it be enough to avert a fresh election? Some constitutional experts found themselves explaining to disbelieving reporters that the final decision — to accept a Labor minority government, or go to a fresh election — rested with the governor, Sir James Gobbo (a family name nowadays associated more with police misconduct). Would Sir James accept the crossbenchers’ written assurances that they would support Labor? Indeed, would he recognise the support of Craig Ingram, not yet a sworn-in MP? Or would he feel it was safer to reconvene parliament and have the question tested on the floor? If Kennett lost the seemingly inevitable no-confidence vote, might he advise the governor to dissolve parliament and call a fresh election, as per Westminster custom? Would the governor refuse that request and commission Bracks, or might he be tempted to turn back to the people? Just a month ahead of the 1999 national referendum on the republic, the fate of Victoria’s government looked like it might rest on the vagaries of vice-regal discretion.

In the end, of course, there was no last-minute constitutional skulduggery, no fresh election. Labor triumphed in Frankston East, Matt Viney winning a shade under 55 per cent of the two-party vote. The following day, Bracks’s chief aid, Tim Pallas, would fly east to Gippsland and then all the way north to Mildura to collect the signatures of all three independents on a memorandum of understanding to be presented to Gobbo as evidence of Labor’s majority support — evidence Government House would find satisfactory. After a full month of grasping for a political lifeline, Kennett would relent, resigning as premier and as leader of the Liberal Party.

Things very nearly didn’t turn out that way. Perhaps Kennett could have swung a fresh election — and perhaps, knowing how close things were, he could have run a winning campaign. Or, as Russell Savage later suggested, perhaps the Coalition could have retained government if Kennett had resigned the leadership; perhaps a different leader, with a more conciliatory style, could have won those three over.

Tiny quirks of fate — the small group of voters who decided the result in Geelong; one man’s weak heart in Frankston East; a former abalone diver’s interest in the Snowy River; the latitude afforded to a memorandum of understanding by the chap in Government House — turned out to be as important as the large swing in the mood of the electorate. Cunning, skill, good rhetoric, effective fundraising — all these things are vital in politics. But so too, it seems, is good luck. •

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Only with a lot of guile and resourcefulness have treasurer Tim Pallas and his Treasury team delivered a projected budget surplus, using a mix of cash-and-grab raids on obscure state funds, small tax rises in obscure areas, and unstated, obscure and unidentifiable spending cuts.

How much could go wrong when your state is booming economically — real spending in Victoria grew almost 5 per cent in 2018 — and is one of the nation’s two growth engines? When your party is fresh from a sweeping election victory in which it decimated the opposition? And when a flood of migration from overseas and interstate keeps creating jobs and new spending like a magic pudding?

Well, plenty has gone wrong for Tim Pallas in the past year (offset by his stunning success in losing weight). For example:

• Housing prices in Victoria have slumped by 10 per cent and home sales by 15 per cent, cutting more than $1 billion off the state’s stamp duty receipts in 2018–19 alone, and even more in the years ahead.

• New national accounting standards will require governments to bring many of their public–private partnership projects back on the budget books — a long-overdue move that Victoria supported. But it abruptly lifts the state’s net debt by $9.6 billion, accounting for the bulk of a spectacular growth in net debt from $23 billion to $39 billion. It also shifts $481 million of previously off-budget interest bills onto the budget.

• Labor won its second term last November on a platform that committed it to more free-spending budgets to boost investment in transport infrastructure and social spending alike. And it doesn’t pay to break promises.

The last four years have been high summer for the Victorian economy. In 2018, real spending in the state was almost 20 per cent higher than in 2014. The state now has 433,000 more people in jobs, three-quarters of them full-time, than when Labor took office in November 2014. And growth has been so high because the state’s population has increased by 570,000 in four years, or almost 10 per cent; Melbourne alone has grown by roughly 500,000 in that time. It’s been boom time.

But this boom time has not seen the state salt away funds to tide it through the inevitable bust. On the contrary. The budget surpluses have been kept small because Labor had other priorities — many of them. In the Andrews government’s first term, the state’s wage bill jumped by a third, total spending on services rose 30 per cent — and, after a slow start, transport investment almost trebled, spearheaded by its policy of removing fifty level crossings from Melbourne’s congested roads.

Sure, taxes rose in line with the increased services. Debt was piled up to finance the road and rail projects, justifiably, given how cheap it is for governments to borrow. It all went down well with the voters, who gave Labor a landslide win at November’s election.

By then, however, the housing boom had already bust. The Victorian Treasury estimates that falling home prices and sales cost the budget more than $1 billion in 2018–19, and roughly $1.25 billion a year for the next three years, relative to its forecasts in last year’s budget. (Peter Martin, then at the Age, warned at the time that Treasury’s forecasts were far too rosy. He sure was proved right.)

The boom saw stamp duty on property transfers become Victoria’s biggest tax. Its collapse has punched one hole in the budget, the new accounting standards have punched another, and the surplus was always more slender than it should have been. So how could Pallas deliver the new spending Labor promised in the campaign — on services alone, $3.7 billion in the coming financial year, plus record infrastructure spending — without big tax rises?

The answer is the real core of this year’s budget. The government leaked its own tax rises to the media early — basically, because they were surprisingly small and obscure, targeting groups with little public support: primarily, foreigners buying property, people buying luxury cars, and company restructures. They add up to just $180 million a year in a budget spending $80 billion a year. The tax hikes on foreign property buyers simply replicate what the Coalition did across the border in New South Wales.

Instead of raising taxes, Pallas and his team used a clever mix of measures to fill the financing gap and emerge with a projected surplus for 2019–20 of just over $1 billion. Their recipe (explained nowhere in the budget papers) was this:

• Spending was cut in the way governments now prefer to do it: by “reprioritising” existing spending plans (no dollar figure given); delaying projects yet to begin (saving $694 million in 2019–20); and cutting every department’s funding by 0.5 per cent, except for frontline services such as teachers, nurses and police ($251 million, but rising steeply thereafter, as a taskforce reviews all spending to search for efficiencies).

That’s on top of the annual “general efficiency” spending cuts, which in Victoria see every department start off with effectively the same nominal funding as the year before, even though inflation means that buys it about 2.5 per cent less. Sadly, often essential maintenance bears the brunt of the cuts, as you can see when you visit a Victorian national park or tourist spot and find it full of weeds. In principle, though, it’s as good a way of cutting spending as any other — and after four years of big spending increases, most departments should have plenty of fat to cut.

• Other taxes came to the rescue. Payroll tax soared as jobs boomed. And while stamp duties fell, new land tax valuations took effect, based on property values close to the height of the boom. Land tax bills in some areas are now double what they were four years ago — with disastrous effects for some, but highly beneficial effects for the budget. (Labor has promised annual reviews in future to prevent such big hikes again.)

• Commonwealth grants came to the rescue. The budget excludes all of the federal Coalition’s election promises — such as spending $7 billion itself to build the controversial East West Link (a politically inspired project that has failed three cost–benefit examinations) and $2 billion to extend the Geelong train line to Waurn Ponds — as these are not yet part of any agreement with the Victorian government (and the first is unlikely ever to be). Even without them, grants are forecast to swell by 50 per cent in five years, as Victoria’s population growth, low mineral royalties, and real estate slump qualify it for a larger share of GST funding.

• The government set up a new Victorian Infrastructure Fund and raided the “hollow logs” of the state insurance agencies to pay for it. The Transport Accident Commission, Worksafe and the Victorian Managed Insurance Authority will pay for their (in the government’s eyes, excessively) prudent management by being forced to cough up $2.3 billion in the next four years to finance priority infrastructure projects.

• Victoria’s Treasury has been optimistic in forecasting the economic parameters. In Victoria’s budget, as in Canberra’s, wage rises are assumed to rise rapidly in coming years — which many economists think unlikely. The slump in property prices and sales is assumed to turn around in coming months, giving way to a gradual recovery. And in summing up the state of the economy, Treasury argues that “the risks to the Victorian economic outlook are broadly balanced.” That’s an optimism you don’t see too often these days.

The net effect is that the state is forecast to generate a $1 billion surplus of revenue over services spending in 2019–20, and bigger ones ahead. They would help finance its record infrastructure spending, which Pallas says will average $13.4 billion a year over the next four years. Most of that is on transport, with four projects dominating: the West Gate road tunnel ($1.6 billion), the Melbourne Metro rail tunnel (also $1.6 billion), the level crossings removals ($1.45 billion), and a much-needed investment in new trains ($910 million).

The government is also planning its next wave of mega-projects: the North East Link to complete Melbourne’s ring road and widen the Eastern Freeway (total cost $15.6 billion), the Melbourne airport rail link ($8 billion to $13 billion), and its worst decision, the Suburban Rail Loop ($50 billion). The federal government, which for political reasons usually opposes whatever Victoria proposes, is however funding the planning work on the airport rail link.

All these, of course, are politically driven choices. The last thing a government on either side of politics would do is to ask the experts which projects would do most per million dollars spent to reduce traffic congestion and/or make public transport more reliable, more consistent in speed and quality, and more useful to the people it is meant to serve.

I suspect the experts might recommend that the mega-projects be replaced by spending on making what we’ve already got work better. Duplicate congested roads, remodel intersections, build more overtaking lanes and highway dividers, and lift the priority given to road maintenance. Give the rail network a twenty-first-century signalling system, more frequent services, and more maintenance. And please, focus attention on what this budget ignored: the under-resourced bus systems that serve the middle and outer suburbs of Melbourne, and country Victoria.

The infrastructure spend will see the state’s net debt rise to a forecast $50 billion by 2021–22, or 10 per cent of gross state product. I have long argued for putting infrastructure needs before debt concerns when borrowing is so cheap. Labor won the state election by doing so, but lost the federal election partly because so many voters believed the Coalition’s taunt that “Labor can’t be trusted with money.”

In politics, wheels can turn. The Andrews government would be far more secure against such taunts in 2022 if it stopped choosing infrastructure projects for political reasons and started selecting the ones that would deliver most value per dollar to Victorians. Voters have given it their trust. It must now give them value for money. •

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Druery’s day job is as chief of staff to Victoria’s senator Derryn Hinch, the former TV and radio journalist they call the Human Headline. And this time his preference art is designed to get his boss re-elected.

In an unheralded coup, Druery has negotiated preference deals with all three major parties that could see Hinch sneak home with Victoria’s final Senate seat.

Hinch is poised to receive preferences from Labor voters, and possibly Coalition voters and Greens. In short:

• Labor has directed its voters to preference Hinch second — in apparent defiance of a national agreement to swap preferences with the Greens, who have been demoted to third.

• The Coalition has listed the centrist senator as its sixth preference, but that lowly position is deceptive. Of the four parties preferenced above him, only Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party has any hope of being there in the final stages. If the UAP drops out before Hinch does, Coalition preferences will head his way.

• The Greens, meanwhile, have given Hinch their third preferences — behind Labor, but ahead of everyone else in the contest.

• And, in a bizarre twist, Hinch’s own preferences will in effect be directed to the Greens, then Labor, then the Liberals.

This extraordinarily cosy arrangement was negotiated by Druery, on behalf of his boss, with Labor and the Greens, after the two parties of the left became concerned that Hinch’s preferences might otherwise end up with the Liberals.

Druery declined to discuss the deal, but conceded that it was “a complex arrangement” that would make Hinch competitive in the battle for the final Senate seat — which he thinks will be with Palmer’s United Australia Party.

“The last polling I saw, the Liberals were close to two quotas,” he told me. “The wild card is Clive Palmer’s party. Can you sell the voters a dud twice? I wouldn’t have thought so, but he’s spending far more money this time than he did in 2016.”

Sources close to the negotiations said the Greens ultimately agreed to allow Labor to override their own agreement for a preference swap, because all sides expect Greens senator Janet Rice will win enough votes to retain her seat, and the Greens would rather help Hinch return than to see his seat go to Liberals or Palmer’s party.

No other candidate in Australia has been as lucky as the former broadcaster, who delivered one of the best lines of the campaign this week on ABC TV, when he began his reply to a question with the words “The last time I was in jail…”

In South Australia, the Centre Alliance (the former Nick Xenophon Team) also appears on the preference tickets of all three larger parties, but it is unlikely to receive any from Labor or the Greens, because they are looking after each other. In Queensland, Katter’s Australia Party appears on the tickets of both main parties, but is well down their cards and unlikely to benefit.

Senate preferences aren’t as good as they used to be. From 1984 to 2013, the 95 per cent of Australians who vote above the line had their preferences distributed for them by the parties. It was Glenn Druery who worked out how to corral micro-parties of all types into deals to direct preferences to each other to get them elected.

His most famous feat was in 2013, when his preference architecture got Ricky Muir of the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party elected from Victoria with just 0.5 per cent of the vote. Muir received preferences from virtually every other party to overtake Liberal senator Helen Kroger, who had begun with 11.5 per cent.

Results like that led the Coalition and the Greens to negotiate reforms to abolish group voting tickets and return control of voters’ preferences to the voters themselves. The 2016 election saw preferences spray everywhere, reflecting the diversity of voters’ views. They ultimately changed only one result — electing Malcolm Roberts of One Nation to Queensland’s final Senate spot instead of a Liberal Democrat.

In the new system, the preference tickets of minor parties are mostly irrelevant. They lack the support base to staff more than a fraction of the polling booths, and their voters don’t do what they’re told anyway.

(Druery has nevertheless wooed the micro-parties for preferences, and with some success. “I’ve seen a lot of elections come down to a handful of votes, so every vote is precious,” he explained.)

But the goldmine in the new system is Liberal and Labor preferences. The big parties have volunteers at almost every booth, and research by the Victorian Electoral Commission has shown that their voters are those most likely to follow exactly the party’s how-to-vote card.

Their preference tickets (and to a lesser extent, those of the Greens) are arguably the only ones that will matter in Saturday’s election.

All states at half-Senate elections usually vote in three candidates from the left and three from the right. Labor and the Coalition are certain to win at least two seats each from each state, so Saturday’s Senate contest is really about who wins the final two seats in each state.

Hinch was elected in 2016 with 6.1 per cent of first preferences after winning top place in the Senate draw. His campaign focus on tackling crime primarily drew votes from the right, but as a senator he has been basically in the centre, calling issues as he sees them. If elected, he and the Centre Alliance would be part of a small crossbench holding the balance of power.

Overall, as I have argued earlier, neither major party is likely to control the new Senate, although both are likely to make gains at the expense of the crossbenchers. The Greens should retain most of the six seats they are defending, but the minor parties of the right might win only a single seat: the last seat in Queensland, likely to be fought out between Clive Palmer, Malcolm Roberts and possibly Fraser Anning.

The Greens meanwhile will have their fingers crossed. If their vote in Victoria turns out to be less than expected, there is an outside chance that they could end up fighting Hinch for the final Senate seat — and that Labor preferences could take it from them, as has happened so often in the past under deals Druery negotiated. •

The post Victoria: where preferences whisper the name Hinch appeared first on Inside Story.

Twice through the campaign I made my way down the freeway for candidate forums. The first, on a dark and stormy May Day, saw over 400 electors crammed into the quaint Balnarring Community Hall to rage against an LNG import plant proposed for Westernport Bay. The second, last Thursday, was a candidate Q&A organised by the Australian Christian Lobby, with perhaps eighty parishioners and curious locals in the pews of the Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Hastings.

They were different crowds, to be sure: in Balnarring, sea changers, local conservationists and Saturday Paper subscribers sat alongside their climate-striking kids; in Hastings, there was a lot more white hair, dignified knits and posh rugby jumpers. Think Diver Dans and Linda Twists at the former, Harold Bishops, Howard Gribbles and perhaps the odd grumpy Alf at the latter. (Your correspondent’s native Peninsula is roughly as ethnically diverse as Australian TV was in the 90s.)

Nevertheless, both crowds were united by frustration with politics as usual, with party pointscoring, with Canberra obfuscation and evasions. And even if this was a self-selected and less-than-representative sample of the electorate, that’s got to worry local MP and federal health minister Greg Hunt, at least a little.

Flinders has been represented by the Liberal Party and its forerunners for 109 of the 118 years since Federation. It went Labor for short stints — a term here and a term there, after which the well-heeled electors of Mount Martha, Sorrento, Red Hill and Portsea came to their conservative senses. Prime minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce held the seat for thirteen years, Howard government minister Peter Reith for eighteen.

Hunt has held the seat since 2001, and over the six elections in the intervening eighteen years he has never dipped below 57 per cent of the two-party vote. He’s been the member as long as I can remember. So how did his fate come to be in doubt?

Two things seem to have come together to turn Flinders into a contest. The first is the fact that the Liberal Party is on the nose across Victoria. Last November’s “Dan-slide” to Labor saw huge swings in normally safe Liberal seats throughout Melbourne’s east and down to the Peninsula. A few even flipped to Labor: Hawthorn in the inner city; Box Hill, Bayswater and Ringwood in the eastern suburbs; and, overlapping with most of Flinders, the normally safe seat of Nepean.

We can assume a good chunk of that swing came down to the popularity of the Andrews government, but the right-wing populist tinge to state leader Matthew Guy’s campaign rhetoric also seemed to have an impact. So too did the ousting of Malcolm Turnbull, still fresh in voters’ minds then. The Liberals looked like they could no longer maintain the moderate middle ground of Australian politics, and Victoria punished them for it.

Knowing this, opponents of the Coalition have descended on the Peninsula and urged voters there to stay angry. All kinds of groups have popped up, each of them attempting to tie Hunt to what Kelly O’Dwyer might call the “climate-denying, anti-women” wing of the Liberal Party. Wilderness Society billboards up and down the freeway put Hunt’s grimacing face next to Tony Abbott’s, reminding voters he was instrumental in the dismantling of the carbon tax. Huge ads wrapped around the local newspaper, paid for by Trades Hall, ask readers, “Who will Greg Hunt stab in the back next?,” tying him to the ouster of Malcolm Turnbull and positioning him as a Dutton supporter. Indeed, lurking in the bushes outside the Holy Trinity Church in Hastings were activists waiting to ambush Hunt, one of them in a giant papier-mâché Dutton head. Progressives see blood in the water at Flinders, and the hunt for Hunt is on.

The other half of the equation is the candidacy of Julia Banks. Last election Banks ran for the Liberals in the marginal Melbourne seat of Chisholm. She was duly elected and sat on the government’s backbench, but was dismayed by the removal of Malcolm Turnbull and her colleagues’ abandonment of what she calls the “sensible centre.” She quit the Liberals to sit on the crossbench. In November she announced she wouldn’t recontest Chisholm; in January she declared she would run against Hunt in Flinders — where she apparently raised her family — as an independent. From the crossbench she not only supported the efforts of newfound centrist friends like Kerryn Phelps on the medivac bill, but also used question time to put her new opponent under pressure, wedging Hunt between his party and his electorate.

That was the theme of her pitch in Balnarring and Hastings: elect a candidate from a party and you get someone with a split loyalty. Indeed, Hunt wasn’t even present at the Balnarring forum because of an event in Canberra — a point Banks was quick to underline. During her time on the crossbench, she told both forums, she had seen how powerful independent members could be, how they could change the agenda and command the attention of the government. The voters of Flinders could get that if they elected her. They would miss out on it if they sent a government backbencher (here she means Josh Sinclair, the Labor candidate) or returned an opposition member (she clearly doubts a Coalition win).

Nobody at these forums quite made the point that Banks’s experience of crossbench power has come in the context of an effectively hung parliament; the parliamentary arithmetic may not be quite so favourable after the votes are tallied on Saturday night. Instead, people seemed genuinely impressed by her sell — they are sick of politics as usual, of parties and partisanship. (Indeed, Hunt’s emissary to the Balnarring forum, the local state MP, was just about booed off stage when he dubbed the LNG plant “Labor’s gas plant.”) Banks has captured the zeitgeist.

Greg Hunt is clearly rattled by all this. In a number of interviews and public exchanges he’s been rather tense on the topic of his seat and the challenge from Banks. But at the Holy Trinity Church in Hastings, it was clear he’s in this race to win it. In his opening address he made quite a compelling case not only for his candidacy but also for the government, talking about people whose lives have been turned around by newly listed drugs in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme — something he says could only have happened with the economy in good shape. This is what governments are for, he says. This is why he wakes up in the morning. He appears genuinely impassioned, and it moves his audience. It’s the kind of story that could be winning votes for the Coalition all around the country, if only Hunt were able to tell it more frequently. Instead he’s stuck defending his own seat, talking to eighty parishioners in Hastings.

Flinders is not the only Liberal heartland seat to suddenly and rather unusually come into play this election. In Melbourne, after eons as safe Liberal seats, Kooyong and Higgins are both live contests. In Sydney, Wentworth is being defended by independent Kerryn Phelps and Warringah is under siege by independent Zali Steggall — both seats associated with recent Liberal prime ministers. And there are others. We can only guess the resources the Liberals are pulling off the marginal front line to shore up their vote in some of their safest seats, but rumours of more than a million dollars being poured into Josh Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong — to not much effect, if Monday’s polling is to be believed — gives you a rough feel for the scale.

With the mutiny in Flinders and seats like it, we are a long way away from the days of election campaigns fought out entirely in Western Sydney — days when, for most of us, elections seemed to be decided by other people elsewhere. Far more of the country is experiencing a real contest this election. Far more of the electoral map is in play. The election may well get called early this Saturday night, but the way that majority gets cobbled together and the outcome of some of these weird and unexpected contests will be well worth staying up late for. •

The post Greg Hunt’s zeitgeist problem appeared first on Inside Story.

In the current climate, the re-election of any government with an increased majority isn’t common, and speculation that a fear campaign based around law and order would leave Andrews vulnerable proved to be misplaced. Nor did Labor suffer any electoral penalty for a series of ministerial scandals, or for the Red Shirts affair, when government funding was misused for political campaign purposes. With politicians now held in such low esteem, a cynic might say that “scandals” are regarded as business as usual.

Instead, Andrews was able to run a campaign on his terms, focusing on infrastructure. I’m among those reluctant to identify gratitude as a motivator in voter behaviour, but the premier’s reputation for “getting things done” does seem to have been rewarded. At state level, where infrastructure and service delivery constitute a major part of the position description, it proved a winning formula.

The government secured fifty-five seats in the lower house, delivering a majority of twenty-two. In what could be construed as triumphalist greed, there is talk of Labor challenging the result in Ripon, retained by the incumbent Liberal by fifteen votes. Ironically, this was the Coalition’s most marginal seat before the election and still is. Significantly, it is located outside the metropolitan area, where the movement towards Labor was far less pronounced.

Nearly as impressive as Labor’s lower house result was its performance in the Legislative Council. At the 2006 election, the first involving proportional representation, Labor secured nineteen out of forty places and was able to establish a sort of ideological majority with the (three) Greens to get legislation passed. In 2010, the Coalition took government with majorities in both houses, but in 2014, with the preference-whispering industry energetically exploiting group voting tickets, or GVTs, the newly elected Andrews government won fourteen, the Coalition sixteen and the Greens five. Beneficiaries of GVTs shared the remaining five places, and at least two of them were needed to vote with Labor and the Greens to deliver a majority in the chamber. While upper house obstruction was not a major issue in the government’s first term, the situation was probably less than ideal.

Andrews is much better off in his second term. Major parties are normally at risk from GVT-related “gaming,” but Labor’s vote in the upper house was high enough to avoid such a fate; it won two places in six regions and three in two, for a total of eighteen. By contrast, a weakened Coalition felt the full force of preference whispering and was reduced to eleven members, the same number held by the assorted members on the crossbench, and possibly some sort of new low for an official opposition.

On the statewide mathematics, Labor secured 45 per cent of positions from 39 per cent of the vote; the Coalition got a fair 27.5 per cent from a vote of 29 per cent; the Greens’ 9.25 per cent of the vote secured them a single spot; and the Liberal Democrats will have two members in the chamber — from a vote of 2.5 per cent. The big winner was the Derryn Hinch Justice Party, finishing with three positions (7.5 per cent of positions in the chamber) from a vote of 3.75 per cent.

While the election of those with minuscule support continues to irritate, it remains the case that 22 per cent of the electorate opted for a party or group other than Labor, the Coalition or the Greens and were rewarded with 25 per cent of the positions. But the superficial attractiveness of this statistic is rendered dubious by the low primary votes of most of those actually elected. Even if GVTs remain, the case for a primary vote threshold for election is surely strong.

Daniel Andrews has never indicated any interest in addressing the GVT issue and, having done so well in this election, there is no immediate self-interested case for change. The varied crossbench — Derryn Hinch Justice Party; Liberal Democrats; the Greens; Shooters, Fishers and Farmers; Animal Justice; the Reason (formerly Sex) Party; Sustainable Australia and Transport Matters — certainly provides a potential majority on an issue-by-issue basis, with the socially progressive Greens/Reason/Animal Justice combo (which would give the government twenty-one votes out of forty) just one example from several possibilities.

And in the event that Andrews encounters upper house problems, he has a trump card — the threat of abolishing GVTs and thus putting preference whisperer maestro Glenn Druery (and his accidental MPs) out of business. It is difficult to find any credible defence for this discredited system, and the relevant legislation would surely attract Coalition, Greens and Reason Party (whose sole MP survived despite GVTs) support. While crossbenchers with the balance of power usually hold the superior bargaining position, the Victorian cohort would do well to remember that Andrews could access his version of the nuclear option.

Daniel Andrews enters his second term in a position of considerable strength, with observers routinely predicting a further victory in 2022. But given some of the huge electoral swings in recent times, it is unlikely that the re-elected premier will succumb to such hubris. The Liberals, who will have governed the state (in coalition) for just four years out of twenty-three by 2022, will surely be hoping that he succumbs to something. •

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But Nepean’s population median age is fifty-one, and the retiring member, Liberal Martin Dixon, once called it the state’s oldest electorate “by a long shot.” The state’s oldest bunch of voters now has the parliament’s youngest member, and few if any saw it coming.

Before the election, as Brayne told Rafael Epstein on ABC Radio’s local drive program last week, Sportsbet was offering $16 for a Labor win in Nepean, while the Liberal candidate, former Michael Dixon staffer Russell Joseph, was unbackable at $1.01. Despite the odds, though, it would be too strong to call Brayne’s win a fluke. Highly unlikely, yes, but more a perfect storm than an accident.

Labor’s “Danslide” was a major factor, of course, but while Matthew Guy’s tin-eared “Get Back in Control” campaign fell flat, many feel that much of the blame should be shouldered by the feds. Scott Morrison’s health minister, Greg Hunt, whose electorate of Flinders blankets the Nepean state electorate, supported Peter Dutton’s disastrous tilt at the prime ministership. It is now almost impossible to find anyone, except behind the microphone in a Sydney radio station, who thinks that was a wise move.

Incumbency may also have been a problem. Martin Dixon had twenty-two unbroken years at Spring Street, first as the member for Dromana and then, after it was redrawn, as member for Nepean, though he was lucky to get away with a slender win in Steve Bracks’s romp in 2002. While Dixon took the electorate from that 114-vote win in 2002 to “safe” during the rest of his tenure, the 2014 election saw his margin drop from 14.4 per cent to 7.6 per cent. On top of that, and by his own admission, the people he was representing had long been neglected by the managers of the public purse.

To be fair to Dixon, more than two-thirds of his time was spent in opposition, and seemingly safe seats on the wrong side of the parliamentary aisle are rare targets for governmental largesse. But if such a perception, justified or otherwise, seeps deep enough for long enough, then eventually something might just give.

Enter Chris Brayne. At the time of writing, Brayne’s (presumably) hastily arranged Wikipedia entry tops out at thirty-five words. It reads:

Chris Brayne is an Australian politician. He has been a Labor Party member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly since November 2018, representing the seat of Nepean. Before his election, he worked in the electricity industry.

During the ABC’s election night coverage, Antony Green didn’t know even that much about the candidate causing a major upset before his eyes. The national broadcaster’s resident psephologist muttered something about not having any notes about the aspiring MP and quickly moved on.

Brayne admits to being just as shocked as Green was. He knew the numbers. He knew the odds at Sportsbet too, and didn’t bother to tell his friends or anyone to “throw a cheeky tenner on.” But like a golfer surprised to have hit a hole-in-one, he can say that he was at least aiming for it. And despite limited resources both financial and human, he’d worked hard.

He tells me that he eschewed the age-old method of doorknocking and instead spent time outside supermarkets talking to whoever would talk back. He had a local designer knock up a few t-shirts and spent about $500 on corflutes. The one big-ticket item out of his $1200 budget was a short advertisement screened before showtimes at the Dromana Drive-In, where, unknown to Wikipedia, he had a weekend job. It’s a short grab, thirty-five seconds or so, with Brayne talking to camera with the ocean lapping on the shore in the background. Given what has transpired since, his tagline, “It’s time to get a Brayne in parliament,” doesn’t seem quite so cheesy.

What plans did he have for the summer before they were interrupted by his new job? He was about to move to Sydney to take up a graduate position with the NSW government. He tells me that he spent five months working in the democracy program at the Carter Center in Atlanta in the second half of 2017. He sat beside Jimmy Carter for Thanksgiving lunch in late November of that year. Then he came back home and in early 2018 asked the Labor Party if he could contest Nepean. He didn’t get an answer straight away; Labor wasn’t even taking expressions of interest until mid-year. But that didn’t stop him charting the course, and he was well into his plans by the time the green light came in August.

Over on the northern side of the Yarra, George Georgiou was already up and running as an independent candidate for the seat of Brunswick. Like Brayne, Georgiou had only $1200 to spend. Unlike Brayne, he has no seat in parliament and no Wikipedia page to show for it. He did have a social media page, though, and spent a few dollars with the Zuckerbergs to promote his vision, which, in the final count, helped him attract 1240 first-preference votes (a shade under ninety-seven cents per vote, if you’re doing the maths). Brayne, on the other hand, got 15,835 first-preference votes for his $1200. By the time it got down to the two-party-preferred count in Nepean, he’d spent about five and a half cents per vote and snuck home by just 767, or just a tick over $40 worth.

George Georgiou didn’t have the backing of Dan Andrews, of course. He didn’t have any corflutes either. Like Brayne, he didn’t knock on any doors. In fact, two days before the deadline to lodge his nomination form to run as a candidate, he didn’t even know the six registered local voters he needed to sign the form and vouch for him. He did have the $350 nomination fee, though. It got a little tense, but he made it eventually — a phone call here and there, a friend of a friend, a relative of another, a tradie working across the road from his house. (“Hi mate. You don’t happen to live in Brunswick do you?”) In the end, he overshot, with eight signatures from Brunswickers happy enough to strike a blow for pluralism.

By his own reckoning he overachieved in the election too. With no profile and no political brand, helped along by being at the top of the ballot paper, he managed to attract 2.82 per cent of the vote for his platform of getting as many cars off the road as possible and loading up the urban environment with cycling tracks and trees. These are popular ideas to peddle in Brunswick, perhaps, but like Brayne, much of his support resulted from hard work and could only lazily be described as a fluke.

Georgiou’s strategy was based on flyers spelling out detailed policies and the hope that people would take the time to read them or, better still, give him the opportunity to explain them personally. How many flyers? Lots. Fifty-one thousand, three hundred and thirty, all printed and cut up in his home office and hand-delivered to mailboxes on the streets of the Brunswick electorate by Georgiou himself over a period of four months.

In 208 hours of walking Brunswick’s footpaths, in stints of between two and five hours at a time, Georgiou covered three-quarters of the electorate four times over. He encountered 587 people along the way and had 110 conversations (which he defines as a chat of five minutes or more). He also met 362 people at train stations and tram stops. Unsurprisingly, not everyone was amenable to a chat with a wannabe politician delivering flyers, and there were days when he trudged home with a bruised ego, perplexed by the attitudes of some. All politics is local, so they say, but none say it is for the faint of heart.

In the end, George Georgiou came fifth out of nine in an election that saw the Greens’ Tim Read take the seat from Labor in a rare loss of ground for the Andrews government. He was the most popular independent in the race, beating two others along with candidates from the Liberal Democrats and the Animal Justice Party. Only the three major parties were ahead of him, along with local identity and Reason Party candidate, comedian Catherine Deveny, who polled 1969 first preferences.

The main measure of success for Georgiou, though, is that he managed to get his ideas out in public. He says he’s spent twenty years or so researching Melbourne’s public transport system and measuring it against how the major cities of the world manage theirs. All he wanted was a forum for that vision. On top of all that he lost six kilograms and his Vitamin D levels are robust. While he won’t be giving a maiden speech in parliament on 19 December, he too thinks he spent his twelve hundred bucks wisely. •

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But a few things worth noting haven’t been widely discussed. In the spirit of Hokusai’s views of Mount Fuji, may I offer a few random views of the Victorian election?

1. Labor’s victory was even bigger than it seemed on the night

In most seats, the swings in the pre-polls and postal votes were as big as the swings in the booths, so the Liberals didn’t make the gains in late counting they expected. (Caulfield was a notable exception.) On my best estimate, with the vote count almost complete, Labor has won 57.6 per cent of the two-party vote. That’s only a tad below the 57.8 per cent Steve Bracks won in his record victory in 2002. The swing was 5.6 per cent, the stuff of landslides.

But in 2002, Labor won sixty-two of the eighty-eight seats. This time it won fifty-five. It won Box Hill, Hawthorn and Nepean, all of which eluded it in 2002. It came close to taking two seats it has never won, Brighton and Caulfield. Its tide rose to record levels in the tree-lined, wealthy, educated Liberal heartland of the inner and inner-middle suburbs. But it was not strong enough to win back the established outer-eastern suburbs and rural seats that were once Labor turf.

It’s not hard to see these voting differences — inner versus outer suburbs, Melbourne versus the bush — as evidence of a growing polarisation, an Australian version of the “great divide” that New York Times columnist David Brooks has written of in America.

Yet the divide is always there; and while the swings to Labor were certainly much smaller anywhere beyond a two-hour drive from Melbourne, Labor did pick up votes almost everywhere, suggesting that Australians have not yet reached the impasse that Brooks sees in his own country — where, he concludes, “politics is no longer mainly about disagreeing on issues. It’s about being in entirely separate conversations.”

2. This win will be Labor’s peak

These days you only win victories on this scale once. In New South Wales, the Coalition won a massive majority in 2011, but four years later, with Mike Baird still on his honeymoon with the electorate, most of it vanished. Daniel Andrews seems to recognise this, hinting that he doesn’t expect to stay on as premier for years.

It’s to be hoped that the result will be a trigger to continue the infrastructure building program that was the main reason for his crushing victory. The most important development in the whole campaign came on election eve, when Andrews and treasurer Tim Pallas removed a key obstacle to a successful second term by proposing to lift the cap on the state’s net debt to 12 per cent of gross state product (about $54 billion in current dollars).

That tells us where the money will come from to keep building infrastructure at the current rate. There is no shortage of claimants: in roads, the North East Link — the “missing link” of Melbourne’s outer ring road — and the associated widening of the Eastern Freeway, plus the West Gate tunnel and many road widenings and duplications. In rail, completing the first line of the Melbourne Metro, now under construction; a costly upgrade of the overflowing Cranbourne and Sunbury lines; a new rail link to Melbourne Airport; and so on. And the next tranche of projects to remove the level crossings that plague suburban Melbourne.

So long as projects are chosen on merit — which is often not the case — the government will be well set up for a second term of tackling the infrastructure backlog. As treasurer and shadow treasurer, the new Liberal leader Michael O’Brien instead gave priority to keeping the debt down. That line has reaped dividends for the Coalition all over Australia in the past, but this election result left no doubt that Victorians now care more about infrastructure than low taxes.

It will be interesting to see how O’Brien and his shrunken team respond to this reality. It is possible that the Victorian Liberal Party will continue to see the fight against Labor enemies as less important than the fight against factional enemies — that’s one reason it has lost twelve of the last thirteen elections in the state. But a defeat on this scale, probably followed by another when the Morrison government faces the voters, will surely trigger changes.

3. Virtually all Liberal seats are now marginal

The National Party now has only six seats in the Assembly, down from nine in 2010. (It lost Shepparton in 2014, Mildura and Morwell this time.) But all six are held with majorities against Labor of 12 to 24 per cent; their only threat is from independents.

It’s a different story for the Liberals. Since 2010 they have lost two-fifths of their seats in the Assembly. From thirty-six seats when Ted Baillieu won office, they have shrunk to twenty-one: they lost one in the 2013 redistribution, five in 2014 (Bentleigh, Mordialloc, Carrum, Frankston and Prahran) and nine at this election (Hawthorn, Burwood, Mount Waverley, Box Hill, Ringwood, Bayswater, Nepean, Bass and South Barwon).

Of the twenty-one seats they still hold, thirteen were won by margins of less than 3 per cent: Ripon (0.02 per cent), Caulfield (0.27), Sandringham (0.64), Gembrook (0.79), Hastings (1.07), Brighton (1.12), Forest Hill (1.14), Ferntree Gully (1.64), Croydon (2.12), South West Coast (2.32), Eildon (2.44), Benambra (2.45 v independent) and Evelyn (2.65).

Labor won a lot of close seats too: four by less than 1 per cent, nine by less than 3 per cent. But the Liberals won only eight seats by more than 3 per cent; Labor won forty-seven of them.

The safest Liberal seat is now the West Gippsland electorate of Narracan (7.26 per cent). Labor has forty-one seats safer than that.

4. The looming redistribution will make the Coalition’s plight worse

Victoria has redistributions every eight years. In the past eight years, its population has swollen by 18 per cent, mostly on Melbourne’s outer-suburban fringe or within five kilometres of the city. There are now enormous discrepancies in the size of its electorates, so the next redistribution will be significant.

For this election, outer-suburban Cranbourne had 61,814 voters and inner-suburban Brunswick had 53,340, while middle-suburban Mount Waverley had just 38,937. The average Coalition seat going into the election had 5 per cent fewer voters than the average Labor seat. Most of them are middle- and outer-middle-suburban seats southeast of the Yarra.

Their share of Victoria’s population has been shrinking rapidly, and will continue to do so. In my view, the redistribution will have to abolish two seats in the eastern and southern suburbs to create two new ones further out, one around Cranbourne and Pakenham in the southeast, and another in the booming new blocks on the northwest fringe.

The other discrepancies in seat sizes can be fixed by shifting the boundaries of seats. In the bush, the western seats will continue to push east, and the northern seats will edge closer to Melbourne: Macedon and Eildon could lose much of their territory and become more clearly based on Melbourne’s fringe. The inner suburbs will push out into the middle ones.

All of that will have political implications. The eastern and southern suburbs are the Liberals’ home turf in Melbourne. The new outer suburbs, on both sides of town, are Labor’s turf. The Liberals lost by talking crime, crime and corruption over the past four years, when these voters want roads, rail, preschools and other health, education and welfare services. The redistribution will probably cost the Liberals at least one seat, maybe two.

5. Urban Australians don’t see the Liberals as their party

Peter Dutton and George Christensen have been urging the party to move to the right to be more popular in Queensland. They forget that almost half of Queenslanders live in Brisbane, and the election results suggest there is not much difference between their views and those of voters in Melbourne — or Sydney, Perth or even Adelaide.

A year ago, Queenslanders expressed their views about what they want from politicians when they voted in their own state election. In Brisbane, the Liberal National Party won just five seats out of forty-one. It was an even worse result than the Liberals got in Melbourne (fifteen out of sixty-three). The LNP was even more out of touch with its base in the capital of Queensland than the Liberals were in the capital of Victoria.

Earlier, voters in Western Australia expressed their views in their state election. The Barnett government, for all its faults, was a traditional centre-right Coalition government, not a hard-right one as in Queensland. But in Perth, it too was cut down to single figures: it won just nine seats out of forty-three.

The Liberals did better in Adelaide at this year’s SA election, winning fourteen of the thirty-two seats in the capital. But that was an unusual election, on boundaries specially designed to help them, and four of their wins were by narrow margins.

The next big test will be in Sydney, and the rest of New South Wales, when the state votes on 23 March. Two opinion polls a week after Victoria voted reported that the Berejiklian government is also on the brink of defeat, although Labor’s margin is fragile: 52–48 in the YouGov Galaxy poll in the Daily Telegraph, 51–49 in the ReachTel poll in the Sydney Morning Herald.

The message from the elections in the three biggest states outside New South Wales should be getting through to Canberra, but clearly isn’t. When Andrews wrote to Morrison after the election to ask him to unfreeze the $3 billion set aside for the rejected East West Link and use it to build the North East Link instead — a move that could only help the federal government politically — the PM brusquely rejected the idea.

Urban Australia wants climate change policy to be taken seriously, and based on renewables. Morrison is not offering either. He believes he can win in May without it. We will see.

6. The dumping of Malcolm Turnbull played a clear but not decisive role in the Liberals’ defeat

It was only part of the story, but Liberals say it was definitely a factor. Newspoll has reported a 3 per cent slide in the Coalition’s two-party vote in Victoria since Morrison replaced Turnbull. Liberal sources have told reporters that their state polling took an immediate hit of similar dimensions, and never recovered. It is hard to believe that they would have lost a seat like Hawthorn if Turnbull were still the party’s national leader.

Even so, Labor did win 57.6 per cent of the two-party vote. Every opinion poll in 2018 pointed to a Labor win, and even before Turnbull’s dumping, Andrews’s leadership ratings had recovered to a position of dominance. Matthew Guy’s satisfaction ratings as opposition leader made Bill Shorten look popular. The Liberals also ran a terrible campaign, which focused on being tough on crime and divided their traditional supporters. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

7. The Greens did better than reported

It was certainly a bad election campaign for the Greens. Labor dirt-diggers had them constantly on the defensive after raking through social media posts of young Greens candidates to find embarrassing acts of stupidity. The Greens’ own internecine warfare contributed, as did a suspiciously late allegation of sexual assault against a candidate. Any messages the party had were drowned out in the hubbub.

They’re putting it down to Labor, and that’s probably true. Its dirt-diggers are like hackers: they’ve refined their skills in fighting each other, and an election allowed them to unleash the whole barrage on the unsuspecting Greens. The former Greens MP for Northcote, Lidia Thorpe, who was narrowly defeated, documented her version of the campaign in the Age.

But the worst part of the election for the Greens was the outcome in the Legislative Council. With preference whisperer Glenn Druery coordinating the preference tickets of a dozen minor parties — and calling on Labor for support — the Greens have won just one seat in the forty-member Council, down from five in the last parliament.

Many have pointed out that this was partly due to a fall in their vote: for the Council, from 12 per cent in 2010 to 10.75 per cent in 2014 to 9.25 per cent this time. But the reason the Greens have lost votes is very clear.

In 2010, they had almost all the space to the left of Labor to themselves. This time, in every region, they had to compete with candidates from Animal Justice, Fiona Patten’s Reason Party, the Voluntary Euthanasia Party, the Victorian Socialists and Sustainable Australia. Those five parties won 6.8 per cent; in 2010, there was just the Sex Party, which won just 1.9 per cent, and much of that was not from the left. The vote for the left is expanding, but the Greens now have to share it.

That wouldn’t matter if Labor and the micro-parties directed preferences to the Greens, as in the past. This time only the Socialists did so. Druery signed up all the other parties left of centre, including Labor, to direct their preferences to his target party or parties in each seat.

The result was that in Southern Metropolitan, Greens MP Sue Pennicuik, with 13.5 per cent, lost her seat to Sustainable Australia’s Clifford Hayes, who won 1.3 per cent — but received preferences from every party except the Socialists.

We’ll come back to this disaster. The key point to remember is that the Greens’ loss of support basically reflects massively increased competition in their part of the political spectrum. The fall in their number of seats is mostly due to Labor and Animal Justice, in particular, directing preferences to whomever Druery wanted them to support.

In the Assembly, the Greens vote also fell, but only slightly: from a peak of 11.5 per cent last time to 10.7 per cent. Northcote, which it won at a by-election a year ago, went back to Labor narrowly. Another key seat, Richmond, was retained triumphantly by Labor’s planning minister Richard Wynne, even without a Liberal candidate to direct preferences his way.

For the Greens, that was the bad news. But remember: the reason Labor sees them as such a threat is that — unlike the Australian Democrats, One Nation, or the DLP in its heyday — the Greens have invaded part of its electoral territory and made it their own. They are the first new party to establish their own electoral base since the Country Party emerged a century ago. Along with a few independents, they are out to make themselves the party of inner-suburban Australia — and those inner suburbs are expanding.

In 2010 the Greens broke through in the federal sphere by winning Melbourne. In 2014 they broke through in the state sphere by winning Melbourne from Labor and Prahran from the Liberals. This time they retained both those seats, and local medico Tim Read captured Brunswick from Labor to make it a third. Sam Hibbins once again won Prahran from third place in primary votes; with the voters free to direct their own preferences, he overtook Labor by 264 votes (0.33 per cent) to comfortably defeat the Liberals.

The Victorian Electoral Commission has yet to count out most of the second tier of inner-suburban seats, but it looks like the Greens beat the Liberals into second place in Williamstown, Footscray and Preston, while still a long way behind Labor. The redistribution should help them widen that battleground.

Elsewhere, the Greens vote has mostly faded. With so many parties to choose from on the ballot paper, they are no longer the all-purpose alternative for those who are jack of the two main parties. That matters for upper house voting. But they are slowly gaining ground and consolidating where it matters most to them: they now have seven seats in the lower houses of state parliaments in the eastern states, plus one in Canberra.

This was not an election where the Greens were going to make a big stride forward. They suffered a disaster in the Council. In the Assembly they basically held their ground, and a bit more. If things go badly for Labor in the next term, the Greens will be well placed to capitalise on it.

8. This was Glenn Druery’s crowning masterpiece

Most Australians have never heard of Glenn Druery. He has been called “the preference whisperer,” the man whose genius for maths and deals has allowed parties with small votes to vault over those with much bigger votes by skilful preference deals. His work has been central to the rise of micro-parties such as the Shooters Party, Family First and others — including the Sex Party, now renamed Fiona Patten’s Reason Party.

The key to Druery’s work is bringing all the little parties together and persuading them to swap preferences with each other — as much as possible. He works it so that every child gets a toy somewhere, or at least the hope of one.

At this election, everyone directed preferences in Eastern Metropolitan to Transport Matters, set up by hire-car owner Rod Barton. He won the seat from the Greens with just 0.6 per cent of the vote to their 9 per cent. In South Eastern Metropolitan, both Transport Matters and the Liberal Democrats were given a big share, with the Liberal Democrats taking the seat with first preferences of 0.8 per cent from Liberal MP Inga Peulich, who managed 12.7 per cent.

In Southern Metropolitan, as mentioned, a tide of preferences swept Sustainable Australia (with 1.3 per cent) across the line just ahead of the Greens (13.5 per cent). Western Metropolitan was meant to go to the Shooters, the DLP or the Aussie Battlers, but those plans were thrown into disarray when Derryn Hinch’s candidate, Catherine Cumming, a former mayor of Maribyrnong, won 6.8 per cent of the vote to claim the final seat from the DLP, even though Druery’s preference deals intended her to lose.

In Eastern Victoria, Shooters Party leader Jeff Bourman won 5 per cent of the vote to see off the rival micro-parties. But they made up for it in Northern Victoria, where Shooters MP Daniel Young lost his seat despite winning 7.8 per cent of the vote — the highest of any of Druery’s candidates — because Druery gave priority to Hinch and the Liberal Democrats. Both of them won, taking seats from Young and the Nationals.

In Western Victoria, Druery arranged the tickets so that Animal Justice won a seat, along with Hinch’s former running mate, Stuart Grimley. (Druery’s day job is as chief of staff to Hinch.) The most closely watched seat was Northern Metropolitan, in the inner and inner-middle suburbs to the north of the city. That was Druery’s one miss: his former client Fiona Patten, elected with his help in 2014, turned against him and arranged her own deals, which saw her re-elected with 3.5 per cent of the vote and many, many preferences from Labor, the Socialists, Animal Justice and others.

The bottom line is that, despite its huge victory in the lower house, Labor remains a minority government in the upper house, winning just eighteen of the forty seats. The Coalition won only eleven, and there are also eleven crossbenchers: Greens leader Samantha Ratnam, Fiona Patten, and nine from Team Druery — three from Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, two Liberal Democrats, and one each from Animal Justice, the Shooters, Sustainable Australia and Transport Matters.

Labor is clearly happy with this outcome, since it worked to make it happen: Labor preferences were directed to all those groups in their target seats, helping to decide for them against the Greens. In the last parliament Labor was in an even bigger minority in the Council, but was able to make the system work for it by making deals to get the numbers needed for each bill to pass.

So far, Andrews has refused to follow South Australia, New South Wales and the Commonwealth in banning the group-voting tickets that are the key to Druery’s system. If voters are given back control over their preferences, as the last federal election showed, they spray everywhere — because we are a diverse bunch of people, with diverse preferences. With open preferences, it is impossible for a party to win a Senate seat without a substantial vote of its own. For the micro-parties, that would be curtains.

One can empathise with their argument that the current system brings diversity into political representation. Sure: it gave us senators Ricky Muir, Steve Fielding, Jacqui Lambie and Glenn Lazarus, to name a few. But it is impossible to make a convincing case for a system in which Hinch’s party can win three seats with 3.75 per cent of the Council vote while the Greens win one seat with 9.25 per cent.

It could be that we have just seen Glenn Druery’s final masterpiece. It was a real work of art, working out preference deals for each party that were within their ideological comfort zone and ensured that someone in the team claimed the final seat. It could be that this is the marvellous deal that worked so remarkably well that the big parties will agree there should never be another.

9. The implications for the federal government are dire

In 2016 the Coalition won 48.2 per cent of the two-party vote, roughly the same as its state colleagues won in 2014. Were the 2018 state result repeated at the coming federal election, Labor would win a swing of 5.8 per cent. If that happened across the board, it would cost the Coalition five seats in Victoria alone.

Last time Labor won eighteen of Victoria’s thirty-seven seats, and the Coalition seventeen, with two crossbenchers (the Greens’ Adam Bandt in Melbourne, and independent Cathy McGowan in Indi). Since then, a redistribution has added a new seat in Labor’s fast-growing outer west, and on Antony Green’s estimates it has turned Dunkley (southern end of the Frankston line) and Corangamite (southern Geelong and its region) into marginal Labor seats.

Add to them Julia Banks’s seat of Chisholm (2.9), in the inner middle suburbs, and the Coalition was looking set to lose three of Victoria’s seats anyway. If Victorians vote federally as they did on 24 November, the Liberals would also lose the outer eastern seats of LaTrobe (3.2), Casey (4.5) and possibly Deakin (6.4).

At a federal level, however, the three traditional Coalition seats in the inner and inner-middle suburbs all look safe: Higgins is on a margin of 10.1 per cent, having shed the Greens stronghold of Windsor, and Goldstein (12.7) and Kooyong (12.8) are very comfortable.

Source: Estimates by the ABC’s Antony Green.

The Greens will not be a threat to the Liberals, but they are to Labor. Macnamara (nee Melbourne Ports) is a lineball seat between Labor and the Greens under its new boundaries. Cooper (nee Batman) and Wills will probably hold this time, but will be vulnerable when Labor support softens.

Then there are the independents. This election in Victoria saw their numbers swell to three: Ali Cupper, a lawyer, social worker and local councillor, won her local town of Mildura from the Nationals, arguing that the big parties ignore it when it’s held by one of them. Similar arguments just failed in Benambra, where a former Cathy McGowan staffer, Jacqui Hawkins, went down by 2.45 per cent. Suzanna Sheed retained Shepparton, which she won from the Nationals last time, while Russell Northe retained his seat of Morwell, which he won as a National last time.

Cathy McGowan appears to be preparing for a third term in Indi, although she has invited anyone else interested in standing to meet with her for “succession planning.” We’ve not heard of other independents entering the field: the lesson from the success of McGowan, Sheed and Cupper is that it takes a lot of doorknocking, a lot of fetes, rodeos, conversations and handshakes, to win people’s trust.

For the next election, the battle is already on. •

The post Final reckoning: nine views of Victoria’s election appeared first on Inside Story.

Many have written about the reasons for this, and the political consequences. This was my take in the Age, and among the stand-outs were James Campbell in the Herald Sun and Paul Strangio in the Conversation.

The critical element in most commentary is the same. The times have changed, yet the Liberal and National parties have let themselves be dominated by a clique bent on resisting change. Menzies isolated his right-wing rebels. Today’s Liberal leaders have given them veto powers over policy and party matters alike.

This will change only when the sensible moderates of the party agree that the only way to stop the right-wing fringe taking it over is to go into battle. Monday morning’s intervention on Radio National by Senate president Scott Ryan was an important sign that some of them are taking the fight to the bullies of the right and the Murdoch media. Ryan is an economic dry and no bleeding-heart liberal, but he lives in the twenty-first century, and he’s not prepared to see his party dragged away from mainstream Australia and made unelectable.

This fight will be a long and bitter one. For what it’s worth, the bookies now give the Morrison government just a 20 per cent chance of re-election. If the federal election results in a landslide like this, the Coalition parties will have lots of time to decide which century they want to live in. It will not be a battle for the faint-hearted.

In Victoria, the counting continues. It was a landslide that resulted in lots of close seats, with as many as twenty seats, almost a quarter of the Assembly, likely to be decided by margins of less than 2 per cent. As of now, my reading is:

Labor — 53
Coalition — 25
Greens — 2
Independents — 2
Too close to call — 6

Even that could be rash: more than six seats are in some measure of doubt, including two Coalition seats in the bush, where there’s an outside chance that independents could vault over the field on preferences. Of the six seats I count as too close to call, Labor leads in three (Bayswater, Hawthorn and Prahran), the Coalition in two (Caulfield and Ripon) and an independent in one (Mildura). Labor will end up with roughly twice as many seats as the Coalition parties.

With 80 per cent of the potential vote counted, Labor’s vote had jumped 4.7 per cent from the 2014 election, while the Coalition’s vote plunged 6.6 per cent. The median swing was 6 per cent in Melbourne and surrounding seats, just over 5 per cent in the three regional cities (Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo) and just 2 per cent in the rest of the state — where five seats, against the trend, recorded swings to the Nationals.

To get a full picture of what’s happened to the Coalition, we should go back to 2010, when Ted Baillieu led it to an unexpected victory over an apparently impregnable Brumby government. It was a unique event; it is the only election, federal or state, that the Coalition has won in Victoria since 1996. It stands out sharply against the twelve losses in that time.

Baillieu not only hammered the Brumby government over its mistakes — the most glaring one being its decision to build a huge, ultra-expensive desalination plant at Wonthaggi, which has barely been used since. Along with the usual Coalition agenda of tougher sentences, cutting waste, and so on, he also put forward a positive agenda for open government, including an anti-corruption commission and a plan to tackle Melbourne’s high construction costs. He was known as a liberal: tall, tolerant, intelligent and progressive. Victoria decided to give him a go.

For reasons too many and too complicated to explain here, it didn’t work. Baillieu was forced out in early 2013 after rogue backbencher Geoff Shaw defected to the crossbench. Denis Napthine took his place but was unable to turn the ship around. Labor returned to power in 2014 on a 3.5 per cent swing. The Coalition lost the four Frankston rail-line seats to Labor, Prahran to the Greens and Shepparton to independent Suzanna Sheed, while gaining Ripon.

This is the second election in a row at which the Coalition has suffered a heavy swing. In the seats it notionally held going into the 2014 election (based on Antony Green’s estimates for the Victorian parliament), the combined swing over those two elections has been 9.6 per cent. That excludes the three seats it has lost or looks like losing to independents: include them, and the average swing is over 10 per cent. One in five Victorians who voted for a Coalition government in 2010 voted against them this time.

Sources: Antony Green’s estimates of 2010 vote on new boundaries, and 2018 election results. Swings counted for forty-four seats notionally won by the Coalition in 2010 and contested against Labor or the Greens in 2018.
# Seats lost total includes seats lost or possibly lost to independents.

Part of it was an inner-suburban revolt. Take Hawthorn. It is one of the four seats of Melbourne where rich people congregate. It has been rusted on to the Liberal Party. Labor has won the seat only once in 120 years.

In 2010, Ted Baillieu won Hawthorn by a thumping two-to-one majority. Now his successor, shadow attorney-general John Pesutto, a well-regarded frontbencher seen by many as the next leader, trails by 154 votes and Labor is confident of taking the seat. Hawthorn, a Labor seat?!

Its wealthy neighbours Kew and Malvern, which includes Melbourne’s most exclusive suburb, Toorak, are now marginal seats. In the two elections, the combined swing against the Liberal Party has been 16.8 per cent in Hawthorn, 14.5 per cent in Malvern, 11.1 per cent in Kew and 13.3 per cent in Brighton, where nineteen-year-old student Declan Martin, who joined the Labor Party only two months ago and spent just $1750 on his campaign, almost won a seat Labor has never held before.

Why? See the analysis above. Whether the issue is climate change, patriarchy, race, gender or mode of transport, the Coalition seems to be clinging to the values of last century. The killer ad of this campaign was Labor’s billboard depicting opposition leader Matthew Guy with Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison. All of them are unpopular in Victoria, where the polls suggest the Coalition will lose heavily next May.

A ReachTel poll for the CFMEU this week reported that even industrial relations minister Kelly O’Dwyer would lose her safe seat of Higgins. Frankly, I’ll believe that when I see it, but it captures the mood.

The Liberal brand has been severely damaged, and the party has suffered a huge loss of support, narrowing its base to those who want to hear the tough-on-crime message that was its main campaign theme. (“Get Back in Control” is a candidate for the dumbest election slogan I can recall.)

Guy did have more positive things to say on issues like decentralisation, but they got lost in the endless negative campaigns that the Coalition and its media Siamese twin, Murdoch’s Herald Sun, kept hammering at voters: the “red shirts” scandal of 2014, in which Labor hired campaign workers at taxpayers’ expense, the Skyrail elevated train line, and others.

These issues failed to connect. Voters were sceptical that changing the government would change the crime rate. They believe parties constantly rort the system, and the “red shirts” scandal was small beer once Labor repaid the money. As for Skyrail, the elevated line ran mostly through the seat of Oakleigh, and voters there didn’t mind at all. Oakleigh gave an 8 per cent swing to Labor.

In 2010, the Coalition held twelve seats within fifteen kilometres of the CBD. Over two elections, it has lost roughly half of them: Bentleigh, Prahran, Burwood, Mount Waverley, Box Hill and possibly Caulfield and Hawthorn. Those it still holds are now marginal.

But it is not just in the inner suburbs that the Liberals have taken a hammering. It is throughout Melbourne. On the other side of that fifteen-kilometre line, it has already lost another six seats, and Bayswater looks likely to be a seventh. Yan Yean, on Melbourne’s northern fringe, is booming with new housing estates. Labor has built a new train line to Mernda for them, it’s duplicating the main road, and it’s stashing the place with services. Yan Yean too has recorded a 16.8 per cent swing against the Coalition since 2010. What its voters want and what the Coalition offers are two different things.

With the solitary exception of Forest Hill, where new residents are largely Chinese Australians, every Coalition electorate in Melbourne has recorded a swing to Labor since 2010 of at least 7 per cent.

Looking at the Coalition seats where it has done best since 2010, two things stand out. This first is evident in the names of the six MPs:

The Coalition went into this election with just six sitting female MPs. Four of them are on this best performers list. A fifth, Heidi Victoria, is just outside it. It is only fair to add that the party did endorse female candidates for roughly half of Labor’s marginal seats. But they all lost in the landslide to Labor. Meanwhile, the two retiring female Liberal MPs in the Assembly, Louise Asher (Brighton) and Christine Fyffe (Evelyn), were replaced by just one new one, Bridget Vallence (Evelyn).

If the Liberals lose Heidi Victoria from Bayswater, as appears likely, Vallence will be the only woman among the sixteen or so Liberal MPs from Melbourne.

Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger suggested this week that long-serving male MPs retire to create vacancies for women to come through. But just three months ago, Kroger himself steered through a new rule to scrap preselections and renominate all federal MPs. It was widely seen as a move to save long-serving right-wing MP Kevin Andrews from a preselection he might lose.

Second, the only part of Victoria where Labor has not gained much traction has been in regional Victoria — above all, in areas more than 200 kilometres from Melbourne that have always been safe Coalition territory, at least until Cathy McGowan showed they could be won by independents. A year later Suzanna Sheed followed her example by taking the previously safe Nationals seat of Shepparton.

This time former Nationals MP Russell Northe — who quit the party last year saying he was suffering depression after allegations of financial irregularities, unpaid loans and a gambling addiction — held his seat of Morwell as an independent against the combined assault of the Liberals and Nationals. In distant Mildura, a young lawyer, councillor and former Labor candidate, Ali Cupper, appears on track to narrowly defeat Nationals MP Peter Crisp.

Independents also have an outside chance of scoring upsets in Benambra, based on Wodonga, and South-West Coast (formerly Warrnambool) but need improbably strong preference flows to pull it off.

Glenn Druery’s success in turning candidates with minimal support into senators or MLCs inspired a record number of candidates to stand for the Legislative Council. Record numbers of them will win seats when the final votes are tallied on 11 December. More on that when the outcome is clear.

In the same way, the success of the independents is bound to lead to more of them standing next time. Cupper came within cooee of winning Mildura in 2014; she has effectively been campaigning ever since, and this time it looks like she’s done it. Next time the independents will be more formidable again, threatening safe seats on all sides.

What the independents share is a complaint that their areas have been overlooked because governments focus taxpayer resources on the marginal seats that matter for their own re-election. And they’re right. The only way to change this, they argue, is to make your own safe seat marginal — by voting for an independent. They’re right again: Suzanna Sheed delivered far more for Shepparton from a Labor government than Nationals MPs were ever able to deliver from their own governments.

This election saw concerted attacks by independents in several previously safe Labor seats in the western suburbs. They all failed, but some came close enough to put the wind up Labor MPs, including treasurer Tim Pallas in Werribee. One suspects that we may see a different approach to resource allocation in this term of government.

Amid all the retribution, we shouldn’t forget that voters vote primarily on their judgement of governments — and clearly they have given the Andrews government a positive endorsement. The economic times have suited Victoria, and jobs have flowed to match the record flows of new migrants. But the government has also been building the infrastructure that Melbourne is crying out for. The voters like it, and they’ve rewarded the government for doing it.

Two days before the election, Labor revealed the most important policy announcement of the campaign. After secret discussions with the ratings agencies, it announced that it will finance the construction of its $80 billion infrastructure wishlist by gradually lifting the state’s net debt from its current limit of 6 per cent of gross state product to 12 per cent. This is a very important policy shift by Labor — and by the ratings agencies — and a welcome one, so long as it chooses its projects with care and economic rigour.

The next big event in the electoral calendar is the New South Wales election on 23 March. Premier Gladys Berejiklian must be hoping that her voters likewise reward her government for its infrastructure blitz (which, unlike Victoria’s, is largely funded by the federal government) rather than punish it for being made up of Liberals and Nationals.

The bookies think so. They give the Coalition a 60 per cent chance of winning in New South Wales, as against a 20 per cent chance of winning the federal election. But then, at the start of the Victorian campaign they gave Matthew Guy a 30 per cent chance of winning. In reality, he had no chance.

All of which means that the year 2019 will be a very important one for the future of the Coalition parties. •

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Out of eighty-eight lower house seats, Labor looks like it will end up in the mid fifties and the Coalition in the high twenties, perhaps nudging thirty. There will be two or three independents.

The Greens had an awful night, going from three to one or perhaps two Legislative Assembly seats. This was despite the Liberals abandoning their 2010 and 2014 strategy of preferencing Labor ahead of the minor party. Much of this result surely flows from well-publicised problems with candidates during the campaign, which Daniel Andrews energetically exploited.

Last night and today, like clockwork, federal Coalition MPs are insisting this election was fought on local issues and that there’s little for them to take away from the result. They actually have half a point.

Quite obviously, August’s prime ministerial shuffle, and subsequent shenanigans — the Nazis R Us Senate vote, shuffling Israel’s embassy like an election chessboard piece, and the ideological tics on issues such as climate change — didn’t help. Along with the Victorian Liberals’ own insistence on running hard on “African crime,” it can all be seen as part of the capture by the hard right, otherwise known as Watching Too Much Sky News After Dark.

But while election observers will instinctively wave this drubbing around as a pointer for the likely fate of the Morrison government and issue dire warnings about “learning the lessons,” Victoria’s vote tells us nothing about the next federal election.

The greatest determining factor in this big swing was the existence of a federal Coalition government. Go back to almost every huge result at state or territory level and you’ll find that the colleagues of the losing side were in office in Canberra.

The federal counterparts don’t have to be travelling badly to hurt the state party. Yesterday’s numbers are dwarfed by the Bracks government’s re-election in 2002, a 7.6 per cent two-party-preferred swing with 57.8 per cent of the vote. The Howard government was perceived to be doing very nicely, so fault for the defeat was widely agreed to lie with the state parties.

Twenty-one months earlier, by contrast, a 60–40 Labor win in Queensland was judged to have such dire federal repercussions that Liberal president Shane Stone was motivated to jot down some unkind words about the Howard government (mostly about the treasurer, Peter Costello) in a memo that was promptly leaked. The difference was that in early 2001 the Howard government was lagging badly in the polls and appeared gone for all money.

So you can see how it works: disastrous state results only portend federal ones when the federal party appears headed for defeat anyway. Otherwise, as with Howard, they serve to provide contrast with the federal party’s surefootedness. (Across his eleven and a half years as prime minister, John Howard presided over record Labor wins in every state and territory except Western Australia.)

The Morrison government probably will meet its maker next year, but Victoria provides no evidence either for or against.

And if tomorrow’s Newspoll falls into line with the most recent Ipsos and Essential polls, registering a federal narrowing to something like 52–48, the “Victoria shows Morrison is doomed” narrative might be very short-lived indeed. •

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With, on this election day, all published surveys indicating a big win for the Andrews Labor government in Victoria, this article is not totally immune to this syndrome.

If the surveys are right, there will be a swing of between 1 and 3 per cent from the 2014 52 per cent two-party-preferred result. (Subtract half a per cent or so for Richmond, where the Liberals aren’t running.)

The pendulum suggests a net gain of between one and three seats. But swings are never uniform: in 2014 a statewide 3.6 per cent swing included everything from a 2.5 per cent movement to the Liberals (Melton) to an 11.5 shift to Labor (Morwell). The pendulum is supposed to estimate numbers, not the identity of seats.

And in the swing-to-seat-numbers equation, sophomore surges tend to assist governments that took a lot of seats at the last poll. At the federal level, for example, first-term governments in 1998 and 2010 survived national swings that the pendulum predicted would have seen them out of office.

So Labor might lose more seats to the Greens, and the Coalition to independents.

The surveys are registering the Greens at around 11 to 14 per cent, but polls routinely overstate minor parties’ support, and it looks likely they will fall short of their 2014 vote of 11.5 per cent.

Of course, it’s seats that count. In 2014 the minor party’s statewide vote barely moved, but it picked up two seats and then snatched another at a subsequent by-election. This time it won’t have to battle Liberal how-to-vote cards favouring Labor. Brunswick, where there is no sitting Labor member recontesting, is seen as the most likely gain. But the Greens have had some terrible publicity in the final weeks, which premier Daniel Andrews has been exploiting with great enthusiasm.

Opposition leader Matthew Guy’s dire warnings of a Labor–Greens minority government have been assisted by Greens leader Samantha Ratnam’s articulated aim of “forming” with the ALP “the most progressive government this state has seen.” This is usually sound Coalition strategy — but not, perhaps, when there’s a wide expectation among voters that Labor will win, either in minority or majority, and some who would otherwise support the Liberals vote to ensure the minor party doesn’t get anywhere near the treasury benches.

As always there have been many references to the “seats to watch,” those “must-win seats.” In this case they tend to be on the “Frankston line,” Labor’s most marginal: Frankston (0.5 per cent margin), Carrum (0.7), Bentleigh (0.8) and Mordialloc (2.1).

But lower house majorities can come from surprising places, and as the federal electorate of Lindsay showed us in 2016 (when for the first time in its history it went to the losing side), electorates can move in and out of the “crucial” category.

All but Carrum should benefit from big, fat, double-strength sophomore surges. In addition, the next seat on the pendulum, Cranbourne, has a retiring Labor MP, so that and Carrum might be the most likely (or least unlikely) to fall to the opposition.

On the other side, the sophomore surge could assist, if the swing isn’t too big, the Liberal MP in the party’s most marginal seat, Ripon.

And in the wake of Wentworth, with low primary votes for major parties, particularly the Coalition, there’s the possibility of more independents. Apart from one sitting independent (in Shepparton) none is favoured to take an individual seat (sitting Morwell MP Russell Northe, who left the Nationals last year, stands a decent chance of surviving), but that doesn’t mean we won’t see one or two squeeze through the middle. •

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Labor’s conflicted position vis-à-vis the Greens is well documented in Shaun Crowe’s recent book, Whitlam’s Children: Labor and the Greens in Australia (and in his piece this week for Inside Story). His interviews with a range of Labor and Greens MPs and activists reveal a much greater consensus within the latter party than in the former. Greens respondents largely see Labor as a fellow progressive party, albeit flawed in policy and practice, with which parliamentary cooperation and alliance are natural future developments.

By contrast, while several Labor respondents express sympathy with aspects of the Greens agenda (but fault them for preferring the elusive perfect to the achievable good), a significant proportion sees little in common and minimal basis for cooperation. Doubtless, some of this attitude reflects resentment at Greens incursions onto Labor turf, but there does seem a genuine feeling that the minor party is simply too outside the mainstream, especially in relation to its failure to worship at the altar of economic growth. Indeed, there are a few Labor figures whose anti-Greens posture is so intense that it seems likely they would prefer to cooperate with almost anyone else (including the Liberals).

Such a hostile attitude can easily be inferred from Labor’s behaviour in Victoria. Along with Western Australia, Victoria retains discredited group-voting tickets for state upper house elections, a feature that facilitates (through the “preference whisperer” industry) the election of micro-party candidates. Despite minuscule primary votes, these candidates are able to win seats and potentially take the balance of power. Informed analysts see the Greens as the most likely loser from the micros’ probable success at this weekend’s election, and this tends to confirm the view that Labor would rather deal with anyone (no matter how right-wing/reactionary) other than the Greens. Daniel Andrews would seem to be in this camp.

In terms of the lower house result, final polling indicates a two-party-preferred Labor lead of 53–47 or 54–46. Opposition leader Matthew Guy’s law-and-order theme appears not to have secured the necessary traction, despite no shortage of useful material. In the first and second weeks of the campaign, incidents of African-related violence were reported, and then followed the tragic events of Bourke Street.

Even if Labor managed a two-party-preferred vote of 54 per cent, a uniform swing would secure it only two Coalition seats. Hence, some interest may remain in the Labor–Greens battles, especially in the government-held seats of Brunswick and Richmond, where the incumbents will be hoping that exposure of the Greens’ internal problems will work in Labor’s favour. Indeed, the election looms as some sort of test as to how less rusted-on Greens voters react to a somewhat scandal-plagued election campaign, the most recent example being the standing down of a candidate over rape allegations.

Finally, while the paucity of polling during the election campaign has been a frustration for political tragics, the apparent lack of movement during the past four weeks suggests that it may have been money well saved for media outlets. •

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Opinion polls, bookies and commentators all expect the Andrews Labor government to be comfortably re-elected. The Coalition’s victory under Ted Baillieu in 2010 looks like an aberration: Victoria is a Labor state these days, and it is reverting to type.

It’s a long time since Dick Hamer led the Liberals to their ninth consecutive Victorian victory back in 1979 — in each case winning enough votes to govern alone. Since then, the Liberal–National coalition has won just three out of ten state elections, and has won a majority of Victorian seats at just three of the last thirteen federal elections. Combining them, the Coalition’s election record in Victoria since 1980 is stark: won six, lost seventeen.

This could be its eighteenth loss. Statewide opinion polls taken in late October by the firm formerly known as Galaxy — one as a YouGov Galaxy poll for the Herald Sun, one as a Newspoll for the Australian — both showed a swing to the government, with Labor polling 53 to 54 per cent.

This week YouGov Galaxy has polled four marginal Labor seats for the Herald Sun, and for what it’s worth — as marginal seat polling, even by Galaxy, has proved unreliable — all of them found Labor holding its ground: against the Coalition, against the Greens, and against a maverick independent.

A week out from the election, the online bookies on average are offering $1.20 on a Labor victory, $4.25 on a Coalition one. That implies a 78 per cent probability that Labor will win, and less than a one-in-four chance for the Coalition. And they’re offering the same odds on Labor to win next year’s federal election.

It’s a dramatic shift from a year ago. In the first half of 2017, both Galaxy and ReachTEL published polls showing the Coalition poised to win back Victoria in landslide swings of 5 to 6 per cent. Even last December, Galaxy reported that it was a 50–50 contest. But every poll this year has pointed to a Labor win, and as the year has gone on, the gap has widened.

An opinion poll, of course, is not an election. And the one issue the polls have found to be working in the Coalition’s favour is crime. Victorians prefer the Coalition’s “tough on crime” stance to Labor’s watered-down version of the same.

The dominating event of the campaign has been last Friday’s tragedy in Bourke Street, committed by a deranged Somali Muslim refugee. And it’s no surprise that opposition leader Matthew Guy is making the most of it as a vindication of the Coalition’s “tough on crime” policies.

Guy has seized on an unguarded remark Andrews made after the Lindt Café siege in Sydney in 2015, when he warned that “all of us, as Victorians and indeed Australians, have to accept that violent extremism is part of a contemporary Australia.” Every time Guy has faced the cameras in recent days, he has declared over and over: “I do not, have not and never will accept that violent extremism is part of contemporary Australia… There can be no complacency and no equivocation when it comes to protecting the community.”

The Coalition keeps rolling out new plans to toughen penalties for crime, this week proposing to require suspected terrorists to keep away from the CBD, wear electronic monitoring devices and lose access to communications. The issue has been fanned over the years by the incessant focus of the TV evening news on crimes, and the incendiary reporting by Melbourne’s Herald Sun of crimes committed by African gangs, as if these matter more than the 95 per cent of crimes that are committed by others.

Most of the issues the Liberals and their media ally have focused on have failed to bite: the Skyrail project, which has elevated the Cranbourne–Pakenham railway line through some suburbs; the “red shirts” scandal, in which Labor in 2014 broke the rules by allocating electoral staff to campaigning (it has since repaid their salaries); and so on. But the crime issue has a solid base in reality, even if, as Age columnist John Silvester has argued, the solutions are far more complex than the simple retribution the voters are looking for.

Andrews, by contrast, has stayed in the background since the tragedy, mourning cafe owner Sisto Malaspina, while adopting a kind of dignified silence on the causes. He has got to where he is by focusing on building a lot of much-needed transport infrastructure, and by the good fortune of Victoria’s economic boom. He is sticking with those stories.

Indeed, Labor’s priority now seems to be to say as little as possible. Andrews has refused to meet Guy in a debate on ABC television, where many people would be watching, choosing instead the safety of a debate on Sky, where few will see it. Treasurer Tim Pallas has even refused the traditional debate with his counterpart, Michael O’Brien, on ABC radio. Labor is feeling comfortable, and doesn’t want to rock the boat.

But this election might not be as clear-cut as it seems. In seat after seat that is traditionally safe for one major party or the other, this is the year of the independent uprising.

Encouraged by Victoria’s ridiculously low deposit fee of only $350, independent candidates have put themselves forward for seats all over the state, arguing that their area has been neglected because it’s not a marginal seat. Vote for me, they say, and you will start to get new infrastructure, better-resourced schools and hospitals, and all those other services that go to marginal seats.

For many, it will be a persuasive argument. Fewer voters these days are rusted onto either side. What can we lose, they ask, by voting for an independent, to make the big parties take notice of us?

It worked for Suzanna Sheed in 2014, when she took the previously safe seat of Shepparton from the Nationals, after the high dollar almost bankrupted the town’s biggest employer, SPC-Ardmona, and the party’s federal ministers did nothing to help rescue it.

This time, independents are everywhere — and who knows what effect they will have? Every state seat within Cathy McGowan’s federal electorate of Indi has one or two independents standing, most of them running open tickets. In Mildura, where local cop Russell Savage dethroned the sitting National in 1995 in a revolt over the Kennett government’s broken promises, two independents are campaigning hard to unseat the current National MP, Peter Crisp.

In South-West Coast, upper house independent James Purcell is trying to change houses by winning his local seat from the Liberals. A potentially dangerous one for the Nats is Ovens Valley, where Nationals MP Tim McCurdy has been committed to face trial on fraud charges from his earlier life as a real estate agent.

Then there is Morwell, in the heart of the Latrobe Valley, which has been in a generation-long depression since Kennett privatised the previously overstaffed power stations. Local footy legend Russell Northe took the seat from Labor in 2006 for the Nationals, but last year quit the party over claims of financial irregularities due to his gambling addiction. Northe is standing again as an independent. The Liberals and Nationals are both standing. And so is former senator Ricky Muir, this time for the Shooters Party, while Labor too has a strong chance.

But it’s not just a rural phenomenon. While most of the independents standing in Melbourne seats look like ethnic vote harvesters for the Liberals, Pascoe Vale has three independents exchanging preferences to try to unseat Labor MP Lizzie Blandthorn. For now, the bookies think Suzanna Sheed will be the only independent to win, but Northe and a few others are given a decent chance.

The independents are mostly threats to the Coalition. The threat to Labor is from the Greens.

In 2002, 2006 and 2010, the Greens kept creeping closer to Labor in four inner-city seats — Brunswick, Melbourne, Northcote and Richmond — without breaking through. In 2014, they focused their resources on winning Melbourne from Labor and Prahran from the Liberals, and succeeded in both. Northcote followed at last year’s by-election. This time they hope to hold all three seats, and take Brunswick and Richmond.

That could potentially give them the balance of power in the new eighty-eight-member Assembly. It’s a prospect the Liberals are simultaneously facilitating and warning against. Victoria has not had minority government since 1952, and while Labor and the Greens cohabit amiably in the ACT, it would require a dramatic cultural change in the Victorian Labor branch for it to work successfully there. Expect a barrage of TV ads from the Liberals in the final days about this scary prospect.

But the Liberals are also helping to make it a reality. In 2014 their preferences gave Labor victory in Brunswick, Northcote and Richmond. This time they are not standing in Richmond — the first election since 1952 at which they have left a Labor seat uncontested — to try to ensure that the Greens win it and unseat planning minister Richard Wynne. As of Friday morning, they have still not lodged their final how-to-vote cards for the other seats, but they are expected to be open tickets.

The Greens are tipped to take Brunswick, which former minister Jane Garrett has abandoned to take a seat in the upper house. The bookies have them as narrow favourites in Richmond; but earlier this year Labor retained the federal seat of Batman without Liberal preferences, and it would be no surprise if Wynne hangs on. Richmond, once solidly working-class, now comprises mostly professional/business couples in which both work full-time, giving it the third-highest median household income in Victoria. In the long term, it is a potential Liberal seat.

One Nation has always been weak in Victoria and is not standing this time; nor are Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives. In the lower house, the threat to the major parties is from the independents and the Greens. In the upper house, it is from “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery, who has produced his most complex and wide-ranging set of deals yet, which could send a tsunami of micro-party candidates into the new chamber.

Victoria has eight regions for the Legislative Council, each electing five members — similar to Senate elections, but with four-year terms and the old group voting tickets, in which you just tick the box and the parties decide your preferences in these backroom deals. They’ve been abolished in most other places, with Victoria and Western Australia the last holdouts. And Druery has excelled himself this time.

In 2014 his team won five of the forty seats. Of them, Fiona Patten (Northern Metro) of the Sex Party (now the Reason Party) has made the biggest impact, spearheading Victoria’s controversial dying-with-dignity bill. But Druery’s tickets also elected two MPs from the Shooters Party, a Western District independent who called his party “Vote 1 Local Jobs,” and Rachel Carling-Jenkins, who was elected in Western Metro for the Democratic Labour Party, then joined the Australian Conservatives, then quit them, and is now running as an independent for the Assembly seat of Werribee.

This time Team Druery looks set to win at least one seat in all eight regions, possibly more. We now have eighteen parties standing in every seat, and only the Socialists have refused to take part in these labyrinthine preference swaps. A right-wing “life coach,” Stuart O’Neill, who wants new migrants to be put on a ten-year good behaviour bond and named his team the Aussie Battler Party, looks likely to win a seat in Western Metro on preferences from the Greens, Labor and ten other parties.

Druery now works as chief of staff to senator Derryn Hinch, and he’s set up Hinch’s party nicely in a number of seats, mostly in unobtrusive positions, and it would be no surprise if it wins several seats next Saturday. The Shooters, the Liberal Democrats, a new party called Transport Matters, and possibly even the Dick Smith–backed Sustainable Australia party could win seats under his deals. Fiona Patten, who has fallen out spectacularly with Druery, concedes she now has only a 50–50 chance of holding her seat.

Most of these seats will be taken from Labor, the Coalition and the Greens — who don’t seem to mind, since they made no effort in the last parliament to reform the electoral laws. The Coalition–Greens reform of the Senate voting system provides a model if they ever want to. But in Victoria, Labor was able to work quite well with the crossbenchers in the last parliament and seems to prefer that to putting them out of business.

If the Coalition were to pull off an upset, how could it do it?

First, it could win with less than 50 per cent of the vote. Victoria has seen massive population growth, but mostly in Labor or Greens seats. The average Coalition seat now has 5 per cent fewer voters than the average Labor seat. The differences that have evolved in the six years since the last redistribution — leading to 61,814 voters in Cranbourne versus 38,937 in Mount Waverley — suggest that states growing this fast need a redistribution after every election.

Second, the new socioeconomic geography of Melbourne — higher-income households in the inner and inner-middle suburbs, lower-income households further out — creates electoral opportunities for the Liberals. Census data shows that while the old Liberal heartland (Brighton, Malvern, Kew and Hawthorn) has the greatest concentration of high-income households, Labor and the Greens hold nine of the eighteen seats in the second tier of wealth. And five of them are marginal.

In the inner south, Prahran (Greens, 0.4) became in 2014 the first lower house seat the Greens have ever taken from the Liberals, after narrowly pushing Labor into third place. It’s a three-way contest again this time, and for what it’s worth, the bookies give the Liberals the best chance of the three.

Next-door Albert Park (Labor, 3.0), by contrast, has never been won by the Liberals. But its median household income is now the highest of any Victorian electorate, and when the Liberals eventually get sick of losing and dump the hard right for the political centre, seats like Albert Park and Prahran will form part of the next Liberal majority.

In the northeast, Ivanhoe (Labor, 3.4) has wealthy pockets and poor ones, and is usually held by whoever is in government. Much further out, the same is true of the gumtree-and-mudbrick suburb of Eltham (Labor, 2.7), which has Melbourne’s second-highest concentration of households speaking English only. Chinese buyers don’t go for Eltham style.

The Liberals have hopes in all these four seats. And they will need to win three or four of them to have any hope of forming government.

Third, they need to win back the four seats along the Frankston railway line: in order of distance from Melbourne, Bentleigh (0.8), Mordialloc (2.1), Carrum (0.7), and Frankston (0.5). When they won power in 2010 under Ted Baillieu, the key was that they picked up all four seats, largely on discontent about the poor rail services and road links. But they failed to fix those problems, and in 2014 Labor won back all four seats, and hence government.

The four seats are constantly grouped together, but they are very different. Bentleigh these days is in the second tier of high-wealth electorates by income, and in the top tier for mortgages and rents. It’s full of two-income professional/business families, attracting an ethnic mix of Jewish, Chinese, Greek and Italian voters.

By contrast, Frankston is far more downtrodden. One-in-four households there told the census they lived on less than $650 a week. Its average income is the fourth-lowest of any Melbourne electorate, behind only the three where refugees are concentrated: Broadmeadows, St Albans and Dandenong.

But Frankston has few of them. It’s an old Anglo-Australian mix, the only part of Melbourne with fewer foreign-language speakers than Eltham. But it does have Victoria’s highest divorce rate.

Labor has worked hard to look after these four seats. Level crossings have been removed, a new station has gone up at busy Southland, work is about to start on the Mordialloc Freeway, and it continually announces new services of all kinds. The Liberals have promised their own new freeway, by removing intersections along the Dingley bypass, and thumped the drum about rising crime. For what it’s worth, this week’s YouGov seat polls showed Labor holding Mordialloc and Frankston, with slight swings its way.

The Liberals are hoping that’s wrong. The bookies rate Frankston, Carrum and Bentleigh, along with Prahran and Albert Park, as their best chances of picking up seats anywhere in the state. They need to win most of these to win the election.

On paper, the outer suburbs should provide plenty of prospective gains. In 2014 Labor won the marginal seats of southeastern Cranbourne (2.3 per cent), Narre Warren North (4.6) and Narre Warren South (5.5), as well as the northern fringe seats of Yan Yean (3.7), Macedon (3.8) and Sunbury (4.3), and the Dandenongs electorate of Monbulk (5.0). But only Cranbourne is seen as a frontline seat, and it has many more voters now than in 2014.

It’s a similar story in Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo. Labor holds seven of their eight seats, mostly by narrow margins. But while the Coalition still hopes to win Bellarine (4.8), the bookies think there is more risk of it losing the one seat it still holds in Victoria’s three main regional centres: the southern Geelong seat of South Barwon (Liberal, 2.9), where the rapidly growing new housing estates are not core Liberal territory.

And in the rest of Victoria, Labor lost its last seat in 2014. It’s the Coalition that is on the defensive against independents (and, in some seats, against Labor).

Overall, a re-elected Labor government is the most likely possibility. But a Labor-led minority government is the next most likely, and one that would require Andrews and his party to climb a steep learning curve. A Coalition-led minority government relying on the independents is an outside chance, a Coalition majority government a very slim one.

And if this election gives Labor an 18–6 winning record in the last twenty-four elections in Victoria, will it lead the Liberals and Nationals to rethink their decision to abandon the political centre for the hard right? Or do its right-wing powerbrokers just want to control their branch, rather than win elections? •

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Indeed, given that Labor secured a 52 per cent two-party vote in 2014, the movement appears to be in the opposite direction. The respected election-watcher William Bowe has averaged Labor’s current two-party-preferred vote at 53.3 per cent, though that swing, if uniform, would secure the party only one additional seat.

So is this election likely to be less competitive than the close state contests of 2010 and 2014? Some caution is necessary, for three reasons. First, given the Labor government’s occasional rockiness, it seems counterintuitive to believe that premier Daniel Andrews might secure a re-election figure close to the one achieved by the ultra-popular Steve Bracks in 2006 (54.4 per cent). Second, in the absence of any polling since both parties launched their campaigns on the weekend, the effect of any decisive policies has yet to be measured. And, finally, conventional wisdom suggests that opposition leaders benefit from a big lift in media exposure during a campaign (as Liberal leader Ted Baillieu certainly did in 2010).

At least one external factor could bear on the result. The federal Liberals’ internal discord has attracted enormous coverage, but its impact on the state contest is difficult to assess. The Victorian division obviously can’t control the party’s national brand, and besides, voters have long demonstrated a capacity to distinguish between state and federal issues, and Guy is currently polling better than his federal colleagues in Victoria.

In their policy launches, both leaders played to perceived party strengths. Labor highlighted its major infrastructure achievements, promising more of the same — a new suburban rail loop having recently been announced — and pledged to employ more medical professionals. The Liberals played the law-and-order card, promising harsher treatment for crimes of violence, and undertook to deal with Melbourne’s burgeoning population by reducing payroll tax in regional Victoria to 1 per cent (from 2.45 per cent). A commitment to reduce car registration costs for first-year probationary drivers was a clearly targeted Liberal proposal, but we might wonder whether enough members of the relevant demographic are actually on the electoral roll.

Among the Liberals’ other promises was the creation of an independent judicial review of Labor’s “red shirts” affair, which involved the misuse of taxpayers’ funds for political campaigning by casual electorate staff in 2014. A case might be made for inquiries like this, but it has echoes of the Abbott government’s royal commission into the Rudd government’s “pink batts” scheme. In a liberal democracy, governing parties should probably tread carefully before “investigating” their predecessors in office; where laws have been broken, such matters may be best left to the police.

Equally controversial has been Guy’s commitment to reintroducing religious instruction as an option in state schools. This drew praise and condemnation from predictable quarters, but smacks of pandering to the “base” and seems unlikely to move votes. It will also confirm for some critics that the Victorian Liberals are increasingly susceptible to the influence of fundamentalist religious elements.

Guy will not be helped by the reality that state election campaigns aren’t what they used to be. In a time of international turmoil and federal political shenanigans, a state campaign will struggle to grab voters’ attention in the sustained manner that an opposition needs. Adding to Guy’s problems is this week’s Newspoll finding that voters put Labor and the Liberals close to level-pegging on Guy’s favoured terrain of law and order.

Another aspect of the Coalition’s polling deficit also spells bad news for Guy. More than in any other mainland state, a Liberal leader in Victoria can use the possibility of a close election to raise the spectre of a minority Labor government in thrall to the dreaded Greens. That minor party already holds three lower-house seats and will be competitive in at least two others. The government could hold all its seats where its main opponent is the Coalition but fail to win any new ones, while at the same time losing Brunswick and Richmond to the Greens. This would leave Labor on forty-four — one short of a majority — and forced to contemplate a deal to enable minority government. It’s certainly theoretically possible, though obviously less likely with current poll numbers. Guy probably needs polling somewhere near 50–50 for a scare campaign about Greens influence to gain any traction.

For his part, Andrews will no doubt give the now-routine undertaking never to enter the same room as the Greens, let alone negotiate an arrangement based on the parliamentary numbers produced by the voters. Unfortunately for the major parties, however, sending the voters back to the polls until they elect a clear majority is not an option.

Finally, a word about the upper house. Since 2006, the Legislative Council has been elected by proportional representation, with the state divided into eight regions, each electing five members. For the first two contests, seats were mostly won by the Liberal, National, Labor and Greens parties (the exception was a sole Democratic Labour Party member in 2006); the Coalition secured a narrow majority in 2010, a feat not achieved by Labor in its two terms in government. In 2014, “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery entered the scene and helped secure the election of candidates who, despite having very few primary votes, benefited from the propensity of most electors to follow the various parties’ group-voting tickets by voting above the line. It will be interesting to see how many voters opt for below-the-line voting this year, the incidence having doubled from 4 to 8 per cent in 2014.

Significantly, the Andrews government has shown no apparent interest in replicating the federal reforms that eliminated group-voting tickets. If his government is re-elected, the premier is stuck with whatever upper-house numbers the fates deliver him. Prediction is nigh on impossible, but a majority for Labor or the Coalition must be seen as the longest of long shots.

What can be predicted with some confidence is that the loser will not be at the dispatch box when the fifty-ninth Victorian parliament is convened. After four years in the job, an unsuccessful Matthew Guy is unlikely to retain the party leadership, and as for a defeated premier: the customary question is when to hold the by-election. •

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Two elections back, the Liberal–National Coalition took power with a two-seat majority; it lasted just one term in government before Labor was elected with a six-seat majority in 2014. Premier Daniel Andrews’s majority fell to four after a by-election loss to the Greens in November last year, and both Labor and the Coalition have lost a member to the state’s tiny group of independent MPs.

If we treat those two seats as effectively belonging to the major parties, then the current lower house numbers are Labor, forty-six; Coalition, thirty-eight; Greens, three; and one independent. The mathematically inclined will have noted two things: that forty-five is the number needed to govern and that the total membership is an even number — a less than desirable feature when a close election is possible. And it is starting to look quite close: a recent ReachTel poll reported a Labor lead of 51–49 in two-party-preferred terms, down from 52–48 at the 2014 election.

While the two-party figure is now commonly used to predict election results, it is at its most useful when the electoral system is reasonably fair and all seats are shared between government and opposition. The former applies in Victoria, but not the latter.

The Greens hold three seats and are likely to be competitive in at least two others. The conservatively inclined seat of Shepparton is held by independent MP Suzanna Sheed. And former senator Ricky Muir is expected to have some impact (as the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party candidate) in the marginal National seat of Morwell. This adds up to at least seven seats in which the final contest may not be Labor–Coalition, raising the spectre of a hung parliament and some form of minority government.

In the past two elections, government has essentially been won in the four seats along the Frankston railway line, which runs through Melbourne’s bayside suburbs. That group — Frankston (held by 0.5 per cent), Carrum (0.7 per cent), Bentleigh (0.8 per cent) and Mordialloc (2.1 per cent) — will again be critical. The four have benefited from substantial transport infrastructure spending (notably the removal of railway level crossings) at the cost of significant pain and inconvenience during construction, and the government no doubt hopes that the balance works in its electoral favour. Whether gratitude brings the desired reward remains to be seen: voters can be notoriously unsentimental.

Even if the Liberals recapture the three Frankston line seats that would fall with the recent poll-predicted swing of 1 per cent, the Coalition’s lower house numbers would still only be forty-one, four short of a majority. The corollary is that Labor, left with forty-three seats, would lose its absolute majority; and it is also vulnerable in two seats narrowly won against the Greens in 2014. The Liberals can get to forty-two with a win in the state’s most marginal seat — inner-suburban Prahran, on 0.4 per cent — which saw a genuine three-way contest in 2014, with the Greens narrowly defeating the Liberals thanks to Labor preferences.

After Mordialloc, the pendulum suggests that the Liberals’ best chances are Cranbourne (2.3 per cent) and Eltham (2.7 per cent), which would take the Coalition to the magic forty-five. It would also have some confidence about winning Albert Park (3.0 per cent), whose demographics are changing in its favour.

For Labor, the 51–49 poll suggests that its task is one of defence/loss minimisation: it is difficult to see it winning seats from the Coalition, and nor are ensconced Greens easy to dislodge. In the past, changes of government were usually visible some distance out, with the opposition of the day consistently ahead in the polls. While that was broadly true of the 2014 election, the 2010 Coalition victory over the Brumby Labor government came at the equivalent of time-on in the last quarter, giving the incumbents no cause for complacency.

In terms of leadership, neither Andrews nor Liberal leader Matthew Guy attract stellar approval ratings, with the preferred premier metric a virtual (low-scoring) tie in the ReachTel poll. The Coalition’s depiction of Andrews as untrustworthy and in thrall to nasty unions is intensifying; and Labor can be expected to remind voters of Guy’s alleged talent, when planning minister, for turning generous Liberal donors into multi-millionaires with zoning decisions. Labor will also focus on the opposition leader’s alleged links with organised crime, highlighting an infamous dinner at a seafood restaurant during which, by his own account, Guy was unaware of the antecedents of one of the more colourful attendees.

In policy terms, the government can be expected to run on its record in infrastructure. As well as removing level crossings, it has commenced a massive extension to Melbourne’s underground rail system, not due for completion till the middle of the next decade, and has upgraded several freeways. Indeed, Andrews is effectively running as the infrastructure premier, with the Age this week reporting that “more than $100 billion of new roads, rail lines, hospitals, skyscrapers, prisons, wind farms and other infrastructure is being build or planned…”

The government will also claim improvements in those Labor staples of health and education. On the key issues of who is best placed to deal with cost-of-living pressures and management of Melbourne’s growing population problems, voters seem evenly divided. They also face what is becoming a familiar feature of Victorian elections: conflict over the Coalition’s proposed East West Link road project.

Significantly, the conservatives retain their customary lead on what could be a critical issue — law and order. This is looming as a potentially ugly battleground, with marauding “African gangs” identified as a menace that only the Coalition can handle. In a state reputedly averse to racist dog-whistling, this theme has the potential to reshape political debate in a direction that not all will find palatable.

The Andrews government’s re-election prospects have not been assisted by “personnel problems” throughout its term. Highlights have included the spectacle of a minister resigning after revelations that he had his dogs chauffeured to his country house in a government vehicle, and both the speaker and deputy speaker stepping down for improper residential allowance claims. Another minister resigned following bullying allegations, and another because of a difference over a controversial enterprise bargaining agreement for firefighters.

More recently, and more seriously, six government ministers are among the subjects of a police investigation for their role in what the ombudsman determined was a misuse of taxpayers’ funds: paying casual electorate staff to undertake political campaigning in the 2014 election. In worse news for the government, police have advised that the investigation will probably extend beyond the election date. Outside a world like Donald Trump’s, we might expect a government with nearly a third of its cabinet under police investigation to struggle for re-election.

The government has responded by referring to the police allegations that a number of Coalition MPs also contravened parliamentary rules by using taxpayer-funded electorate officers for campaign purposes before the 2014 election. The lack of detail provided by the government has attracted criticism from both opposition and media. It would seem to be the government’s cynical hope that the electorate will conclude that both parties are as bad as each other and refocus on issues of the government’s choosing.

To complete this impression of crisis, Victorian Labor has been characterised in recent months by very public factional brawling following the breakdown of the left–right “stability agreement.” This has been manifest mostly in conflict about alleged branch-stacking and preselections for state and federal seats. (It’s never about ideology or policy, is it?) While much of this is usually too arcane to trouble the average voter, it risks being seen as further evidence that the party is simply not sufficiently focused on governing to be left in charge of running the state.

But recent months have not been plain sailing for the Liberals either. Moderate party members have been concerned at what they see as a takeover by social conservatives, a development in which party vice-president Marcus Bastiaan is seen as a key player. The prominence of Mormons (traditionally politically inactive in Australia) among the religious activists has been viewed as noteworthy. As always, one person’s “party rejuvenation” is another’s “branch-stacking.”

The Liberals also suffered embarrassment when a dispute between the state party and the fundraising Cormack Foundation was aired recently in the Federal Court, where it was resolved in favour of the foundation. The main immediate consequence appears to be that party candidates will again be funded in the state election, although it is unlikely that the issue had any impact among swinging voters.

It is the governing party whose factional brawls tend to attract most media attention, especially in Rupert Murdoch’s Herald Sun. And Labor’s colourful cast of latter-day Tammany Hall–style factional “heavyweights,” plus the added bonus of union involvement, provide far better copy than a bunch of largely reclusive Mormons.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that rather than exhibiting the prudence and caution of a first-term government, Labor has behaved as if its 2010 defeat was an aberration, remedied four years later by restoration to its rightful role of running the state. True, Labor has governed Victoria for nearly 70 per cent of the time since 1982, but the current level of self-indulgence and ill-discipline may have reached the threshold that attracts electoral punishment.

It seems possible that the government’s problems will allow the opposition to develop some election-winning momentum, but the infrequency of state voting-intention polling leaves observers more in the dark than is the case with federal elections. Less than four months out, some loss of Labor seats seems likely and it may be that minority government (supported by the Greens on confidence and supply) is the best it can hope for. A tantalising possibility is that the Coalition may secure forty-four seats and need the Shepparton independent (assuming her re-election) to support a minority government. Among those preferring an outright result we can probably include the state governor. ●

The post Outlook uncertain in Labor’s Victoria appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet-to-be-released budget figures show that the Turnbull government’s spending plans for infrastructure in Melbourne for 2018–19 amount to just $103 million — or less than a tenth of the $1.16 billion it has offered for equivalent projects in Sydney.

And most of its spending in Melbourne will be on putting together business plans and other preparatory work. It has committed just $49 million to build new transport infrastructure — mostly for the final stage of widening the Tullamarine Freeway.

But the new figures come in the midst of a startling shift in the long stand-off between Turnbull and Victorian premier Daniel Andrews. For years they have been at odds over the federal government’s refusal to invest in the transport projects of the Victorian government — a refusal that means Victoria has been badly shortchanged by the Turnbull government in favour of the prime minister’s home state of New South Wales.

Turnbull and Andrews, who have rarely if ever met one on one to talk about issues, will sit down soon to discuss how they can cooperate to build the Melbourne airport rail link, the proposed North East Link to join the Eastern Freeway to the Outer Ring Road, a tram or rail line to Monash University, and other transport projects.

Sources on both sides say they have already had several “productive discussions” by phone. “They’re as friendly as they’ve been in a long time,” one adviser says. Similarly positive discussions have taken place in recent weeks between Turnbull’s major projects minister, Paul Fletcher, and Victoria’s public transport minister, Jacinta Allan.

It’s too early to call it a bromance, but it is a sharp reversal of the longstanding hostility between the two governments, and it’s even reflected in 2018–19 budget allocations. The discussions, which were initiated by Turnbull, came after Victorian opposition leader Matthew Guy turned on his federal leader, accusing him of giving Victoria less than its share and favouring other states.

The budget papers for the last two years reveal that, under Turnbull, Victoria has received less than 8 per cent of federal spending on transport infrastructure, while New South Wales has received almost 40 per cent. Victoria is home to 26 per cent of Australians, New South Wales to 32 per cent.

Over 2016–17 and 2017–18, the federal government has given the states $14.7 billion of taxpayers’ money to build transport infrastructure. Of that, it gave $6.26 billion to transport works in New South Wales and just $1.15 billion for similar works in Victoria.

Melbourne, which absorbed almost a third of Australia’s population growth in 2016–17, will receive just 2 per cent of federal infrastructure spending in the coming financial year, according to the list of key projects prepared by the Department of Infrastructure.

But the long stand-off, which began with the Abbott government’s demands that Victoria build the financially unviable East West Link, a proposed road tunnel through the inner suburbs, appears to be coming to an end. Under pressure from his own federal and state MPs in Victoria, Turnbull announced last month that his government would “build the Melbourne airport rail link,” offering $5 billion in return for joint ownership of the project. While the offer was presented like a command, and was clearly intended to be abrasive — Turnbull told the Murdoch press first, then sent an email to the premier at around midnight — Andrews decided to ignore the slight and focus on the money.

After reporters criticised his negotiating style, Turnbull phoned Andrews, who thanked him and expressed a willingness to talk. Turnbull also played down suggestions in the Herald Sun that his government wanted the route changed to run through contaminated former defence land at Maribyrnong that the Commonwealth hopes one day to sell.

More phone calls have followed, including a warm one from Andrews on Monday after Turnbull announced that his government would offer $1.5 billion towards the $16 billion cost of the North East Link; $475 million towards the cost of a train or tram line from Caulfield to Monash University at Clayton, and then ultimately to outer-suburban Rowville; and funds to extend the Frankston line to Baxter and duplicate the line from South Geelong to Waurn Ponds.

“Rail link a reality,” blared the Herald Sun in its report on the Monash plan. No, it isn’t, and probably never will be. A tram line could become a reality, though; it would be very much cheaper and could go to Chadstone, the biggest shopping mall in the southern hemisphere, on its way to Clayton. A report earlier this decade for the Baillieu government warned that heavy rail would be the most expensive option to build and maintain.

Federal sources say they are open to either option. They also say Turnbull is not insisting on changing the route of the airport rail link, which is planned to go through Sunshine station to link with trains to Ballarat and Bendigo. Rather, he wants to be engaged in the project, and make it a genuine partnership between the two governments.

The sources would not be drawn on why the prime minister wanted half ownership of the rail line to Melbourne airport, whereas a month earlier he imposed no such condition when agreeing to pay half the cost of a rail line to Western Sydney airport. He still appears to have double standards when it comes to the two states.

The budget papers reveal that in the financial year just ending, his government has given New South Wales $2.7 billion for transport spending alone, roughly five times the $562 million it gave to Victoria. At least that was a more even split than the year before, when he gave his home state $3.6 billion, more than six times the $590 million given to Victoria.

But compared to its predecessors, this year’s budget seems almost egalitarian. On the figures in the budget papers, New South Wales will get a tad under $2 billion for transport spending, which is only a bit over twice as much as Victoria’s $890 million.

As I pointed out in my budget overview, despite the PM’s waving a list of new transport projects, the budget plans to cut federal investment in key transport projects by 13 per cent in 2018–19, compared to its equivalent list a year ago. Investment in Victoria, however, is projected to rise, mostly due to $504 million of spending on a package of regional rail upgrades negotiated by former infrastructure minister Darren Chester.

Even so, over the five years to 2019, the Abbott and Turnbull governments will have spent $12 billion of Commonwealth taxpayers’ money on transport infrastructure for New South Wales, but just $3 billion in Victoria.

Turnbull and his ministers blame the Victorian government for refusing the $3 billion they offered it to build the East West Link, which a conventional cost-benefit analysis revealed would return benefits of just 45 cents for every dollar it cost.

Fletcher has accused Victoria of sitting on a cash pile of $2.8 billion of money the federal government has allocated to it for projects that have yet to start, or are still incomplete. His office did not respond to a request for a list of these projects before publication.

Maybe that too is part of the warming of relations between the two governments. With an unfriendly redistribution looming in Victoria, the Turnbull government desperately needs to shore up its marginal electorates in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs — whose voters might not like seeing their taxes used to build the prime minister’s pet projects in Sydney when so much is needed in their own town. ●

The post Are Victoria and the feds back on track? appeared first on Inside Story.

In just a decade, Melbourne has added more than a million people. It began this century with 3.4 million people. By September, on current estimates, it will have five million. In less than twenty years, its population has grown by roughly half.

That’s exhilarating. The city today has a buzz that it lacked twenty years ago. In the year to last June, an extra 125,000 people packed into Australia’s fastest-growing city. They included a net 80,000 overseas migrants, students and workers, as well as a net 9166 people, overwhelmingly young, from the rest of Australia. It gained a net 14,400 migrants from Sydney (but lost some to regional Victoria and Queensland). And there were a record number of births, because the city is now full of people in their twenties and thirties, and so babies keep popping out.

In that one year, Melbourne’s population grew by 2.65 per cent, the rest of Australia by 1.35 per cent. If this pace keeps up — and it has, more or less, for far longer than any of us expected — it will overtake Sydney within a decade to reclaim the title of Australia’s biggest city, a title it lost in 1902.

If growth is what you want, Melbourne’s got it. More to the point, it’s got it whether you want it or not.

But for many, the population growth transforming the city is more disappointment than exhilaration. In theory, governments can manage any level of population growth as long as they match it by investing heavily in infrastructure and providing expanded services. That was the key issue behind yesterday’s Victorian budget, in which treasurer Tim Pallas set out to do just that — at least for the coming year, when the government is facing an election.

But until now, that is not how the Victorian government has been run. As the table shows, it has been a chronic under-investor. Even in 2017, its investment in transport infrastructure generally, as a share of economic activity, was the lowest of any state, whereas its population growth has been the highest. Victoria has lived off the capital built by past governments.

Tuesday’s budget papers confirm that the roads have become far more congested; the past five years have brought 14 per cent more people, but only 1 per cent more road space. The growth in public transport passengers has flattened off, perhaps because people now look back nostalgically to the days when you could board a train or tram and get a seat. And while there are several reasons why ordinary young couples can no longer afford to buy a house, population growth is certainly one of them.

If the city keeps growing at this pace, the five million Melburnians of 2018 will become ten million by 2045. Melbourne has prided itself on being, as one survey keeps reporting, “the world’s most liveable city.” It was less congested than Sydney, its houses were cheaper, its train and tram networks were something to be proud of. All that is now disappearing before people’s eyes.

While those issues underlay yesterday’s Victorian budget, the politics was front and centre. There’s a state election on 24 November, and the Labor government of premier Daniel Andrews wants to be sure it gets back. Policy debates are all very good, but the policy of this government is to stay in power. Yesterday it left nothing to chance, showering money for works on schools and roads, hospitals and sports grounds, mental health programs, regional Victoria, and trams, trains and TAFEs.

Treasurer Tim Pallas put out a positive spin, reeling off his own exhilarating numbers on the growth of the state’s economy, and on its budget spending. Since Labor won power three and a half years ago, he said, Victoria has become the fastest-growing state. The output of its economy has grown by almost one-seventh in that time. It has added 334,000 jobs, more than 200,000 of them full-time. Housing and investment are booming.

And so the budget is awash with money. In some ways, the key figures of this budget are its dramatic revisions to estimated revenue and spending in the election year, 2018–19. The state now expects to rake in $7 billion (11.5 per cent) more revenue than it had forecast just two years ago — and to spend an extra $7.6 billion (12.5 per cent) on expanding the services it offers Victorians, almost across the board.

Why is revenue so much higher than Victoria’s Treasury had anticipated? Partly because soaring house prices have pushed up land transfer duties and land tax revenues. Partly because the Turnbull government keeps wanting to spend more in areas the states run — even if it discriminates against Victoria on transport investment — and partly because even GST collections are booming, and Victoria’s share is being pushed up because its share of the population is soaring.

Because this is an election budget, there are no tax increases and no spending cuts — at least, none the government owns up to. But a table in one budget paper shows that almost $2 billion of unspecified cuts will be made over the next four years to “reprioritise” spending, so that existing programs will be dumped or trimmed to pay for new ones. And we’ll never know what will be cut.

The new spending initiatives go almost everywhere — social housing was almost the only area to miss out, despite the crisis facing low-income renters in Melbourne. The new mental health spending is significant, the list of schools receiving upgrades runs for twenty-six pages, and a catchy policy offers a $50 payment to any households that sign into the state’s Energy Compare website to investigate how they can reduce their power bills. (The budget numbers imply that they expect almost a million households to do exactly that.)

A lot of care has been taken to ensure that regional Victoria gets its share of projects in almost every area — highlighted by a decision to reduce payroll tax there to only half the rate paid in the city. Melbourne is growing twice as fast as the rest of the state, and the government wants to move more of the action to the bush. A recent audit report found that in the decade to 2016, economic output actually shrank in half the municipalities of regional Victoria, including Mildura, Wangaratta, the Latrobe valley, a vast swathe of western Victoria, and even East Gippsland, where the retiree population is booming but jobs are not.

But Andrews and Pallas highlighted two areas in particular: skills and infrastructure.

A package of reforms to the neglected TAFE system is headlined by a surprising initiative to make thirty courses free of charge throughout the state. At the highest (diploma or certificate IV) levels, they include accounting, ageing support, agriculture, building and construction, engineering, plumbing, nursing, mental health, and other health and welfare roles.

The government will also fund 30,000 more training places, upgrade or add seventeen new campuses, largely in country towns, expand career guidance in schools, and begin a program to allow students to enter an apprenticeship while still at school.

The aim, Pallas said, was to challenge the assumption that kids have to go to university if they want to succeed in life — and help them become the skilled workers needed for the future Australian workforce. “Skills are the centrepiece of this budget,” he told me. “This is a Labor budget that will deliver new skills and good jobs.”

The other main theme of this budget is infrastructure. In this coming election year, the state plans to invest $13.7 billion on infrastructure, including investments by private companies such as Transurban on projects they operate for the government. In its first budget just three years ago, the Andrews government invested a puny $4.8 billion. At first sight, that is some policy shift — and a recognition that the combination of rapid population growth and inadequate investment is destroying Melbourne’s liveability.

(This figure is much higher than the one in the table above for several reasons. The earlier figure measures engineering construction, which covers most infrastructure investment, especially in transport. The government’s figures also include investment in buildings, machinery and equipment, investments by its private-sector partners — and, of course, a sizeable increase in spending between 2017 and 2018–19.)

But it’s only temporary. For the Andrews government remains bound by its commitment to keep net government debt to a minuscule 6 per cent of gross state product, the share it inherited from the Liberals. The protracted sale of the Port of Melbourne brought the debt down, and now, over the three years from 2017 to 2020, a big increase in infrastructure investment will push it back up to that low ceiling. One might note that the federal government’s net debt, by contrast, is roughly 20 per cent of GDP — and it still has a AAA credit rating.

The budget also warns us that this investment surge is a one-off. After the election, as it nears its self-imposed ceiling, the government would go back to being a chronic under-investor. Its investments and those of its private sector partners will hit 3 per cent of gross state product in 2018–19, only to then slide back to 1.5 per cent in 2021–22, and resume its usual ranking at the bottom of the table.

Unless you believe it will have fixed the infrastructure backlog by then, that is economically indefensible. Bond rates have edged up a little, but it is still very cheap for governments to borrow, and with the population on track to double within a generation, Melbourne’s needs remain immense. The government’s decision to impose such a low debt ceiling, and to maintain a AAA credit rating at all costs, are driven by politics, not economics. Queensland lost its AAA credit rating when premier Anna Bligh rightly gave priority to infrastructure investment — yet the rates it pays on its debt are only between 0.1 and 0.15 percentage points higher than New South Wales. It really makes very little difference in the markets.

In effect, Victorians are paying the cost for believing that Labor governments are fiscally more irresponsible than Liberal ones. But there are many ways to be irresponsible, and investing too little can be as irresponsible as spending too much.

For these three years, at least, Victoria will be investing across a wide canvas of transport projects. Its own investment in transport infrastructure has risen from $2.5 billion in 2015-16 to a planned $7 billion in 2018-19. That includes:

• $1.1 billion on its blitz to remove fifty level crossings from Melbourne roads. That is one of Labor’s flagship projects, funded by the state alone — although unfortunately, as the auditor-general has pointed out, they are not the fifty most dangerous or congested level crossings in Melbourne. Inconsequential level crossings in marginal seats on the Frankston line are being removed while the level crossing in Liberal-voting Surrey Hills, which VicRoads has ranked as one of the city’s worst on both counts, has been left to keep blocking busy Union Road.

• $319 million as the state’s share of works on the controversial West Gate Tunnel project, a Transurban plan adopted by the government despite the best efforts of the Liberals, Nationals and Greens to block it. The government has adopted a sneaky plan by which most of the bill will be footed initially by Transurban, but the bill will ultimately be paid by drivers on CityLink, the overpriced inner-suburban freeway, for which Transurban’s lucrative franchise has been extended for another decade.

• $571 million for another of Labor’s flagship projects, the $11 billion Melbourne metro tunnel, also entirely state-funded, which will take a decade to build. (Why can they do these things so much faster in Asian cities like Delhi and Singapore?)

• $453 million of essentially Commonwealth-funded works to upgrade the Ballarat and Gippsland rail lines. This was the legacy of former federal infrastructure minister Darren Chester, Gippsland’s MP, who used the deadlock between Malcolm Turnbull and Andrews over almost every project in Melbourne to focus the small amount of funding the federal government gives Victoria on rural roads and rail.)

• $375 million to transform the rail line from Cranbourne/Pakenham through the city to Sunbury, including a new signalling system, longer platforms and upgrading those essential, inconspicuous and often-overlooked things like power supply. Another $58 million will complete the controversial Skyrail project, to open later this year, which has elevated the rail line through some southeastern suburbs to scrap level crossings. The Murdoch press, which supports the Liberal government doing this in Sydney, has depicted it as an outrage against human rights under a Labor government in Melbourne.

• $123 million to plan the $16.5 billion North East Link from Greensborough to the Eastern Freeway — to include a significant widening of the freeway through the middle suburbs. But in a marked difference from the way the Liberals rushed through the controversial and economically unviable East West Link before the 2014 election, Andrews says no commitments will be made until after the election. Liberal leader Matthew Guy says that, if elected, his party will build the East West Link first.

And there’s much more. A lot of money will be spent all over the state to upgrade, widen, rebuild and repair Victoria’s rural and regional highways and arterial roads, and a lot more to tackle urban congestion. There will be new trains, trams and rail carriages. The government deserves a pat on the back for committing $200 million or so of its revenue windfall to lift spending on road maintenance, where the statistics suggest an alarming deterioration. It needs to do the same for bridges, after a recent report rated two-thirds of the state’s bridges as being in poor condition.

Where is the Commonwealth government in all this? On the fringes. Its own figures have consistently shown that Victoria is getting only 10 per cent of its infrastructure outlays, even though it has almost 40 per cent of Australia’s population growth. Both governments share the blame for the juvenile stand-off in which the Turnbull government refuses to support anything that the Andrews government supports, apart from widening the Western Ring Road and the Monash Freeway.

Turnbull’s latest stunt is to offer $5 billion to build a rail link to Tullamarine airport — provided that the route is changed to run through land the federal government is trying to sell, and the federal government takes 50 per cent ownership of the rail line. The offer was shared with the Murdoch press before it was shared with the Victorian government — which understandably has ignored it. When the federal government announced its support for a rail link to the Western Sydney airport, it was with no conditions, and at a joint press conference with the NSW premier. That’s how governments are meant to act.

Whatever route is chosen, the rail link can’t run through the city before the new metro line opens in 2026. Infrastructure Victoria rates the whole project as only a distant priority anyway, given that the Tullamarine Freeway widening is almost complete, which will see Skybus get to the airport as fast as a rail link could. And the polls suggest that in a year’s time, Turnbull will no longer be prime minister, and a federal Labor government would finally treat Victoria with the respect — and priority — it deserves.

After a rocky period last year when the Herald Sun commissioned opinion polls whenever things looked bad for Labor, the polls in recent months have suggested that Labor is likely to be re-elected. It’s still close — Labor polled 51–49 in the last Newspoll, 52–48 in the one before, and even better in the latest Essential poll — but what is striking is that Andrews’s personal ratings have rebounded to roughly where they were at the 2014 election. Among the mainland state premiers, the only other to achieve that feat in recent times was Annastacia Palaszczuk, who was also the only one to be re-elected. The Liberals, who seem obsessed with battles within the party, have simply not cut through.

This is a soft budget. With all that new revenue and infrastructure spending, the anticipated surplus in 2018–19 is a skinny $1.4 billion, down from about $3 billion when Labor took office. In state budgets, the surplus is essentially the contribution current taxpayers make to infrastructure spending. With Victoria’s economy where it is, the surplus should be at least $5 billion now, but Labor has used the good times to put off hard decisions, allow wasteful programs to continue — for example, paying people in uniforms to walk up and down every suburban train station at night, to make passengers feel safe — failing to tackle tax reforms, and allowing the state’s wage bill to blow out by an extraordinary 38 per cent in its four years in office — including an 11.2 per cent increase in 2018–19 alone.

If the economy keeps going well, it will get away with it. If the economy turns down, as well it could, this slack management will cause Labor serious problems ahead. Right now, the public is paying no attention.

This budget was labelled “Getting things done.” Last year it was “Getting on with the job.” Whatever Andrews’s faults and limitations, he is dogged, competent and, yes, can say that he is getting things done. People might not like him, but he has earned a grudging respect. And he, and Pallas, have been lucky to be in office at a time when the state economy is booming. Naturally, they claim the credit. ●

The post Budgeting in boom time appeared first on Inside Story.

It will be a bizarre election in many ways. For one thing, it features a weird and wonderful line-up of candidates. Liberal-aligned pollster Gary Morgan is hoping he’ll be fourth time lucky, having stood against Doyle three times; councillor Ken Ong, another Liberal, has also thrown his hat in the ring. Colourful independent contenders include activist Phil Cleary, a former federal parliamentarian once tripped up by section 44 of the Constitution, and sporting identity Sam Newman, who is reportedly considering a tilt. Embattled state MP Jane Garrett was thinking of taking a stab too, but decided against it, leaving no Labor-backed candidates.

But the main contest will be between the Greens, who hold this turf at a state and federal level — their candidate is councillor Rohan Leppert — and the Property Council’s CEO, Sally Capp, who is formally unaligned but has backing from segments of both the Labor Party and the Liberals. Altogether, it is a strange contest for those of us accustomed to a fairly clear party divide.

In fact, none of the normal rules seem to apply to the City of Melbourne. Unlike other levels of government and most of its local counterparts, Melbourne elects its top office-holder through a direct, popular vote. Tasmanians and Queenslanders are more practised at this kind of thing — they directly elect all their mayors — but in Victoria mayors are generally elected from and by councillors. The state’s only other exception has been the mayor of Geelong, though that city reverted to indirect elections last year after things went sideways under its colourful mayor Darryn Lyons.

Then there is a quirk in the franchise for Melbourne Council elections. Both residents and ratepayers get a vote — that much is common in Australia (except in democratic Queensland, which abolished the property franchise in 1921). Where Melbourne gets strange is that corporations or joint property holders get a second vote. That’s one vote for people and two votes for businesses — a system that only Melbourne and the City of Sydney enjoy. As a result, says poll-watcher Ben Raue, businesses and non-resident property holders make up a majority of the votes — as much as 60 per cent, leaving just 40 per cent for residents.

This eccentric system makes Melbourne closer to the old rotten boroughs of England than a proper representative democracy. One person, one vote is nowhere to be seen. Or perhaps, if we’re being more generous, it is more like a medieval republic, with trades and guilds rather than citizens electing the Doge. Indeed, in Sally Capp we have one of the most powerful local professions — the Sacred Order of Property Developers — standing its leader for the top job.

Is Melbourne’s electoral system simply a relic of the past? In some respects, yes. The bias to propertied interests, for instance, is as old as the city itself. From 1863, votes were doled out only to ratepayers, with extra votes apportioned depending on the value of their rateable property. Some residents ended up with three votes; many had none.

For decades, that system allowed larger businesses to dominate. But by the 1960s bracket creep had given a majority of electors the full three votes. After plural voting was abolished in 1969, the franchise stayed attached to property rather than residence, and ward boundaries systematically favoured business districts over residential ones. That was the case through to 1982, when John Cain’s Labor government attempted to democratise the council.

In 1982 — yes, 1982 — all residents over eighteen years could vote in the council’s elections for the first time. Labor also watered down the business vote, but never quite eliminated it altogether. At times it crept back through quiet tinkering with the regulations — changes to boundaries, enrolment obligations and so on. By 1993 the pendulum had swung nearly all the way back on the franchise, with Liberal premier Jeff Kennett restoring plural voting with the two-votes for business arrangement we know and love now.

Kennett went further. Though well known for controversially amalgamating most councils, his government actually made Melbourne’s smaller and more intensely focused on the CBD, carving off parts of the surrounding suburbs where the left-wing gentry dominated. The business bias was strengthened further in 1995 with automatic enrolment of two voters per company and fines for a failure to vote. Democracy-wise, Melbourne was almost back to square one.

If the property franchise is ancient, direct election of the lord mayor and his or her deputy is a modern flourish. Steve Bracks’s Labor government introduced this and other changes in 2001. After the third sacking of the council in eighteen years, Labor was seeking deeper reform of the electoral system. It abolished Melbourne’s wards and introduced proportional representation alongside the directly elected mayor and deputy.

The changes made for a very different kind of council election. The first of them, in 2001, shared some characteristics with Senate elections under full-preference group voting. If Antony Green was worried by the massive 2013 Senate ballot paper, nobody show him the 170-page booklet, with its ninety-seven candidates, that was posted to all voters in that first Melbourne City Council direct election. Without wards, candidates also had to run city-wide, high-spend campaigns to have any hope of getting into office — bigger campaigns than had ever been seen in local government elections.

Developer donations have poured into the council’s elections ever since — so much so that in its previous term the council couldn’t assess nearly a dozen major planning applications because a majority of councillors had received donations from the applicant. Despite the appearance of being more democratic, the 2001 reforms probably made Melbourne’s councillors even more beholden to vested interests.

Even with the council’s positively Dickensian franchise and an electoral system reliant on big donations, some people defend the status quo. Stephen Mayne, the Crikey founder who went on to sit on the council, argues that a change to a resident-only franchise would result in an unacceptably left-wing, anti-business council governing the corporate and financial centre of Victoria. Former lord mayor Robert Doyle has argued that taking votes away from businesses would violate the highest democratic principle of all: no taxation without representation.

The local Chamber of Commerce has also railed against any curbing of business votes. Businesses are simply too integral to the city, it says, to be deprived of a say. Indeed, this is the view enshrined in law by the City of Melbourne Act: because Melbourne has “capital city status” and serves many interests that don’t live in it, giving votes only to residents would deprive many of the city’s stakeholders from a say in its governance. Multiple votes for business is part of a balancing act that gives all the important segments of the city a say.

Perhaps. But this sounds a bit thin when we consider the fact that people who work in the CBD don’t get any votes, and they are the biggest users of the city, bar none. Expanding the franchise to even more non-residents is hardly going to be a popular rallying cry, and it’s not something I’m advocating here, but the idea directs us to the big question we should be asking when we look at this election: who owns Melbourne? Nearly a million people live, work, study or visit the City of Melbourne every day — that’s nearly a million people with some kind of claim on the place.

Some claims are stronger than others, of course. Of that near-million, many thousands are regional or international visitors. But many others consider themselves Melbournians, have a real stake in the city and the decisions being made about it, and can only watch, disheartened, as elections like the present one unfold. And what about the Wurundjeri, the original custodians of the land? Perhaps they should get a vote, regardless of residence? Or two votes. Or three. The only influence that they, along with the rest of Victoria, have on the council comes via the state government, which intervenes in city matters from time to time.

But it needs to be asked whether there is any legitimate role for a tiny, gerrymandered business fiefdom in the governance of a modern, democratic metropolis serving millions. The answer is surely no. Whether we get Sally Capp, Rohan Leppert or, somehow, lord mayor Sam Newman this May, let us hope that they will be the last sovereign of this very rotten borough. It is a system well and truly past its use-by date. ●

The post Is something rotten in the City of Melbourne? appeared first on Inside Story.

The book’s editors begin by describing Collins St 5pm, John Brack’s renowned painting of Melbourne in the 1950s:

A stream of dour faces all point the same way, in a ritual march from work to suburban homes. This picture depicts a city full of people and buildings, yet it is monochromatic and flat. It has become iconic not only because it captured a mid-twentieth-century conformity, but also because it stood for the loss of an intensive urbanity that had flourished in the period of “Marvellous Melbourne.”

Perhaps the conformism has changed form rather than disappeared, but the change — as documented in words and extensive images in this beautifully produced volume — has certainly been extraordinary. The editors acknowledge that the city still faces many challenges, but they’re not shy about claiming success. Central Melbourne’s transformation since the 1980s is a global success story,” they write. “Melbourne is now emerging as a city with a depth of character and urban buzz that is palpable…”

The laneways, once decrepit and forgotten, now “filled with hip bars, housing and art,” get most of the attention, but much more has changed than creation of a twenty-four-hour city. As the growth in residential towers attests, the central city has become a highly desirable place in which to live. The CBD’s population, less than 1000 in 1981, is more than 41,000 today. The city has embraced the river, claimed back space from traffic and brownfields, acquired new public spaces, revitalised retailing, grown greener (both literally and metaphorically), relinquished many on-street parking spaces, and integrated spatially with universities and other institutions.

Melbourne Choreography is an enthralling and rewarding read supported by a gallery of fascinating images. For the most part, though, it doesn’t seek to analyse how and why the changes happened. Few of the contributors — many of whom have been involved in managing the central city at various times since the 1970s — attempt to identify the transformation’s wider implications, including the key question of who has benefited from the changes.

In fact, this collection could more accurately be thought of as a heritage project: a collection of mostly personal perspectives that commemorates and celebrates a decades-long achievement. That sense is reinforced by the decision to devote sixty-odd pages to an extended, and somewhat soft, interview with one of the editors, Rob Adams, director of city design and projects at the City of Melbourne, in which he explains his views about planning and his work with the City of Melbourne since 1983.

The book’s strength is that it provides insider interpretations of what happened and why. The contributors include a former lord mayor of the City of Melbourne, Lecki Ord; the head of the state planning department from 1982 to 1988, David Yencken; and, of course, Adams. They provide useful — and often fascinating — perspectives.

Ord provides an absorbing, informative account of “taking council” in the early 1980s and the development of the council’s 1985 Strategy Plan; David Yencken looks at central city planning in the 1980s from a state government perspective; and Marcus Spiller contributes a welcome but all-too-brief survey of wider structural forces. Even the interview with Adams by fellow editor Kim Dovey, which the uncharitable might see as an editorial misstep with the potential for excessive self-congratulation, is a worthwhile and wide-ranging read.

The weakness of this approach is the possibility that the viewpoints would be self-serving and unreceptive to alternative explanations. It could mean the book offers limited insight into how the experience of central Melbourne might apply to other urban areas. All the contributors are believers, but some of them readily acknowledge the complex forces that led to the revitalisation of the central city.

The Nieuwenhuysen liquor-licensing reforms under the Cain government in the 1980s; the exodus of finance jobs to Sydney in the 1990s; the international growth of the knowledge economy; the changes in the rules governing tertiary education; the complex shifts that rendered much railway land surplus; the relatively permissive attitude of successive state governments to large residential towers — most of these factors are nodded through with limited elaboration. Yet they were key drivers of change, and some of them even warrant essays of their own.

The Nieuwenhuysen reforms, for example, meant that bar operators were freed from paying very high licensing fees. No longer needing to seek the economies of scale provided by large premises, they could now operate small bars profitably. With low-cost premises of varied sizes to be found in Melbourne’s laneways and inner-city streets, the proliferation of food and drink outlets gave operators the scope to specialise and offer unusual and idiosyncratic experiences. Partly as a result, the number of on-premises restaurant licences in Victoria ballooned from 571 in 1986 to 5136 between 1986 and 2004.

Urban Choreography largely gives the glory to the custodians of the physical environment: the planners, architects, environmental activists and, in particular, the urban designers. Whether or not the book overstates the designers’ contribution, it’s a great story very ably told in a stand-out essay (clocking in at sixty-five pages!) by landscape architect Ronald Jones. Jones is particularly insightful in recounting some of Melbourne’s great struggles with public space, like the saga of the city square.

Given the prominence accorded to urban design, it’s perhaps unsurprising that local government emerges as the book’s hero. That sense is reinforced by two of the editors being closely associated with the City of Melbourne. They rightly give a former state planning head, David Yencken, a chapter, but the weight of the volume leans heavily towards the part played by the politicians and bureaucrats in city hall.

That’s contested territory. Some former senior state government bureaucrats give much of the credit for central Melbourne’s design transformation to the progressive government of Labor’s John Cain, and particularly its first planning minister, Evan Walker. Cain came to office in 1982, three years before the date nominated in the book’s subtitle; on one view, the council mostly filled in the gaps between the strategic beams laid by Walker and his team.

This is the book we have, and there’s much in it that’s interesting, useful and important about the contribution made by good urban design to central Melbourne over the last thirty to forty years. The central city is a much better place because of that valuable work.

But this isn’t the book we need. The change in central Melbourne since the early 1980s has been dramatic and it’s not an exaggeration to say it’s caught the attention of the rest of the world. A rigorous and detached account of the relative contribution made by the various structural forces — and the various players — could have provided important lessons for public policy elsewhere. The question lingers: has urban design been a key driving force of central Melbourne’s vitality, or should the city’s transformation be characterised as primarily a consequence — perhaps even an inevitable one — of broader influences? ●

The post How Melbourne became cool again appeared first on Inside Story.

Let’s start with the less important one. The Batman by-election result should make it clear to party bosses that it matters who they choose as a candidate. We’ve seen it happen in rural electorates like Indi, which the Liberals lost because their MP was Sophie Mirabella. And now we’ve seen it in inner-suburban Batman, where Labor’s biggest problem was that its MP was David Feeney.

At the start of the campaign, I argued that the replacement of Feeney by Ged Kearney “could swing several percentage points of the vote from the Greens to Labor” and probably outweigh the damage to Labor from having no Liberal preferences. The punters obviously didn’t agree, because, according to one bookie, 99 per cent of them bet that the Greens would win the seat. But it turned out as I forecast.

By Sunday night, after the Australian Electoral Commission had counted pretty well everything it could, the two-party swing to Labor appeared to be 3.25 per cent, giving it a clear victory with 54.3 per cent. (We have corrected the official figures for an obvious error, of which more in a moment.) Important to note: of that swing, 2.35 per cent came on first preferences, but the other 0.9 per cent came in preferences from other candidates.

In fact, Labor did far better on preferences with the Liberals not standing than it had done in 2016 with the Liberals handing out how-to-vote cards in its favour. Most voters these days prefer to choose their own preferences, the ballot paper tells them which candidate is from which party, and they pick ’em as they please.

Three things made the difference this time. The first was in the polling booths in the Greens’ heartland: in Northcote, Thornbury, Fairfield, Clifton Hill and Alphington, the inner-suburban booths south of Bell Street. In 2016, with Feeney as its candidate, Labor won just 40 per cent of the two-party vote at these booths. On Saturday, with Ged Kearney as Labor candidate, it won 44.3 per cent.

In some booths, the swings to Labor were so large as to be almost incredible. The Northcote West booth at Northcote High officially recorded a two-party swing of 34 per cent from the Greens to Labor. In Northcote West?? I used to live across the creek from Northcote West, and it was Greens territory before the Greens existed. Call in the stewards!

(After this story first appeared, a steward called — fellow pollwatcher Ben Raue, who runs the excellent website The Tally Room. Ben pointed out that the official figures showed the Greens won 57 per cent of first preferences at the booth, yet only 37.5 per cent of the two-party vote. Since that is mathematically impossible, we have concluded that the officials entered the Greens and Labor data for Northcote West in the wrong columns. No one from the commission was available to comment. All figures quoted here are corrected for the obvious error.)

It was a different story north of Bell Street, especially in Labor’s own heartland of working-class Reservoir. The Greens lost in 2016 because they failed to make up enough ground there; the further from Melbourne you went, the lower the Greens vote.

On Saturday the Greens won a swing of 1.8 per cent in the northern half of the electorate, but that was far outweighed by the swing to Labor in the southern half. Feeney was probably less of a liability in the working-class homes north of Preston and Reservoir. It’s also possible that Bill Shorten’s oddly timed announcement last Tuesday — that if elected, Labor will end cash payments to shareholders who don’t pay tax — cost it significant votes among the migrant pensioners in these suburbs.

Second, the overall swing in the booths on Saturday was 1 per cent to Labor. But on Saturday night and Sunday, officials also counted more than 23,000 pre-poll and postal votes, and there the swing to Labor was 5.5 per cent. These votes would have been mostly cast before Shorten’s dividend announcement, and it may be that the much smaller swing at the booths on Saturday was partly due to that.

And third, even with no Liberal standing, two-thirds of minor-party supporters gave their preferences to Labor. None of them scored well: the third place-getter was Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives, who won just 6.4 per cent of the vote (and preferenced Labor). It just confirmed that Liberal preference directions are really not that important; voters can find their way to where they want their votes to go.

The result relieves the pressure on Bill Shorten’s leadership, which would have been intense had Labor lost Batman because of the ill-timed release of an otherwise good policy. Shorten may not be a great electoral asset to Labor, but please show us the evidence that he is the liability some people claim. There was none of it in Labor’s win on Saturday.

Did the Greens lose because a few dissidents went to the media with their complaints about Alex Bhathal over supposed bullying and so on? It obviously hurt her campaign, and must explain some of the swing to Labor, but I seriously doubt that it mattered to enough voters to make the difference. It does remind us, however, how vulnerable the Greens are to being torpedoed by a small number of unhappy lefties — or a large state branch of them.

The Batman by-election was a story that might have been. Like the Bennelong by-election, it will soon fade into oblivion.

The more important election on Saturday was in South Australia, where the Liberal Party finally won a state election, after the Supreme Court intervened by ordering the state electoral commission to draw boundaries that would ensure that the party with the biggest two-party vote won the election. At this point, the seat count is twenty-five Liberal, nineteen Labor, and three independent.

Labor had won the previous four elections, even though in three of them, the Liberals had won the biggest two-party vote. There were good reasons for this: some notionally Liberal seats were held by independents, and even by a National Party MP, who supported Labor, making the two-party measure dubious. A lot of the Liberal vote was also in rural seats where Labor had barely existed, whereas Labor won a lot of seats narrowly in suburban Adelaide.

What made this election so unusual was that it transferred government from Labor to the Liberals, while the votes — at least, those so far posted — were moving in the other direction.

Whatever the merits of all that, the Liberals were long overdue to win a South Australian election, and this turned out to be it. Of all the commentary before the event, I thought the best line was from Tasmania’s very acute pollwatcher Kevin Bonham, who noted that the last state government to spend more than sixteen years in office was that of Joh Bjelke-Petersen. It was time, ladies and gentlemen.

What made this election so unusual was that it transferred government from Labor to the Liberals, while the votes — at least, those so far posted — were moving in the other direction. On Antony Green’s estimates of the two-party vote on the new boundaries, the redistribution changed a 22–23–2 result in 2014 (that’s Labor/Liberal/independent) into a 20–26–1 status quo for this election. The Coalition only had to hold enough of its ground to secure twenty-four seats, and it would gain a majority.

And it was a status quo election. In my mind, the only seats that have clearly changed hands are Florey and Mount Gambier, in which a Labor and Liberal MP respectively lost preselection, ran as independents, and defeated the endorsed candidates. Having proved their point, will they stay independent, or return to the fold?

Of the twenty-five seats our friend Antony called as Liberal at the close of Saturday night’s telecast, several are not yet certain. In central Adelaide, the Liberal lead is just 0.2 per cent, in Newland 0.9 per cent, and in King, the only seat that appears to have changed hands, 1.2 per cent. Pre-poll and postal votes normally favour the Liberals, but can also favour Labor sitting members. But an overall Liberal victory is certain, whatever the precise outcome.

Yet in the twenty-eight seats that came down to a Labor–Liberal contest, and for which the SA Electoral Commission has released two-party counts, there was an average swing to Labor of 1.5 per cent.

That will no doubt erode somewhat when officials start counting pre-poll and postal votes tomorrow. And for what it’s worth, the two-party-preferred vote in 2014 was Liberal by 53–47. But it’s likely that Labor will end up gaining a swing at the election that cost it office.

That’s significant, because it shows that the electorate’s embrace of the Liberals is provisional, without the sweeping mandate given to Barry O’Farrell in New South Wales in 2011 or Campbell Newman in Queensland in 2012. This is more like Ted Baillieu’s narrow election victory in Victoria in 2010, which was soon dissipated by policy uncertainty and party infighting, leading to a return to normal — Labor government — in 2014.

In South Australia too, Labor governments are normal. In the past fifty years, the Liberals have had just thirteen years in power, and only once won re-election, in the 1990s. The South Australian Libs excel in party infighting, whether ideological or personal, so we’d better wish Steve Marshall luck as he takes over as premier.

The last man to lead the SA Libs to power, Dean Brown, was cut down by his lieutenant John Olsen before he had even finished his first term. And, of course, Ted Baillieu had to walk the plank to make an early departure as premier of Victoria. It’s a risk in parties that are more used to being in opposition.

Jay Weatherill conceded defeat gracefully, without seeming to feel like a loser — and in a sense, he wasn’t. The real losers of this election were Nick Xenophon and Cory Bernardi.

Let’s start with Bernardi. He took over a party that admittedly was in a distressed state, Family First, rebadged it as Australian Conservatives with himself as the new management, and aimed to make it the central force among the disparate groups to the right of the Turnbull government. It got off to a bad start when Family First senator Lucy Gichuhi refused to join him — and ultimately joined the Liberal Party.

In Bernardi’s own state, the other right-wing parties gave him a clear path on Saturday. One Nation did not stand at all. The Liberal Democrats stood only in the upper house. The Conservatives fielded candidates in two-thirds of the seats, but won just 3.1 per cent of the vote — roughly half the vote Family First won in 2014. For the upper house, they won 3.5 per cent, and will probably lose one of their two seats.

Saturday’s result, coupled with poor by-election results in Batman and Bennelong, confirm that Bernardi’s dream of uniting Australian conservatives has failed to fly. He himself has a six-year Senate term, but Saturday’s figures suggest that South Australia at the next Senate election might elect two Liberal senators, two Labor and one Xenophon, with Sarah Hanson-Young squeezing home to keep the final Senate spot for the Greens.

The Australian Conservatives have not been able to attract enough conservative voters to be anything but another minor party. One Nation is by far the most popular conservative alternative to the Coalition.

But Nick Xenophon is the biggest loser. When he announced he was going back to South Australia, but that he didn’t want to be premier and didn’t want to be in a coalition government, we wondered if he was going through a brain snap, or was just desperate to spend more time at home. It’s a puzzle to work out what his real game plan was.

In his eighteen years in politics, Xenophon has been a class act as a crossbench politician. He would use shameless gimmicks to attract attention, but when he got attention, he was also witty, sensible, relatively honest — and concerned to use the little influence he had to get action on causes that matter: reforming gambling laws, increasing water flows in the Murray, and so on. So his support soared.

But what made him trade that in for a stumbling, improvised, policy-free attempt to become premier of South Australia (which, in the absence of any better explanation, I assume was his goal)? His campaign will be remembered primarily for a campaign ad that was probably the worst I’ve ever seen. It told voters: I am a gimmick politician, don’t expect serious policies from me, but hey, vote for me, and we’ll have fun.

They didn’t vote for him. In 2016, the Nick Xenophon Team got 21.3 per cent of the vote in South Australia, won Mayo and almost won Grey. On Saturday it won just 13.7 per cent — admittedly, running only in three-quarters of the seats — won nothing, and came close only in Heysen.

It was a long way from where they stood at the start of the campaign, when Xenophon led Weatherill and Marshall in the polls, and the party looked a good chance to lead the next government. Xenophon has blamed an ad campaign by the hotels lobby against his policy to remove poker machines; but while that must have done damage, it was probably worsened by the fact that he was not impressing voters as expected in debates, and his own advertising left the impression that he was funny but flaky.

If there is a way back for him, it is likely to be long, and to start with him eating humble pie in coming days. At federal level, a radical redistribution is under way to reduce South Australia’s seats from eleven to ten. But Xenophon’s safest path would be to return to the Senate — at the next election.

What difference a Liberal government will make to South Australia remains to be seen. Much of Labor’s renewable energy policy is already locked in, and besides, the polls suggest it is popular; Marshall is unlikely to tear it up. He has pledged to extend retail trading hours, which could certainly change the sleepy atmosphere that is both Adelaide’s charm and its limitation. Victoria’s long experience of retail deregulation suggests the gains outweigh the losses.

South Australia has been losing its talented young for a long time, especially to Melbourne. Australia’s laissez-faire attitude to corporate takeovers has seen Adelaide’s biggest companies absorbed into national or international firms based elsewhere. It’s become a branch office town — and yet, a rather beautiful one, between the hills and sea, with lots of lovely old homes, good food and coffee, quality universities, cheap housing and a history of doing things.

I wouldn’t be surprised if South Australia has better days ahead of it. But its future is over the page, and we can’t read about it until we get there. •

The post Saturday’s two big contests, the morning after appeared first on Inside Story.

The Greens are hoping to snatch inner-Melbourne Batman from Labor. At the 2016 election, Labor’s David Feeney limped back in with 51 per cent of the two-candidate-preferred vote, assisted by Liberal how-to-vote cards. There’s no Liberal candidate this time (bad for Labor) but also no Feeney (good for Labor). Instead, the party’s candidate is ACTU president Ged Kearney, a much better fit for this electorate. She faces Greens candidate Alex Bhathal, who has been battered by leaks from her own party.

That’s already plenty of reasons for uncertainty. But Batman is impossible to predict mostly because it’s a by-election. By-elections are often important to the parties — this one very much so, because once the Greens take an electorate from Labor it can be difficult to retrieve. But to most voters they are Seinfeldian: elections about nothing. Certainly nothing as significant as who will form government. And so they are susceptible to the influence of the latest gust of… well, froth, inanity, urgings to “send a message” to someone.

North Queensland’s Adani mine has reportedly been the big issue. Distant and feel-good, symbolic of rapacious capitalism trashing the environment, it could easily be pushed aside if something else pulls the heartstrings — like Labor’s plan to end dividend-imputation tax refunds, for example. The timing of Labor’s announcement was surely no coincidence, although leader Bill Shorten’s rushed assurance that pensioners won’t be worse off turned it into a bit of a bungle.

According to the Guardian, Labor’s own polling reveals a close contest. But after the Greens’ surprise win in last November’s state by-election in Northcote (which sits inside Batman), the attention paid to opinion polls has been seriously reduced.

Further back, in 2012, a by-election in the state seat of Melbourne produced another shock victory — for Labor that time, via the rare sight of the Greens topping the primary vote but the ALP prevailing after preferences. First-preference opinion polling had been in the ballpark but observers had been unaware of, or didn’t take into account, other candidates’ Labor-friendly how-to-vote cards. (The most important were those of the Sex Party candidate Fiona Patten.) The Victorian Electoral Commission, like its federal counterpart, doesn’t register how-to-vote cards, so they couldn’t generally be examined in advance.

Back in Batman, the betting markets, which reflect general expectations, strongly favour the Greens. I reckon 50–50 is a better assessment. That’s another way of saying it’s unpredictable.

A few hundred kilometres due west, South Australia’s general election will determine whose hands sit on the tiller for the next four years. The insurgency of Nick Xenophon’s SA-BEST — itself a symptom of lack of enthusiasm about the major parties — makes it a terribly difficult election to read.

The sixteen-year-old Labor government, led since 2011 by Jay Weatherill, shouldn’t really still be in office. At only one of its four victories has it actually won the statewide two-party-preferred vote — despite this being the one Australian jurisdiction that requires its electoral authorities to set boundaries to ensure, as much as possible, that the winner of the statewide vote wins the most seats.

The state boundaries commission failed most egregiously at the 2014 poll, when the Weatherill government survived with just 47 per cent after-preference support across the state. That vote-for-seat equation wasn’t a surprise: the pendulum produced by the commission during its most recent redistribution had predicted such an outcome from such a vote. This time it has not repeated that particular blunder, and the pendulum shows, on paper at least, the government needing a 3 per cent swing to retain its majority.

After the unfair 2014 result, the Labor government’s stocks recovered, and it even hit the lead in several polls. The 2013 change of federal government (from Labor to Coalition) assisted Labor counterparts around the country (just as the 2007 change helped conservative ones). But that dynamic was supercharged in South Australia, with its vulnerable car and submarine manufacturers, and state Labor came to be seen as a bulwark against an aggressively unsympathetic federal government. The federal-versus-South Australia renewable energy battle and the regular grumbling from Western Australia about the distribution of GST revenue also assist the incumbent.

Whether SA-BEST takes any House of Assembly seats, and if so how many, is one unknown. The larger one (particularly given the decline in SA-BEST support in opinion polls) is the proportion of SA-BEST’s preferences that each side, Labor and Liberal, will receive.

Conveniently, South Australia’s electoral commission does register how-to-vote cards, so we know that SA-BEST is not recommending preferences in any of the thirty-six lower-house seats it’s contesting (out of a total of forty-seven). Instead, its cards just show a “1” next to its candidate and the other squares are empty, with a reminder to voters to fill them all in.

It is difficult to determine, via polling, where SA-BEST’s votes will come from and how its preferences will flow. Adding to the uncertainty is the tendency of electors not to value preferences as highly as primary votes. So, for example, a person who would vote Labor if SA-BEST were not on the ballot paper might, after putting a “1” next to SA-BEST, not necessarily place Labor second. Unpredictability upon unpredictability.

Working the other way, the major parties’ how-to-vote cards will strongly influence SA-BEST’s chances of success. The Liberals are “preferencing” (that is, recommending) SA-BEST ahead of Labor in thirty-three electorates, Labor ahead of SA-BEST in two and splitting the ticket in one (the seat Xenophon is contesting, Hartley). Labor is preferencing Liberals ahead of SA-BEST in seventeen, SA-BEST in front of the Liberals in eighteen, and offering one split ticket (also Hartley).

There’s more. South Australia has a “ticket” system for its lower house (also unique in the country) to catch votes that would otherwise be informal because not all squares are numbered properly. Parties and candidates can tell the commission how they would like such votes’ preferences to be distributed. These tickets are kept hush-hush (partly because their very existence is kept quiet so as not to encourage people to just vote “1”) but they will, presumably, replicate the order on the how-to-vote cards.

One last technical matter. Parties and candidates are able to lodge two tickets in each electorate if they wish, in which case half their votes are distributed according to one and the other half according to the other. So we can guess that SA-BEST will send half its preferences to Labor and half to Liberal. And SA-BEST’s card itself is likely to encourage a relatively high proportion of incomplete ballots with a “1” next to that party.

It used to be said that a major ingredient of SA Labor premier Don Dunstan’s success was the rich timbre of his voice. Jay Weatherill doesn’t enjoy that attribute, but he does possess a certain quiet assurance in voice and demeanour. Liberal leader Steven Marshall, who survived a full term as opposition leader (in fact, opposition leaders seem less dispensable across the country than they did five years ago), is something of a nonentity who hardly sets pulses racing. In other words, he’s like most opposition leaders, including the successful ones.

In those thirty-six seats with SA-BEST candidates, the electoral commission will have to nominate beforehand which two candidates to include in the final, two-candidate-preferred count. In some seats, when they realise after a few hours they guessed wrong, we’ll only have first-preference results at the end of the night. Over on ABC TV Antony Green might try to estimate preference flows, but with no historical record to go on that would be hit and miss.

If the result is clear on Sunday morning, it’ll probably mean a combination of a Liberal victory and a poor showing by SA-BEST.

Those SA-BEST preferences could fly everywhere. That’s why, as in Batman, the fact that we don’t know what the outcome will be doesn’t mean the result, when it arrives, will necessarily be “close.” A range of outcomes is possible. ●

The post Super Saturday’s electoral uncertainties appeared first on Inside Story.

Cormack, a key source of funding for the Victorian Liberals, hands over more than a million dollars to the party every year. At least, it did until last winter, when its board decided to turn the tap off. The party, and particularly state president Michael Kroger, is fuming, asserting the foundation is supposed to be managing funds for the Liberals. The board disagrees, declaring itself entirely independent. Both sides have lawyered up and are preparing for a fight to the death in the full glare of the press, nine months out from a state election. Like I said — the wars.

This is not just a run of bad luck for Victoria’s Liberals. It is part of a larger upheaval. For decades now, the state division has been undergoing a slow, painful metamorphosis from a pragmatic, almost centrist Establishment party, to an angrier, more ideological outfit for conservative outsiders. You could say they are slowly but surely losing their genteel civility and going feral.

That’s ”feral” not in any pejorative sense, but strictly in zoological terms. Where once the Victorian Liberals were thoroughly domesticated and moderated by their long residence in the halls of power, they are now part-way through a decades-long process of shedding their pragmatism, their trust in existing institutions and their ideological flexibility. Having spent years in the political wilderness, they are returning to baser instincts and harsher attitudes.

And it has been many, many years now. The Victorian Liberals have held government for just four of the past nineteen years. Federally, Victoria has become a reliable Labor state: Liberals have done poorly, even when they are being swept to power by the rest of the country. Sydneysiders have dominated the party leadership in Canberra for decades. It’s a long time since Victoria was the jewel in the Liberal crown, as it was during the long reigns of Bob Menzies in Canberra and Henry Bolte in Spring Street.

Indeed, it can be difficult to appreciate just how dominant and influential the Liberals were in the now-progressive Garden State. They completely remade Victoria’s politics in the postwar era, founding what could nearly be called a new political order.

Before the Liberal Party arrived on the scene, the state’s politics were notoriously chaotic. Conservatives, reformist liberals and, later, Labor forces were fairly evenly split in the parliament. Alliances were constantly drawn and redrawn; parties were desperately undisciplined; splits and fusions transformed the political landscape with dizzying frequency. If nothing else, the tumult kept the Victorian governor busy. In 1861 alone, the colonial governor, Sir Henry Barkly, found himself offering nine commissions of government, with nobody willing to take the poisoned chalice. Government changed hands almost annually.

That chronic instability came to an end with the rise of the Liberal Party in Victoria. Governments began lasting much longer, for one thing. From Federation up to the election of Henry Bolte in 1955, the average Victorian premier lasted 1.8 years. From Bolte onward, that figure blew out to 5.9 years. Bolte himself was the state’s longest-serving premier, lasting seventeen years; his successor, Dick Hamer, got eight years in the chair. This was something Victoria had never seen before — one party governing, continuously, decade after decade — and the Liberals became synonymous with power.

The stability and discipline of the Liberals changed the whole character of the political contest in Victoria. The old three-cornered free-for-all settled into a more structured, bipolar contest we might more readily recognise today. Parliamentary dominance also allowed for power to be concentrated in the executive, away from the legislature and the state’s many and massive statutory authorities. Decades later than other states, Victoria had finally made the transition to a “party” — as opposed to a “parliamentary” — system of government. And the dominant party in that system, for its first three decades at least, was the Liberal Party.

No longer. Now, the Liberals are more habituated to the wilderness than the halls of power. And those long stints on the outside have made their mark on the character and politics of the party. Their first taste of long-term opposition — the ten years of John Cain and Joan Kirner’s Labor governments — saw the party take a decisive turn under the leadership of Jeff Kennett. Kennett’s temperament was aggressive and irreverent, at times shocking his colleagues and Establishment elders. His brutal and unforgiving tactics included attempts to block supply or revoke parliamentary pensions to force an election.

In government, Kennett put a wrecking ball through time-honoured institutions and traditions, many carefully established and nurtured under his Liberal predecessors. He was, in that sense, more revolutionary than conservative, more radical than pragmatic. It would be wrong to say the Liberals had gone completely feral at this stage — the Melbourne Establishment remained fairly well embedded in the party and the government ­— but these wild flashes, this irreverence, this streak of revolutionary zeal, betrayed a new distrust of conventions and institutions.

Perhaps the thing holding back a fuller expression of that feral turn was the presumption that the Liberals were back to stay. To the surprise of many, they managed only seven years in power before being dispatched by the electorate. And this time around the business and civic Establishment of Melbourne began to decouple itself from the Liberals. Slowly but surely, it began to cosy up to the very business-friendly, third-way, New Labour–style governments of Steve Bracks and John Brumby. Business figures and corporations, lobbyists and elite civic groups all began to reorient themselves, hiring Labor-friendly lobbyists and board members, donating money, attending events and joining supporter groups.

We need only look across the Murray to see what kind of party the Victorian Liberals were morphing into. Political historian Norman Abjorensen has written that the New South Welsh Liberals always had an “intensely tribal ‘outgroup’ mentality.” Stuck in a natural Labor state, they existed on the margins of power, with Labor dominating nearly all institutions — from parliament and the bureaucracy to local government, schools, the professions, the judiciary, and even many churches and sporting clubs.

Perhaps forgivably, the NSW Liberals had adopted a kind of siege mentality. They were insular, suspicious and more uncompromisingly ideological. This is not to say there were no moderates in New South Wales, any more than there had been no hardliners in Victoria. But the basic cultural difference between the states had been fairly stark: New South Wales had the outsider’s chip on the shoulder, was deeply suspicious of the Establishment and was more aggressively right-wing; the Victorians were the Establishment, more pragmatic, more flexible, sometimes positively progressive in their liberalism. Now, no longer the Establishment, the Victorians began to resemble their tribal cousins to the north.

This shift was on show during Ted Baillieu’s tortured leadership of the state party. Baillieu himself was an Establishment scion, a member of one of the oldest elite families in the state. He was noted for his moderation, his pragmatism, and his relaxed, unflustered style. All this was in keeping with the old Liberal Party. But by the time he was at the top, the party had changed, and he struggled to wrangle the feral elements that had emerged. In opposition, he suffered constant leaks and backgrounding by disgruntled factional enemies. Some members of the party’s state office even set up a website decrying “Red Ted” and his moderate politics. Tony Nutt — ex–John Howard consiglieri and all-purpose party fixer ­— had to be brought in to hunt down and purge the rebels. Leakers in the party room and the shadow cabinet similarly had to be rooted out and sacked every six months or so — year after year.

All this was feasted on by the state media, something Baillieu never seemed to forgive; he was guarded, often openly hostile in front of journalists, speaking rarely and briefly. Nor could he forgive the party’s natural allies — the chamber of commerce, banks, financiers, the freight industry — for cosying up to and even openly backing Labor.

Baillieu carried all these wounds and suspicions over into power. Reading the party’s own autopsy on the Baillieu years, we see how the premier’s office — distrustful of Baillieu’s colleagues, indeed distrustful of the whole world outside his office — micromanaged the government. Most serious decisions were taken away from cabinet and given to subcommittees where fewer enemies lurked. Journalists were starved of information, and what little they got was delivered through gritted teeth. Interest groups found it impossible to get access to the government; stakeholders were thrown off-side by policy surprises, or felt nobody in government was listening.

And so, despite leading his party out of the electoral wilderness and despite winning with a sizeable swing and a double majority, Ted Baillieu found himself struggling with backbiting and white-anting within months of taking office. Abortion, the Human Rights Charter, department secretaries kept on from the Labor years, the lack of big infrastructure projects, the lack of boldness, zeal and aggression — all were the subject of intense infighting. By Christmas 2012, the premier was hanging by a thread. The following March, when Frankston MP Geoff Shaw quit the Liberals over an investigation into his misuse of entitlements, Baillieu lost his majority in the Assembly. He resigned, swiftly, before his enemies could get in first. All this just two-and-a-half years into a new government. This is what a feral party looks like.

Now, in opposition yet again, the Victorian Liberals are just about in meltdown. On paper, the party should be within reach of government later this year. But it is desperately low on cash, at war with its main funder, and engaged in internecine internal warfare, the ferals outmanoeuvring and, according to some, out-stacking the Establishment all over the place. If there were grumblings and whispers coming from these elements during the Baillieu years, there is now a full-blown insurgency — almost the kind of thing we saw the Tea Party engineer in the United States before Donald Trump came on the scene.

None of this means that the Liberals won’t win back power in Victoria in November, or that they won’t manage some good results federally. An angrier, more right-wing, more feral party might even manage to speak to the disillusioned, non-major-party-voting chunk of the electorate that can make the difference in Australian elections these days. But it almost certainly won’t resemble the golden postwar era of stability. More likely than a feral-right hegemony in Victoria is a return to the old days of factiousness, division and instability. And it is not just the Liberal Party unravelling — both major parties are struggling with their response to a flagging primary vote.

That is the context for the Cormack stoush, due to come to court in Melbourne next month. Indeed, it is the crisis facing the Liberals in microcosm: the Cormack board is constituted by old-guard Liberals with eminent Establishment credentials; rather suddenly, they have found themselves wavering in their commitment to the party, at least under its current leadership, with Michael Kroger at the helm. On the other side is Kroger, who, despite being the consummate party insider, is fashioning himself more and more as an anti-Establishment crusader, lambasting the Business Council of Australia, expelling all MP staffers from the state’s administrative committee, and acting as patron of hard-right up-and-comers who are recruiting whole churches out in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.

The stoush is between two Liberal parties — old and new, domesticated and feral. Perhaps the two can find some accommodation and divert the conflict from the embarrassment of open court next month. Perhaps not. Either way, this is not the beginning, nor is it the end of the upheaval for Victoria’s Liberals. ●

• James Murphy’s analysis of Justice Beach’s decision in the Cormack Foundation case.

The post How Victoria’s Liberals went feral appeared first on Inside Story.

The Secondary Teacher relied much on cartoons as a weapon and Ron’s forte was disrespect for authority. His most memorable images were of the school principal as a loudspeaker. In those days every classroom had a loudspeaker above the blackboard and lessons were conducted to the tune of the principal calling for someone to come to the office to collect papers or pick up the lunch his or her mother had dropped off. In one drawing, Ron pushed this nuisance a step further by having the principal sample and comment on the lunch.

The ubiquitous classroom speaker: two of Tandberg’s cartoons for the Secondary Teacher.

When I met Ron he was drawing a comic strip celebrating a little man, Fred, which ran in the local Leader papers. He was just starting on his shorter-frame drawings, which kept that focus but in a concentrated form that depended on sharp dialogue. Fred became Everyman, and in our magazine that meant he was a lowly teacher. He was short, and had big feet and a large forelock. Most of his interlocutors dwarfed him. The joke was in the one or two lines of dialogue through which the innocent little man learnt the ways of the great world.

Ron’s world was the teacher’s world. His targets were the authorities: principals or the department. His little men were innocents, trying to get on with the job against the interruptions and obstructions of authorities, represented by men around a table or word bubbles from a loudspeaker. They reflected every teacher’s irritations with bureaucracy and authority.

Ron’s cartoons depend on the punchline, and I still find it hard to imagine how he managed to come up with one or more almost every day. He seemed to do it without much effort and continued to do so for the next forty-odd years.

I ran whatever Ron drew for the magazine. Sometimes we would sit together in my dining room going over material for cartoons. Sometimes a cartoon or two would be slipped under the front door.

Although Ron, given his own teaching experience, could have drawn general cartoons about schools and teachers, he concentrated from the outset on the political struggles of teachers. At the beginning of the 1970s these were more intense than they ever had been or would later be. Indeed, there were so many fronts to fight on — the bias of the supposedly independent Teachers Tribunal, the question of what were acceptable qualifications for employment as a teacher, the indignity of being inspected, the excessive hours of work, and generally the drive to be treated as professionals — that I decided to roll them into a single campaign under the heading Professional Action.

The hated inspector: Tandberg in the Secondary Teacher.

“Professional Action,” I wrote in the Secondary Teacher at the beginning of 1971, “is an offer of hope for the future. It is not a promise from a politician or an administrator; it is a vow by teachers that from now on teachers will be qualified, teachers will be trusted and teachers will be able to teach. If it looks like strong action, remember that we have the habits of half a century to break.”

The margins of this militant rhetoric were illustrated by our two cartoonists, the great Alex Stitt, who had carried the magazine through the 1960s, and the newcomer Ron Tandberg, whose native militant disposition made him our most potent humorist. Teachers long remembered the day the Professional Action pamphlet arrived in schools and in their memories they perhaps thought of it in the form of Tandberg’s image of a pamphlet being handed out of a cloud to a little figure on a mountaintop.

The campaign against school inspectors probably worried more teachers than any other of our campaigns against authority. Tribunals, departments, governments could be readily scorned. Opposing inspectors was much closer to danger; individual careers depended on their opinions. Which is why we sought to lighten our union rhetoric with mockery and why Tandberg of all our cartoonists was the most powerful. “Some kids outside want to know what we do,” says the thought bubble coming from behind the inspectors’ door. “What’ll we tell ’em?” asks the other bubble.

One day an editor at the Age asked me if the paper could re-run some of Ron’s cartoons in its Education Age section. This was awkward. Ron happened to be away so I couldn’t ask him. The paper was vague about which cartoons they wanted and how they would run them. They were also cautious about payment. But I decided on Ron’s behalf that being in the Age would be a good thing, and that matters of permission and payment could be sorted out later. Happily, when Ron came back he agreed. From Education Age he moved inevitably to the paper’s front pages.

Unpopular premier: Tandberg on Sir Henry Bolte, who was often in conflict with the teacher’s union.

Ron’s transition to Education Age clearly imposed more discipline than he’d laboured under for our small publications but it had the virtue of not requiring him to tackle too much new material too quickly. He was thus able to move to more general themes within a familiar context. If he felt daunted by the larger context, I saw no signs of it.

Humour relies on disrespect. Tandberg’s disrespect was humane. He didn’t attack or demean his targets. Instead he allotted them their place in an absurd world that put the little men outside, looking on and wondering.

I guess, given his background knowledge of schools and teaching, Tandberg already knew who his targets might be and what their follies were. Even so, his talent moved easily on to the large stage of journalism, where it sustained him for nearly half a century. I can never quite fit together in my head the friendly, quietly funny bloke I worked with for a while with the wide-ranging leader of attitudes we met in the press.

I’m sure he saw himself as one of his modest little men, but to the rest of us Ron was an honest and powerful leader. •

Ron Tandberg’s latest collection of cartoons is A Year of Madness (Wilkinson Publishing).

The post Tandberg and the teachers appeared first on Inside Story.

In fact, the Northcote result went halfway to becoming a remarkable salvage operation — one that shows Labor potentially winning back inner-suburban turf from the Greens. In the short term, it suggests that if the federal member for Batman, David Feeney, is the next victim of the citizenship fiasco — and if Labor replaces him with a more attractive vote-winner — there is a strong chance the party will roll back the Green tide and retain the seat with an increased majority.

Bad as the result looked for Labor, it was much better than its vote at last year’s federal election. Between the two elections, Northcote’s cool electorate swung 5.3 per cent in two-party terms — away from the Greens, towards Labor.

That was not the way anyone has reported it. We journalists and election-watchers didn’t do our homework on this one.

First, if you look at the way Northcote has voted at the last five federal and state elections, there’s a zigzag pattern. The 2010 Victorian election was the first time the Liberals directed their preferences to Labor, rather than the Greens: adjusting for boundary changes since, I estimate the Greens’ two-party vote at 40.4 per cent.

But in 2013, when the rest of Australia embraced Tony Abbott, the Northcote part of the seat of Batman swung sharply to the Greens; they won 49.3 per cent of the two-party vote there, almost a 9 per cent increase from the 2010 state vote. Was it a protest against Labor’s disunity and poor government? Or against Feeney, who was imposed on the electorate by head office? Or did it reflect the rising tide of Green support in inner Melbourne?

It was a different story at the 2014 state election: Labor MP and future minister Fiona Richardson retained Northcote easily. The Greens’ two-party vote dropped to 44 per cent, 5.3 per cent down from the federal election. Why? Labor in Victoria is to the left of the federal party. Richardson was widely respected. And the Greens’ focus in 2014 was on winning Melbourne from Labor, and Prahran from the Liberals. Northcote wasn’t a priority.

Come 2016, and the federal election, the Greens went all out to win Batman — even though it required a swing of 10.6 per cent in a seat whose northern half, made up of working-class Labor suburbs, is a foreign country to them. They were helped by an awful campaign by Feeney, who discovered that he had “forgotten” to declare a $2.3 million investment property in the electorate, where few issues matter more than people being priced out of housing.

Within the state seat of Northcote, the Greens overachieved: they won a phenomenal 11.6 per cent swing, and 60.9 per cent of the vote. But north of Bell Street, especially in Reservoir and Bundoora, the swings were mostly in single digits. Feeney held on with his margin slashed to just 1 per cent.

Last August, Fiona Richardson died from cancer. The Liberals decided not to stand at the 19 November by-election to replace her. Without their preferences to rescue Labor, the Greens won the seat with another 11.6 per cent swing.

There’s a strange symmetry here. In both 2016 and 2017, the Greens won a swing of 11.6 per cent from the previous federal and state elections respectively. Yet in the past two state elections, 2014 and 2017, their vote has been 5.3 per cent lower than at the previous federal election. How come?

One explanation is that Northcote voters like the Andrews government and its candidates — Clare Burns, Labor’s by-election candidate, won good reviews — better than the Shorten opposition and David Feeney. Labor’s hard line against refugees works against it in seats like this. Younger voters have never known a successful federal Labor government.

But an alternative explanation is that Labor polled much better this time because it ran a campaign targeted to the issue of economic inequality, which is hurting the lives of thousands of articulate young people in seats like Northcote: insecure and part-time employment, mixed with impossibly high housing prices and rising rents.

Labor’s assistant secretary in Victoria, Kosmos Samaras, has spelt this out in a very interesting paper. He argues that we are going through a third industrial revolution, in which the gains made by previous generations of workers — full employment, good wages and conditions, home ownership — are being rapidly eroded, creating a new class of people with good qualifications but low incomes, insecure employment, and no prospect of buying a house where they want to live. Samaras uses “the precariat,” a term popularised by sociologist Guy Standing, to describe them.

“We went after a particular type of voter in Northcote,” Samaras tells Inside Story. “There’s a growing number of young people whose lives are precarious. They have university degrees, but can’t get the permanent, full-time work they need to plan their lives ahead. They don’t want to live in the suburbs, but in the inner city there’s a more aggressive rental market than we’ve seen for a long time. We’re experiencing evictions; rents are going up every six months.

“We’re not going to beat the Greens by going up against them with the voters who are very progressive. But for this group, the issue that matters most is economic inequality — and that is our turf.”

Andrews began the campaign by visiting Northcote to announce new rental laws to improve tenants’ rights — including limiting rent increases to once a year, and requiring landlords to provide a reason for evictions — and Labor reminded voters that it has exempted first home buyers from stamp duty, and put a tax on owners of empty dwellings to encourage them to sell or rent. Being out of government, and with no prospect of winning power, the Greens can’t fight on that front.

If there is a by-election in Batman, it’ll be an interesting one. The Greens’ momentum versus Labor’s momentum, with the Liberals planning to sit in the stands and watch. It’ll be a pointer to the bigger contests ahead. •

The post How Labor could fight back in inner Melbourne appeared first on Inside Story.

A high-profile dispute last year saw Andrews intervene to hand a firebrand union leader unprecedented authority in the management of the state’s Country Fire Authority. That led to the resignation not only of the CFA’s leadership but also of highly regarded minister Jane Garrett. A Galaxy poll in February found the government’s honeymoon with voters well and truly over: Labor led just 51–49 in two-party terms, and Andrews had become Australia’s most unpopular premier, with a satisfaction rating of just 35 per cent, with 52 per cent dissatisfied. Even Colin Barnett was polling better than that before he was swept from office.

But the Andrews government is lucky that, unlike Western Australia, Victoria is booming. This is not really its own doing, but it can and does claim the credit. Melbourne has become a magnet for foreign students, Asian (especially Indian) migrants, and the young and cool from all over Australia. In the year to June, that city alone absorbed almost a third of Australia’s population growth. Housing prices and construction have boomed. The state’s payroll tax data confirms that Victoria is generating new jobs at an astonishing pace.

That should mean that the state budget unveiled yesterday by treasurer Tim Pallas is rolling with loot, and in some ways it is. Revenues for 2017–18 are now forecast to be $2.4 billion higher than Pallas projected a year ago, and $4 billion higher in 2018–19. This has allowed Pallas to deliver a budget that splashes money around Labor causes (especially for victims of domestic violence) while investing a record amount in transport infrastructure, schools, hospitals and so on, hiring thousands more police, handing out tax breaks big and small – and yet still end up with billion-dollar surpluses stretching out into the blue yonder.

Yet, for all the apparent prosperity, Victoria’s budget looks far more vulnerable than it did a year ago. The surplus for this year was then projected to be $2.9 billion; now it is expected to come in at just over $1 billion.

To balance the books, Pallas has had to lift the so-called “efficiency dividend” from 2.5 to 3 per cent into the future, saving $1.2 billion. Given the extraordinary growth in the Victorian public sector since Labor took office – the wages bill has swollen 17 per cent in just two years ­– that is certainly doable, but it is notable that Pallas did not even mention this large cost saving in his budget speech, and the one reference to it in the five-volume budget papers did not explain how it was to be achieved. It does not inspire confidence.

The key to Victoria’s budget boom is one figure. For the first time, stamp duty on property transfers has overtaken payroll tax as the state’s biggest revenue source. In just four years it has almost doubled, from $3.2 billion to $6 billion, as soaring population, soaring new construction and soaring house prices made it a treasurer’s dream tax. Even after removing the tax from most first home buyers, Pallas now projects its proceeds to shoot up another 25 per cent in the next four years, accounting for almost half the growth in future tax revenue.

Well, he might be so lucky. Or he might not. And that’s the risk. A property downturn, which is more likely than not in the next four years, would put the state’s budget surplus at risk. The future surpluses predicted now are skinnier than they were a year ago.

How can the surplus be shrinking when revenue is soaring? Because the Andrews government is spending the money faster than it’s coming in.

This year, revenues rose 8 per cent, but spending rose 10 per cent. Next year’s revenues are forecast to rise 4.4 per cent, despite several tax cuts, but recurrent spending is forecast to grow 4.9 per cent – and that leaves out a big, long-overdue surge in investment in new roads and rail.

Despite wage growth being at the lowest levels on record, Victoria’s public sector wage bill has shot up 10 per cent this year, and 17 per cent in Labor’s first two years. The forward estimates showing that growth shrinking to 2.5 per cent in the out-years have to be taken with more than a grain of salt. Or, to be less tactful, they cannot be believed.

That’s not the way Pallas presented his work, nor is it what Andrews wants us to focus on. Among the dozens of press releases, the ones the premier put his name on highlighted these elements:

• The “unprecedented investment to end family violence,” implementing every one of the 227 recommendations of the state’s royal commission on the topic, in a package that adds $400 million a year in new spending – overwhelmingly focused on caring for victims, rather than on prevention.

• $4 billion of spending directed at the regions, especially the regional cities where Labor has a swag of marginal seats, including new programs for public transport, roads and bridges, schools and housing, and, in a throwback to the Hamer government’s decentralisation push, an unexpected 25 per cent payroll tax cut for firms based outside Melbourne.

• Putting an extra 3135 police on the streets over the next five years, on top of the 13,525 already there. This initiative is aimed at countering the campaign of the Murdoch flagship, the Herald Sun, to convince Victorians that they are at daily risk from a new crime wave, despite the statistics showing that Victoria has the lowest crime rates in Australia. By the time it ends, almost one in 400 Victorians will be a police officer.

• The usual mix of new investment to build and upgrade schools, to upgrade hospitals, with almost $3 billion of new health spending – and invest in new transport infrastructure.

Andrews made his priority clear. “At the heart of this year’s this year’s budget is a historic and life-changing investment to end family violence,” he declared. Andrews is a political animal, but no one would doubt that he is genuinely passionate about the issue, and good on him; it is something society has tolerated for far too long.

But most of his new spending is not going to end family violence, but to treat its victims. It includes $95 million over the next four years for “family violence industry planning.” Maybe his government should have set aside some of those 227 recommendations – they include the right to “family violence leave,” at employers’ cost, which is sure to become a rort – and instead given more priority to prevention and tackling the causes. Why do so many relationships that begin in love end up in such extreme, obsessive hatred? What can we as a society do to prevent this, and help relationships work rather than fail?

Victoria’s low level of infrastructure spending has been a recurring theme in this column, and with good reason. As the accompanying table shows, even last year, when three out of eight Australians were settling in the state, the share of its economic activity going into public infrastructure spending was way lower than even in Tasmania, and barely half that of New South Wales – and that was after the Andrews government had lifted spending quite a bit.

Chronic under-investor: Victorian infrastructure investment as a percentage of total state spending, compared to other states, in 2016

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Total spending (or state final demand) is the sum of all spending by households, governments and businesses.

The Turnbull government is largely to blame for this. Over the five years to 2020, the Coalition has allocated Victoria only $3 billion of the $31 billion it plans to invest in transport infrastructure across the nation: roughly 10 per cent, for a state with 25 per cent of Australia’s population and 37 per cent of its population growth. The Andrews government has also helped prolong this schoolyard stoush, but Turnbull controls the money; his and Abbott’s government created the problem, and it’s his responsibility to fix it.

Pallas, a genial, good-natured guy, told journalists yesterday, “The Commonwealth has made a very clear decision not to invest in anything that the state government believes is a priority for the people of Victoria. If Labor says it’s a good thing to do, then they will not do anything about it… There is a deliberate effort by the Commonwealth to frustrate and impede the economic potential of the state.” It is hard to disagree with him.

The good news is that the 2017 Victorian budget marks another big step forward, and for the first time in forty years, the state – and others investing on its behalf – are giving Melbourne’s transport needs the priority they deserve. Even if its transport investment is not quite what it seems, and still falls short of what Melbourne needs, it’s an impressive step.

The budget papers claim that the government will invest more than $10 billion in 2017–18 on infrastructure in all areas – schools, hospitals and police stations, as well as roads and rail – although this includes investments by Transurban and other private firms in private–public partnerships. The government’s own plans for transport investment for the year ahead amount to $5.77 billion – a 30 per cent jump from the $4.4 billion planned a year ago, and more than double the $2.8 billion year-ahead spending proposed in the last Coalition budget in 2014.

The 2017–18 activity will be dominated by Labor’s program to remove level crossings ($1.2 billion) and to build the Melbourne Metro ($855 million). But there will also be $80 million to plan the North East link between the Ring Road and the Eastern Freeway, and $100 million-plus budgets for road projects such as widening the Ring Road and the Tullamarine and Monash freeways, and rail works ranging from the Murray Basin project to serious upgrades of the lines to Ballarat, Hurstbridge and Dandenong and the extension of the suburban system to Mernda.

The government has also flagged that it will build the long-delayed north end of the Mornington Peninsula Freeway, now renamed the Mordialloc bypass, and, with the Commonwealth, investigate options for a rail link to Melbourne Airport, apparently to be privately owned. Why?

It’s still far less than Sydney is building, but that is partly because the Abbott–Turnbull government has been an ATM for projects in Sydney, while starving Melbourne. Most of the little it spends in Victoria goes to country roads. Perhaps next week’s federal budget will see a change that will astound us all.

The state budget also coughs up some money for a one-off maintenance catch-up, in both rail and road. That’s welcome, because politicians typically prefer to fund gleaming new projects than patch up the fraying edges of existing lines, or replace equipment that is long past its use-by date. Public transport advocates often argue that governments should fix up the lines we’ve already got, give them dedicated tracks and install modern signalling and control systems, before they start building anything new. Reports leaked to the Age on the state of the Melbourne and regional train networks, and the tram network, all suggest that far more than this one-off hit will be needed to tackle the decades-long backlog of essential maintenance and replacement of outdated equipment.

The budget has been well-received. Business likes it, the welfare groups like it, even commentators normally hostile to Labor couldn’t find much to criticise, while opposition leader Matthew Guy seemed to be saying the government should have spent more, taxed less, and run a bigger surplus. Thanks, mate.

I can’t join the party. To me, this budget reinforces the impression that this is a government that shies away from making hard fiscal decisions. Unlike the Victorian Labor governments of the previous decade, which leaned to the centre, this one leans to the left. Its priorities seem to be those of the activist fringe, and not the mainstream of Victorians. That is why the government, like its budget, is now vulnerable.

Steve Bracks and John Brumby were both economics graduates who spent years out in the real world – as teachers, youth employment workers and so on – before entering politics full-time. Daniel Andrews is just as bright as them, but he did an arts degree, and then went straight from university to politics, as a staffer. He has never worked in anything else, and it shows.

A surplus of $1 billion in Victoria’s current economic position is far too small. In state government accounting, an operating surplus is essentially the current taxpayers’ contribution to infrastructure spending. It is unambiguously a good thing. This year’s budget should have aimed at a surplus more like $3 billion, and got there by taking a much tougher line on spending.

There are many glaring examples. The state’s Night Rider experiment with all-night public transport has been an expensive failure, costing almost twice the original estimate, with each passenger journey costing almost as much as a taxi ride. Yet the budget pledges to continue it for another four years, booking it in at implausibly low costs.

Victoria does not need 3000 more police, and if it did, the obvious source of them should be to retrain the underutilised protective security officers, or PSOs, as police. The PSOs are another failed experiment, this time by the previous Coalition government, in which people in uniforms are paid by taxpayers to walk up and down every Melbourne railway station at night, supposedly to make passengers feel more secure. It is a breathtaking waste of money, and everyone knows it, yet no one apart from Age columnist John Silvester has had the courage to say so.  

I love the Australian Open, but why do Victorian taxpayers have to be an ATM for whatever Tennis Australia wants to build next at Melbourne Park? It has five show courts already. There are far greater priorities than spending $277 million to build it a sixth one.

One could go on. The government needs to spend a bit less on current services, and invest a bit more on the needs of the future. That’s why its budget is now vulnerable, and it sums up the problem of a government that appears to be out of touch with its electorate.

It is a government that puts a low priority on sustaining the health of Victoria’s private-sector economy, and a high priority on being state of the art on social policy. One might say the latter appears to be Andrews’ obsession, when most Victorians expect their leader to have a broader focus.

The polls suggest he has lost them; the Labor Party is far more popular than its leader. He is a bright guy, and could still grow into the job, but two and a half years in, an economic downturn could see this end up as a one-term government.

The post Budgeting for one term in government? appeared first on Inside Story.

While Victoria has been a “natural” Labor state for several decades – as reflected in state and national elections – Daniel Andrews’s government has struggled on a number of fronts. It no doubt expects credit for its high-profile investment in infrastructure, but even here the nitty-gritty of choosing and implementing projects invariably produces winners and losers, with the media providing the latter with an abundance of venting opportunities. In the case of one of the biggest-ticket items – the removal of a number of congested road–rail level crossings, with initial focus on the electorally sensitive Frankston corridor – the government will be hoping that memories of temporary inconvenience will have faded by election day, and be replaced by gratitude for a smoother journey. Small businesses devastated by loss of easy customer access to their premises, however temporary, may be less grateful, although Labor cynics might observe that annoyance among this core conservative constituency is unlikely to upset previous voting patterns.

The massive Metro Tunnel project has generated similar problems in the CBD, complicated by the fact that two or three state elections will have come and gone by its completion date of 2026. Given the disruption involved, this will certainly test the proposition that voters will tolerate short-term pain for long-term gain. The difficulty for the government is that nine years of pain exceeds the normal understanding of “short-term.”

Of more concern for state Labor, though, are the government’s self-inflicted wounds. The most significant involved a conflict over a new enterprise agreement for fire-fighters, which ultimately pitted the government against the Country Fire Authority and saw the board of the latter sacked by the former. Along the way came the resignation of the responsible minister, Jane Garrett, who had essentially sided with the CFA. As the government’s decision had the effect of aligning it with the activist–militant United Firefighters Union, the opposition and the Murdoch press had a field day bloviating on their perennial theme of “weak Labor government run by dangerous left-wing unions.”

While conservatives routinely overestimate the extent of broad community hostility to unions, this issue certainly did the Andrews government no good. In a rare dose of good fortune for the government, though, Victoria avoided any large-scale fire disasters during summer 2016–17, sparing voters any stark reminders of this problematic issue. Another summer lies between now and the next election, however.

The CFA issue at least had a policy dimension. The same can’t be said of a raft of parliamentary scandals that have undermined any credibility the Andrews government may have been seeking in the area of MPs’ behaviour and misuse of entitlements. The first to go, in July 2015, was small business minister Adem Somyurek, outed on a charge of bullying a staff member. He initially stood aside, only to have that status made permanent when an inquiry concluded that he had behaved unacceptably.

Less serious at one level (and even comical) was the fate of corrections minister Steve Herbert, who was revealed to have arranged for his ministerial chauffeur to drive his two dogs between his Melbourne home and his country residence. This was a story that could only have two results – the resignation of the minister (in November 2016) and the gratitude of Melbourne cartoonists and comedians.

At this point, the Andrews government was poised at that Oscar Wilde moment when further losses would move the situation from “misfortune” to “carelessness.” Alas, the transition came soon enough, with first the speaker, Telmo Languiller, and then his deputy, Don Nardella, accused of misuse of MPs’ residential allowances. Both resigned from their posts last month, with the former contrite but the latter not at all so, and opting to sit as an independent. Investigations continue, with the prospect of serious consequences for one or both – and, of course, substantial damage to the government overall.

To round off the theme, the government has been unsuccessfully resisting (all the way to the High Court) a state ombudsman’s investigation of allegations that Victorian Labor MPs misused electorate office resources by involving staff in campaign work prior to the 2014 election.

Two aspects of this mess warrant comment. The first is that while misuse of parliamentary allowances is now so endemic and routine as to attract (deservedly) an attitude of “a pox on both your houses” from the voters, the Victorian opposition has so far this term avoided any revelations that might leave it specifically embarrassed. Moreover, if the system is viewed as corrupt, voting against the government (not against the opposition) is usually regarded as the necessary purgative.

The second point is more contentious, and unlikely to be suggested by journalists keen to retain their range of parliamentary and party contacts. This writer has no such need and hence suffers no such inhibition. While useful commentary has focused on the need for powerful anti-corruption agencies federally and in those states where current arrangements seem inadequate, a prior question surely arises in relation to the calibre of parliamentary representation. Put crudely, the fewer crooks elected in the first place, the less work for anti-corruption agencies.

While this may sound harsh, the alternative view – of good people suddenly led astray by the temptations of office – is surely starting to wear more than a little thin. In an age of professional politicians, is it not possible that an entire working life in politics, doing whatever it takes, simply blinds some future MPs to the moral imperatives that people in conventional jobs need to observe on a daily basis, knowing that (unlike MPs) their offences will result in dismissal? Is an MP whose main pre-parliamentary skill was branch-stacking likely to demonstrate an instinctive aversion to corruption and use parliamentary and ministerial allowances ethically? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the preselection process places inadequate weight on personal integrity: location in the factional queue or ideological intensity seems of much greater significance.

While this is difficult terrain for the Andrews government, it is possible that its biggest problem will lie in the traditional election theme of law and order. In a field where perception trumps statistics, the belief that crime rates are increasing, fanned by the opposition and Murdoch’s Herald Sun, will need to be factored in. There has been a particular concern about residential burglaries, now dramatically relabelled “home invasions,” and Liberal leader Matthew Guy is already promising to “make Victoria safe again.” Labor is conventionally vulnerable to conservative attack in this area, so Andrews’s main hope may lie in convincing the electorate that a massive increase in incarceration could send the state broke.

Single-term state governments are no longer a novelty. Victoria may well experience two in succession unless Labor can run a disciplined and focused operation for the next eighteen months. With forty-seven seats (counting the self-exiled Nardella’s as Labor) in a house of eighty-eight, the government has little margin for error. A loss of three seats would see the loss of majority government. Almost appropriately, the third seat to fall in a uniform swing would be Bentleigh, home of three level-crossing removals. •

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But some things are eerily familiar to the east-coast-dweller’s eye, and none more so than the politics of the Roe 8 freight link. The parallels between that imbroglio and Victoria’s infamous East West Link saga, for instance, are too many to count. An enormously controversial inner-city toll road provoking rolling protests, “direct action” and court challenges; contracts signed with an election only months away, despite declarations by the opposition that they won’t go ahead with the project; sweaty state Labor leaders telling the press pack they will rip up said contracts if they win office (which, when they made those pledges, looked entirely likely); tussles with the feds over redirecting Commonwealth dollars promised to the projects… the more one looks, the uncannier things get. Sydney’s WestConnex is not far below on the déjà vu spectrum, but Roe 8 and East West are so incredibly alike it’s worth asking what exactly is going on here.

Well, what indeed? Why are these inner-city road projects crashing into elections again and again, and becoming the subject of messy politicking and brinkmanship? One common denominator is the Abbott government. Eager to go down in history as “the infrastructure prime minister,” Abbott pumped billions into a score of inner-city road projects within months of winning government. At the same time, he made a point of shunning public transport projects, even those deemed a higher priority by Infrastructure Australia, the independent umpire.

This change in Commonwealth priorities saw a bunch of projects leap the funding queue, despite many having not been fully planned or costed. With the states desperately reliant on Canberra to get any project rolling, all they could do was try to make up the time and get sods turned by the next election. According to this account, what we saw in Victoria and are seeing now in Western Australia is really an aftershock of Abbott’s brief but consequential time in the Lodge.

It’s a temptingly simple explanation, but it assumes some pretty debatable points, including the idea that power has become so centralised in Canberra, and especially the prime minister’s office, that whoever sits in the PM’s chair essentially dictates what happens at every level of government. Put a roads man in the chair and we get a massive realignment of policy and resources to favour roads; switch to an avid rail fan and we get a recalibration with some money shifting back to public transport. The PM says jump and the entire Australian political system asks how high.

In reality, these controversial schemes are the product of the enormous mess of bureaucracy and lobby groups, political imperatives and economic limitations that get between any leader and the rolling-out of a policy. It takes a lot of momentum and collaboration to turn a leader’s idea into reality, and often a lot changes in the process. Indeed, navigating a policy or a project through this maze of interests and institutions, players and processes can be so torturous and require such political dexterity that they often simply never make it through to the other side.

This seems to be the fate of more and more policy initiatives these days, whether it’s greyhounds in New South Wales, abortion law reform in Queensland, or pokies, negative gearing or carbon pricing in Canberra. Mobilising opposition to a project has never been easier, thanks to social media, and the fragmentation of the two-party system in recent decades has multiplied the number of fronts on which a project can be attacked. It has probably never been harder to pitch a project and get it through to the ribbon-cutting.

If that is indeed the underlying problem with all these infrastructure fiascos, then we’ve been thinking all wrong about infrastructure reform for the past ten years. Since Kevin Rudd took over the leadership of the Labor Party in the lead-up to the 2007 election, the big push has been to depoliticise infrastructure, to get it away from politicians and into the hands of independent experts. Not only has that push failed utterly – politicians have bypassed the new processes and authorities set up to make infrastructure non-political – but the thinking behind it is profoundly mistaken about the nature of infrastructure.

Infrastructure is inherently political. It involves the allocation of public resources (even when private capital features heavily) and appropriates space in the name of the common good. And once projects are announced, they necessarily have to run a political gauntlet to make it to completion. A thumbs-up from the brains trust at Infrastructure Australia, or one of the state-level authorities, will never change the fact that projects require political momentum to get up. Good politics – careful building of support, cobbling together coalitions, bringing together stakeholders and so on – is the foundation for good infrastructure. Until we accept that, expect to see more East West Links and Roe 8s on the horizon. •

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Have we learned anything from this? Listening to the state treasurer, Tim Pallas, and his opposite number, Michael O’Brien, trading blows last week, it was hard to believe we have. Both deny responsibility and point the finger at the other, cherrypicking findings and vying to appear the most outraged. More surprising, however, is the battle over the role of the public service in this billion-dollar fiasco. Behind all the bluster is a serious debate, not just about the quality of officials’ advice about the project but also about their role in our system of government.

Touted as the missing link in Melbourne’s freeway network, East West Link would tunnel under the city’s latte-sipping inner north to connect the Eastern Freeway with CityLink, then continue to the Western Ring Road. The Baillieu government adopted the link as its signature project in 2011 and just two months before the 2014 state election Baillieu’s successor, Denis Napthine, signed contracts with the East West Connect consortium to build the link – despite a pending court challenge and Labor’s commitment to can the project. On winning the election, Daniel Andrews’s Labor government did just that, paying out $643 million (and counting) in compensation. Add to that all the money spent by the Coalition on the project – give or take how many acquired properties can be resold – and that’s a fiasco well worth an independent audit.

While the auditor-general finds the Coalition and Labor governments guilty of ignoring advice, rushing processes and taking huge risks with state funds – findings echoed this week in a review of the Abbott government’s funding of the project – the real focus is on the state bureaucracy and its role in all this. “Over the life of this costly and complex project, advice to government did not always meet the expected standard of being frank and fearless,” he writes.

At every stage, the bureaucracy gave “too much emphasis to the benefits of approaches that were in line with the government’s preferred outcome and little emphasis to alternative options that could be argued were more aligned with the state’s best interests.” Some officials admitted they thought giving advice that went against what the government wanted to hear could jeopardise their careers and influence. More than that, it would be plainly naive.

The auditor-general fears this attitude poses a serious threat to the integrity of the service:

It is not sufficient for public servants to avoid providing advice or recommendations simply because they believe the government of the day does not want to hear them. Doing so is at odds with the Public Administration Act 2004 and the Code of Conduct for Victorian Public Sector Employees, which require the public service to act impartially and achieve the best use of resources.

The state bureaucracy vigorously denies this interpretation of the debacle and has rejected the audit entirely. In fact, Chris Eccles, secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, argues the audit mistakes the role of the bureaucracy:

Since the earliest articulation of a professional, apolitical public service in the 1850s, the role of the public service has been to serve, and act as an instrument of, the government of the day… For a public servant to hinder progress to implement a lawful decision, constantly recontest that decision, or refrain from actions that follow from a lawful decision of a minister, would be to fundamentally undermine the Victorian Public Service as a trusted and apolitical institution, undermine the integrity of our democracy, and erode longstanding conventions that are at the heart of the Westminster system of government.

In other words, the public service has to do what it is told. We can’t have Sir Humphreys white-anting ministers and their policies. If the government’s preferences are understood and explicit, bureaucrats have an obligation to go with them. They can’t repeatedly “recommend courses of action that are contrary to the government’s settled policy” – that would subvert democracy.

The auditor-general is unimpressed by this line of argument. He argues that the public service can’t cater its advice to suit the preferences and biases of the government of the day. When advising on a decision, it has to make recommendations based on what the evidence shows is in the best interests of the state. “At critical points in this project,” the auditor-general writes, “this did not occur.” That is to say there weren’t enough public servants saying things like, “Minister, with respect, I would advise against that” during the whole fiasco. Instead they were taking hints and working to them, at least according to this report.

So is the public service’s role first and foremost to turn the government’s every wish into reality? Or do we want a more independent, feisty service, one that says, “No, Minister”? Would that jeopardise democracy, or is that a necessary check on the whims and petty interests of governments?

These are big questions. How they’re handled is not a merely abstract issue. In the case of East West Link,  the public service’s advice could have been a key reason Victorians lost a billion dollars down the drain. Indeed, it could cost us a whole lot more yet. We may have a new infrastructure authority vetting projects, but the board includes the same officials who worked on East West Link. The same people, the same departments, the same overall system are handling the $11 billion Melbourne Metro and the $5.5 billion Western Distributor. What reason is there to expect these won’t fall victim to the same pitfalls as plagued East West Link? None of the auditor-general’s recommendations have been accepted by anyone; if the report is right, that means none of the lessons have been learned.

As the blame game whirs on, the question remains: how did Victoria get itself into this mess? Was this a one-off fumble? Or are there deeper cultural and structural problems in our government, problems that threaten to derail future projects? What really went wrong with East West Link? That’s still the billion-dollar question. •

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Rather, Labor has set out to make itself the family’s friend. Here is Pallas, rewriting Tolstoy at the start of his budget speech:

Every family is different, but every family wants the same thing. They want their kids to have the best start in life. They want jobs that will exist next year, in industries that will exist next decade. They want a home they can be proud of. A street they can feel safe in. And a government they can rely on.

And if someone they love gets sick, they want the care and precision and peace of mind that only a modern hospital can provide. These are the things that matter. None of it is too much for families to ask… The budget I hand down today has fairness at its heart and families in its reach. It gets us back to basics: jobs, schools, hospitals and transport. The things families need to live a good and healthy life.

And so it goes on. This is going to be a Labor government focused on caution, not on the vision thing or long-term problems. This budget defines it as populist, in a responsible sort of way. Like the first budget of the Bracks government in 2000, it is really about relaxing the austerity imposed on government spending by its Coalition predecessor.

Spending on hospitals in the coming financial year, 2015–16, is forecast to grow by 6.7 per cent from the equivalent figure in last year’s budget. Spending on primary schools is forecast to grow by 6 per cent, on secondary schools by 5.3 per cent, and on public transport services by 6 per cent.

Labor is also the unions’ friend. The state’s wage bill is forecast to grow by 7.7 per cent next financial year, with most of that coming from increased staffing levels, not increased wage growth. With revenue estimated to grow by only 3.4 per cent, it’s a shift that could derail the budget if it continued, but Pallas assures us that it will be a one-off event. Wage growth is forecast to average 4 per cent in future years, and total spending growth just 3.1 per cent. The ratings agencies will be wary, but will probably wave it through.

Pallas has been helped by some rosy forecasts by his Department of Treasury and Finance. It predicts that Victoria’s growth rate will accelerate to average 2.75 per cent over coming years, which would, if correct, be a big improvement on its track record since the global financial crisis. (Official figures show the state’s output per head has grown just 0.5 per cent in six years.)

Treasury forecasts that the state will add 250,000 new jobs over the five years to 2019, and state revenues will soar by 28 per cent. That will be quite a feat, given that those years will see the demise of Victoria’s traditional linchpin industry, car manufacturing, which has a mesh of linkages to other industries in the state. Other forecasters are less optimistic.

Pallas would not admit it, but he has also been helped by his Coalition predecessors, who bequeathed him a string of forecast budget surpluses, estimated to average a hefty $2.35 billion a year over the next three years. In short, he has helped himself to $1 billion a year of that, leaving him with average forecast surpluses of $1.3 billion a year ahead.

(State governments define surpluses differently from the federal government’s eccentric definition. In Victoria’s case, a surplus of $1.3 billion means the state’s revenue that year is $1.3 billion greater than the amount it spends on delivering health, education and other services. That surplus helps pay for its capital spending, which is not included in the bottom line, and most of which is financed by borrowing.)

Premier Daniel Andrews had promised not to raise taxes, and so far, more or less, he hasn’t. The only tax rises are aimed at foreign property owners. From 1 July, foreigners buying homes in Victoria will have to pay a 3 per cent surcharge on the property’s value, which is forecast to raise $280 million over the next four years; and landowners who are not usually resident in Australia will face a surcharge of 0.5 per cent on their land tax. Pallas confirmed that the surcharge would apply to foreign-owned companies, implying that it will hit BHP and Rio Tinto, among others.

Where is the increased spending going? This is a cautious government, so by and large it will be spent exactly where they promised to spend it in the election campaign. On the jobs front, for instance, there is $500 million over four years for the Premier’s Jobs and Investment Fund, intended to finance startups and promising industries. There is another $500 million for the Regional Jobs and Infrastructure Fund, $200 million for the Future Industries Fund, and $80 million to attract more major events.

Pallas repeated Labor’s ludicrous line that these initiatives will create 100,000 new jobs. The funds would have to be very well-run to do that. The risk is rather that they will be targeted where the government thinks they will be most electorally rewarding, like so many other slush funds we have seen.

In health, there is $391 million to expand neglected outer suburban hospitals, mostly in Labor’s western suburbs heartland, $200 million to “rescue” unused hospital beds, an extra $1 billion for hospitals generally, $889 million for the community sector to meet the wage increases flowing from Fair Work Australia’s equal remuneration order, and improved funding for disability services, mental health and child protection services. Yet in the same breath, Labor will shell out $95 million to expand crowd facilities at the Geelong and St Kilda ovals. Fortunately, this budget does not as yet burden taxpayers with Labor’s plan to spend another $30 million so that the Western Bulldogs can play occasional games in Ballarat.

In education, $1.4 billion of new funding has been allocated to meet the state’s share of the Gonski report’s funding for disadvantaged schools, although Pallas warned again that the state could not pick up the federal government’s share if it pulls out from 2018, as the Abbott government has flagged. There is an extra $1.375 billion of general funding for government and private schools to meet forecast growth in demand, $200 million to “rescue” Victoria’s TAFE colleges after the Coalition’s severe funding cuts left half of them operating in the red, and $148 million to pay for kids from poor families to participate in school camps, sport and excursions.

Policies like these are essentially plugging gaps opened up by the Coalition’s funding cuts, much as Bracks and John Brumby did when they took office after the Kennett years. Pallas points out that the average growth in overall spending over the forward estimates has risen only from 2.5 per cent under the Coalition to 3 per cent (actually, 3.1 per cent) under Labor. One can question some of Labor’s priorities, and the optimistic revenue assumptions underlying them, but so far, the budget can be broadly given a tick.

But where this budget really drops the ball is on infrastructure. I have written on this elsewhere, but the reality of the budget in this area turned out to be even worse than I had foreshadowed.

It was one thing for Labor to scrap the Coalition’s wastefully extravagant East West road tunnel – whose own proponents found would return, on a conventional cost–benefit analysis, only 45 cents of benefit for every $1 spent. But as Pallas conceded, it has actually cut infrastructure spending.

A year ago, the Coalition was budgeting to spend $3.93 billion on transport infrastructure in the year ahead. Much of that was never spent, but this year, as far as one can tell from the budget papers, Labor at best has budgeted to spend about $3 billion, and probably even less.

This is not because of a lack of projects. The budget papers show Labor has around $30 billion of transport projects in the pipeline, and around $20 billion even if you take out the biggest one, the Melbourne Metro rail line, on which construction is not due to start until 2018. The projects are there if the money is there. But the money isn’t there, because Labor does not see tackling congestion as a priority, and plans to do it slowly.

Take one example. Between Kew and Fairfield, traffic slows to a crawl for hours every day, as two or three lanes of traffic have to squeeze into one to cross a nineteenth-century bridge over the Yarra. A recent survey by the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria found motorists rate it as the worst congestion spot in Melbourne. In its election campaign, Labor promised to duplicate the bridge.

And so it will. Next year, it will allocate $2 million to draw up plans. Sometime in 2016–17, it will actually start building it. By late 2018, around the time of the next state election, it hopes to have finished it. This is not a particularly complicated or big project; it is estimated to cost $110 million. It is just not a priority.

Labor’s big transport promise going into the election was its pledge to eliminate fifty of Melbourne’s worst level crossings over eight years, at an estimated cost of $5 billion to $6 billion. But the only crossings the budget specifically commits funds to remove are the four projects Labor inherited from the Napthine government, and the official website tells us that only two of these – Burke Road, Glen Iris, and Main Road, St Albans – will see construction take place in the coming financial year. The budget allocates just $299 million for them.

The Andrews government has now promoted another thirteen level crossings to the planning stage, but it would have to double or treble the pace of spending to have them completed by the next election. And even adding them to the four inherited from the Coalition, that adds up to just a third of the level crossings Labor has pledged to replace.

There’s a myth that a government needs to be building mega-projects to provide work for local contractors. No, it doesn’t; it just needs to be spending more money where work needs to be done. This budget cuts funds for resurfacing Melbourne’s roads by $480 million in the year ahead, even though it concedes this will mean 7.5 per cent of metropolitan road surfaces remain “distressed.” Funding for resurfacing country roads has been frozen at current levels, although 8.3 per cent of country road surfaces are likewise distressed.

It is striking that the performance indicators set for the transport authorities in the budget papers do not include measures of congestion. If they did, this budget might have found more useful ways to tackle them: not with mega-projects, but by duplicating congested single-lane main roads, especially in the outer western suburbs where so much of Melbourne’s population growth is taking place, and so little of its road infrastructure spending is being directed. •

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You can see the problem. What happens if Infrastructure Victoria concludes that one of the government’s priority projects is a dud? Or that far better projects were being left unbuilt while the government spent taxpayers’ money on ones of questionable value? Which policy would take priority?

And how could the government pay for its long shopping list of projects from a severely constrained capital works budget: currently, less than $4 billion a year for all Victoria’s transport needs? If it plans to reduce public debt rather than take advantage of today’s extraordinarily low interest rates to borrow and build, how many of the promised projects will become reality anytime soon?

In Tuesday’s state budget, Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas revealed that the answer is simple: the government might have changed, but otherwise it’s business as usual. Infrastructure Victoria will be set up only after the key infrastructure decisions have been made. And with the new rail line through the outer western suburbs (Regional Rail Link) completed, and the East–West road tunnel scrapped, funding for transport infrastructure has shrunk even more. Less than 1 per cent of the state’s output will be invested next year to build all this new transport infrastructure.

Yet, only five months into his first term, premier Daniel Andrews has already pledged to:

• build the new nine-kilometre Melbourne Metro line from South Kensington to South Yarra, burrowing under the middle of Swanston Street, at an estimated cost of $9 billion to $11 billion.

• scrap the previous government’s proposed East West Link tunnel, and compensate the contractors for up to $420 million of costs they’ve already incurred.

• consider a new West East tunnel and bridge proposed by toll road operator Transurban, to link the West Gate Freeway to the docks, rail freight terminal and City Link, at an estimated cost of $5.5 billion.

• join with Transurban and the federal government to widen the northern half of CityLink and the Tullamarine Freeway, at an estimated cost of $1.28 billion.

• scrap the previous government’s deal with a private consortium to upgrade the Cranbourne–Pakenham rail corridor, and instead do a bigger version of the same plan itself, at a yet-to-be-determined cost thought to be around $2 billion.

• invest $2 billion to build new trains and trams locally over the next decade.

• go ahead with just two of the four level crossing removals previously slated for 2015–16 – Burke Road, Glen Iris, and Main Road, St Albans (the latter mostly funded by the federal government) – with works at North Road, Ormond, and Blackburn Road, Blackburn, now scheduled for 2016–17.

So if the government is already committed to all that, what is left for Infrastructure Victoria to advise it on? The key decisions for this term appear to have already been made.

In fairness, most of these projects are things Andrews promised to do before the election. Some of them, such as widening CityLink, simply lock in uncontroversial decisions previously made by the Napthine government. But the announcement of the Metro came after Andrews was hammered by those parts of the Melbourne media who refuse to face the reality that the East West road link was a poor project that would have cost taxpayers billions of dollars over time. In reality, spending $420 million to close it down now was the cheap, fiscally sensible option.

Melbourne Metro is another matter, though. A business case prepared years ago under the Baillieu government has now been leaked by the Liberals to the Herald Sun, but as James Campbell points out, it envisaged a much cheaper project than Andrews has announced. And that 2011 study found the Metro would have a benefit–cost ratio of just 1.2–1 – the equal lowest of the eleven projects that made it to the advanced stages of Infrastructure Australia’s latest priority list.

The government could recoup some of that cost by capturing the increased value the line will add to land around the new stations. But much of that land is publicly owned, with little or no scope for redevelopment. So the great bulk of the project will have to be publicly financed – even if, with construction scheduled to start only in 2018 (just before the next state election), that is more a problem for the future.

The bottom line is that Melbourne Metro might not pass a standard cost–benefit analysis in its present form. Even the preliminary work will eat up about 10 per cent of the government’s budget for transport works over the next four years. And had Infrastructure Victoria been set up before the decisions were made, it might have found alternative projects offering much bigger bang for the buck.

Faced with the choice between vision and caution, Pallas has chosen caution. State debt is projected to fall in the out-years, implying that future borrowing will shrink rather than grow. That means, in turn, that transport infrastructure spending will shrink in real terms and as a share of the state’s output.

If Melbourne were not growing so fast, this fiscal conservatism wouldn’t matter so much. But Victoria’s capital is growing very fast indeed. Every week it adds almost 2000 new people. In the fifteen years since the start of the new millennium, the city’s population has grown by a third, adding more than a million people. It’s now 4.5 million, and on current growth rates it will reach five million by 2020, six million by 2030, and eight million by 2050 or so. Like Sydney, it is cramming more people in at a rapid rate while building new infrastructure to cater for them at a slow rate. And the result is rapid increases in road congestion, public transport crowding, and frustration among the city’s residents.

Outside government, there is a growing consensus among economists that, with an underperforming economy facing serious challenges and many feasible, productivity-enhancing transport investments on the drawing board, governments ought to be borrowing to build. Victoria’s ten-year bonds are now selling at less than 2.5 per cent; the money is so cheap, the needs are so big. In time, of course, the money will have to be repaid, which means the investments must be chosen well and future revenues earmarked to meet the bill. With that qualification, borrowing to build in today’s economy offers governments a win–win opportunity.

But Labor fears being seen as spendthrift, and so it is too afraid to grasp its opportunity. It has opted to let congestion keep growing because it fears that the Coalition, the Murdoch press, and ultimately the voters would crucify it if it borrowed money to fix the problems. Like its predecessor, is trying to juggle the problems, to make it appear that it is solving them: promising projects it will be unable to deliver, bringing in private partners that will ultimately inflate the overall costs, doing what it can with just $3 billion a year.

That is why Labor was attracted to Transurban’s cleverly designed proposal to build a tunnel–bridge link between the West Gate Freeway and CityLink via the docks and the rail freight yards. On the numbers being discussed in the media, just $1.5 billion of the $5.5 billion cost would come from government. Most of the money to build it would come ultimately from tolls – partly on the new link ($3 for cars, $13 for trucks), partly on the now toll-free West Gate Bridge ($13 for trucks, with cars remaining free), but primarily from motorists using CityLink, for which the immensely profitable franchise granted by the Kennett government, and extended by the Napthine government, would be extended for an unspecified period.

Most of the cost, that is, would be paid by motorists using CityLink after 2035, when the franchise was due to end. Those costs are not likely to be high in the minds of voters at the 2018 state election. Andrews even cheekily suggested that the federal government might allow Victoria to transfer the $1.5 million the Abbott government paid for the East West Link to this project, only to be quickly slapped down by federal assistant infrastructure minister Jamie Briggs, who said the feds were unlikely to pay without a state contribution.

There are a number of risks with the Transurban proposal. Few cars are likely to transfer from West Gate to the Transurban Link when one is free and the other has a $3 toll. It would make far more sense to put a toll also on cars using West Gate, but that is politically impossible unless tolls are introduced for other urban freeways as well. That would make a lot of economic sense, and provide a revenue source that could be earmarked for future road construction; but it would also be a decision Sir Humphrey would call courageous.

Transurban has calculated the benefit–cost ratio of its link as 1.6–1, and had that signed off by experienced infrastructure bureaucrats Kerry Schott and Tony Canavan. The route chosen would serve a lot of goals, and there is a widespread view among transport professionals that a road linking the West – but preferably from the Western Ring Road – with the docks, the rail yards and CityLink should be Melbourne’s biggest priority in new tarmac.

But there is also a widespread view that the best projects in terms of bang for buck are not the big blockbusters like this, but smaller projects that improve the existing road system by tackling bottlenecks: removing fifty level crossings, for instance, which was Andrews’s biggest priority in the election campaign, or duplicating the single-lane main roads that now cause congestion in the western suburbs from dawn till dark. But smaller, more worthwhile projects tend to come off second best when competing for funds against the blockbusters, and so those commonsense projects seem to be receding. •

More about the Victorian budget

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We saw that dramatically illustrated in the Queensland election result. Apart from Morgan, the pollsters predicted the two-party-preferred vote would be LNP 52 per cent, Labor 48 per cent. The actual outcome, on Antony Green’s estimate, was very different: LNP 49, Labor 51.

As Peter Brent explained in Inside Story immediately after the election, this wasn’t because the pollsters got their polling wrong: Queenslanders voted exactly as they had told the final Galaxy Poll they would.

So what went wrong? The pollsters tripped themselves up by assuming that preferences would flow as they had at the last Queensland election in 2012. In fact, the preference flows this time were very different, as this summary shows:

2012 Queensland election
Preferences to Labor – 27%
Preferences to the LNP – 22%
Preferences exhausted – 51%

2015 Queensland election
Preferences to Labor – 48%
Preferences to the LNP – 16%
Preferences exhausted – 36%

Why? One reason is that Queensland, like New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, has made preferences optional. This means the polls in those states now include two unknowns: how many voters will cast preferences, and whom they will flow to.

In 2012, the plague-on-both-your-houses voters mostly sat on the fence. This time, hostility to the Newman government saw a huge shift of second preferences to Labor, enough to give it an extra 3 per cent of the vote.

A second factor, as Green explains, was unique to Queensland. In 2012, the biggest minor party was Katter’s Australia Party, which didn’t allocate preferences. This time, the Katter party stood in only eleven seats, and its share of the vote slid from 11.5 per cent to just 1.9 per cent. In 2015 the Greens were the biggest minor party, with 8.4 per cent, and their preferences flowed strongly to Labor.

If you tell a pollster you plan to vote for a minor party or independent, he or she will always ask you which way your preferences will go. But in recent times, most have just filed away that information, and instead used the actual preference distributions from the previous election. That’s because, at some elections, it had proved to be a better guide.

Not any more: this was the second election in ten weeks where the old rule had been overturned. In Victoria, the Fairfax Ipsos poll in the Age correctly predicted a Labor victory by 52–48 in two-party terms – but only because it went back to the old system of using the voters’ stated preferences rather than those from the previous poll.

The Age found the preference flows from the last election implied a 50–50 result: too close to call. Ipsos’s polling of first preferences was mostly accurate – apart from sharply overstating the Greens’ vote, and understating Labor’s – but the usual methodology would have given the wrong result, mainly because, as the table shows, between 2010 and 2014 preference flows shifted Labor’s way:

2010 Victorian election
Preferences to Labor – 64%
Preferences to Coalition – 36%

2014 Victorian election
Preferences to Labor – 70%
Preferences to Coalition – 30%

The shift in preferences gave Labor an extra 1.1 per cent of the vote – and majority government. Had preferences flowed as they did in 2010, the Liberals would have won Bentleigh, Carrum, Frankston and, probably, Prahran. The eighty-eight seats would have been split, with forty-four to Labor, forty-two Coalition, one Green and one independent. Labor would have had to form an unstable minority government.

The Greens contributed part of the surge in Labor’s vote, with 82 per cent of Green voters giving preferences to Labor. But even voters for parties of the religious right split their preferences in all directions, despite their how-to-vote cards directing them to the Coalition.

With New South Wales facing an election on 28 March, and the Abbott government to face the voters within eighteen months, what’s the moral to keep in mind when we read the polls?

First, if a new government drives voters offside, it will suffer on election day not only on first preferences, but also on second preferences – and they can be just as deadly. The Queensland and Victorian results show the polls can no longer assume that people will deliver preferences at the next election as they did last time. No formula is perfect, but trusting people when they say where they will direct their preferences is more reliable than trusting them to do what they did last time.

The latest Newspoll, released on Tuesday 24 February, repeats the mistake it made in Queensland. It reports voters’ first preferences as:

Coalition 38 per cent (down 7.6 per cent from the 2013 election)
Labor 38 per cent (up 4.6 per cent)
Greens 12 per cent (up 3.3 per cent)
Others 12 per cent (down 0.4 per cent)

It then groups the Greens and others together, and allocates 60 per cent of their vote to Labor and 40 per cent to the Coalition, roughly matching the 62/38 split of their preferences at the 2013 election, to come up with a two-party-preferred vote of 53 per cent Labor, 47 per cent Coalition. That’s a swing of 6.5 per cent – yet the swing from Coalition to Labor and the Greens is almost 8 per cent. 

Even if you treat the Greens and others separately, and assume no change in preferences, the poll numbers point to a 54/46 split. (In 2013, Labor won 83 per cent of Greens preferences, the Coalition won 53 per cent of the rest.) And the assumption that preferences would be unchanged is, as we have seen, unsound.

Any poll that continues to rely on preference splits from 2013 is likely to overstate the Coalition’s two-party vote, as Newspoll and Galaxy did in Queensland. The same will be true for New South Wales.

Second, while the NSW election looks unlikely to be as close as those in South Australia, Victoria and Queensland, remember the uncertainty about whether voters will give preferences to any party at all. In 2007 and 2011, most NSW voters for smaller parties just voted 1. Will they do so again? And if not, will they choose to punish Mike Baird for disappointing them – or reward him for delivering on their hopes for better government? •

The post Polls and preferences: the new challenge for election watchers appeared first on Inside Story.

The Victorian legislation divided the state into eight upper house regions, each with five members, producing a quota of 16.7 per cent. This was high enough, it was thought, to guard against the election of any of the assorted odds and sods who routinely contest upper house elections in Australia, a point premier Steve Bracks made in 2003 when he explained the decision to use a system of regions rather than a single electorate.

Unfortunately for Bracks, evidence that his optimism may have been misplaced came soon after the passage of the legislation. At the 2004 federal election, Family First candidate Steven Fielding was elected to the Senate with a party primary vote of just 1.9 per cent in a system with a quota of 14.3 per cent. He was assisted by Labor preferences, among other things, though it is a fair bet that Labor officials hadn’t envisaged that a group polling less than 2 per cent of the vote would be a beneficiary of that ideologically curious decision.

But the first election for the new Victorian upper house in 2006 went largely as expected, with seats mostly shared among Labor, the Liberal–National Party Coalition and the Greens − much as had been envisaged when Bracks proposed the reforms. The one exception occurred in the Western region, where the previously defunct Democratic Labor Party, or DLP, polled a primary vote of just 2.6 per cent but secured the election of its lead candidate Peter Kavanagh. Like Fielding, Kavanagh was assisted by Labor preferences. With the re-elected Labor government and the Greens holding a combined twenty-two votes in the forty-member chamber, though, the practical effect of Kavanagh’s success was minimal.

Because of Victoria’s four-year terms, two federal elections were held between the 2006 and 2010 state elections, and while the 2007 Senate election saw no repeat of the Fielding surprise, such was not the case three years later. This time, the DLP replicated its state success by winning a Victorian Senate seat, with John Madigan elected on a party primary vote of 2.3 per cent. The system, it was now clear, could be “gamed” to help secure the election of micro-parties.

That result fuelled speculation that the 2010 Victorian election might see the election of several upper house candidates on miniscule votes. While the battle for last spot was close in some regions, those hopes or fears were not realised. Three-party dominance prevailed, with seats shared by the Coalition (which won government and an unexpected upper house majority), Labor and the Greens.

And last November’s election? Before we look at that result, it’s instructive to reflect on the statewide votes that produced the outcomes at the earlier polls. Between them, the main players – Labor, the Coalition and the Greens – polled over 90 per cent of the upper house primary votes in each of the 2006 and 2010 elections, and while the figures varied from region to region, the overall picture was one of three-party dominance. Fewer than 10 per cent of voters opted for other candidates.

This pre-eminence was radically diminished last November. Although Labor defeated Denis Napthine’s Coalition government, a substantial cross-bench emerged in the upper house: Labor secured fourteen positions, the Coalition sixteen, the Greens five, and five went to others (two to Shooters and Fishers, one to the DLP, one to the Sex Party and one to Vote 1 Local Jobs). The proportion of voters opting for other than Labor, the Coalition or the Greens more than doubled, from 9.4 per cent in 2010 to 19.6 per cent. The vote for “others” ranged from a formidable 24.8 per cent in the Northern Victoria region to 16.1 per cent in Eastern Metropolitan.

Of those elected from micro-parties, the candidate with the lowest group vote secured 1.3 per cent (Vote 1 Local Jobs, in Western Victoria) and the highest was 3.5 per cent (Shooters and Fishers, in Northern Victoria). These primaries are obviously small, but they were far in excess of the 0.5 per cent achieved in the 2013 federal election by the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party, whose candidate (Ricky Muir) was elected in to the Senate for Victoria.

The success of these micro-parties doesn’t just reflect the gaming of the voting system; it is also a manifestation of an obvious state of disrepair in the relationship between the main parties and the voting public. And it certainly isn’t limited to Ricky Muir’s home state: while nearly one in five Victorian voters opted for a micro-party or independent alternative in the 2014 upper house election, the figure was one in four in the Senate re-run election in Western Australia last year and over 40 per cent in the 2013 SA Senate election. If the main parties were not as unpopular as these figures show, there would be less “spare” quota to help elect non-mainstream candidates.

Despite these obvious causes, many commentators and practitioners see the election of candidates with very small primary votes as a threat to the quality of representative democracy. The fact that above-the-line voters (that is, the vast majority) rarely know how their preferences will be distributed is seen as further undermining the democratic legitimacy of the result, especially where the flow can be ideologically incoherent or contradictory. Such a charge is not restricted to the micro-parties, as Labor and the Greens often seem more intent on fighting their tedious turf wars than on respecting their voters’ values.

The voting system for Victoria’s upper house offers an alternative for voters who want to control their preferences. Under a system of optional preferential voting, an informed elector is not obliged to record more than five preferences. At least partly as a result, below-the-line voting doubled (from a small base of 4 per cent) in the state’s 2014 election. The “optional option” enjoyed more pre-election publicity than in the past and was also outlined at voting booths by polling clerks.

For the vast bulk of electors, though, above-the-line voting remains irresistibly convenient. And this means that their preferences will sometimes be ideologically inconsistent, reflecting the opportunism of party negotiators (or “preference consultants”). While this may frustrate supporters of the main parties, the situation is possibly more complex for those unwilling to support Labor, the Coalition or the Greens.

Not all voters are necessarily ideologically driven (especially in a system of compulsory voting) and it shouldn’t be assumed that what looks like an inconsistent distribution of preferences necessarily devalues a vote. Polling shows that most voters prefer a second chamber under neither government nor opposition control; where some of these voters opt for the micro or independent option, a decision to vote in a way that effectively maximises a crossbench of non-mainstream parties can possibly be viewed as rational voting behaviour.

Exactly this point was made by a Greens spokesperson during the Victorian campaign. Asked to defend some ideologically curious preference deal, his response made clear that the party’s priority was to prevent either major party from controlling the upper house, rather than primarily to determine who might hold the balance of power. (There are obvious exceptions to this proposition, where strong passions may be involved. A voter for the Animal Justice Party, for instance, is unlikely to see any merit in passively supporting the Shooters and Fishers via preferences.)

It could also be argued that the nearly 20 per cent who supported “others” in the 2014 Victorian upper house election were entitled to some “other” representation. Indeed, having attracted nearly 20 per cent of the vote but securing only 12.5 per cent of the seats, the micros and independents might contend that they have been short-changed. So, while the election of candidates with miniscule primary votes is a legitimate concern, the opposite problem – bigger parties with a combined 80 per cent of the votes securing 100 per cent of the seats – doesn’t sound too democratic either.

All this means that Victorian Labor’s confidence in its proportional representation model was misplaced. Its expectation that neither major party would be able to control the upper house was disproved when the Coalition secured such a majority at the second election after the reform was introduced. More importantly, its assumption that eight regions, rather than a statewide constituency, would produce a quota beyond the reach of micro-parties and independents failed to anticipate both the collapse in support for the main parties (especially in upper house contests) and the capacity of interested parties to “game” the system for their own advantage.

Ironically, if Victorian Labor, like its NSW and SA counterparts, had opted to create a single statewide electorate for upper house elections, the party would probably have been no worse off. For a forty-member Victorian upper house, the quota for election would have been 2.4 per cent, quite close to the primary vote that several successful candidates have secured under the regional system.

Interestingly, Victoria’s current Labor leader, Daniel Andrews, appears to have passed up an opportunity to remedy the “problem.” In a phone call with Andrews six months before the election, Coalition premier Denis Napthine proposed that a candidate would need to reach a threshold primary vote of 5 per cent, and that voters be able to express preferences above the line. According to Napthine (and not denied by Andrews, who is now premier), Labor was not interested in such reform. Had the Napthine model been applied to the 2014 upper house vote, Labor, the Coalition and the Greens would have secured thirty-nine of the forty seats, with one possibly going to the Liberal Democrats.

Clearly, it is much more difficult for governing parties to change the rules once the micro-party representatives are sitting in parliament. Like Tony Abbott federally, Andrews cannot afford to antagonise or alienate those who now hold the upper house balance of power. Why he declined Napthine’s offer is not clear, but he may simply not share the alarmism that informs much commentary on the issue. Possibly, he believes that he can assemble an upper house majority, bill-by-bill, issue-by-issue, by stitching together sufficient cross-bench support. (The need for the government to retain good relations with the Shooters and Fishers Party made it a very bad election for ducks.) As the new parliament has yet to vote on any legislation, this idea remains untested, but the inherent uncertainty makes for a very interesting time ahead in the Victorian Legislative Council. •

The post Democracy at work appeared first on Inside Story.

But while there are countless books about Whitlam, until Tim Colebatch took up the challenge there has been no biography of Hamer. State premiers just don’t carry the same symbolic weight as prime ministers, but they have a huge impact on the day-to-day lives of their citizens. Transport, education, police and criminal justice, hospitals, planning and environmental laws are all still largely matters for the states, and premiers can have lasting impacts on the confidence and style of their state capital. Melbourne owes much of its reputation as a liveable European-style city to Hamer’s commitment to preserving its built heritage, expanding its parks and gardens, and developing its artistic life.

Tim Colebatch was a young journalist at the Age when Hamer’s premiership began, and he has drawn on his own reporting, including interviews he conducted at the time with Hamer and other key players. As a close observer of Australian political life over more than forty years, Colebatch brings a shrewdness of judgement to the biographical task, as well as a deep knowledge of Victoria’s political history. We can only understand Hamer’s historical significance, he makes clear, if we understand the rural-dominated politics that preceded him in Victoria, when country votes were worth twice as much as city votes and the Country Party regularly provided the premier. The Liberal Party, too, was dominated by rural members, led by Henry Bolte, the farmer who was premier for seventeen years.

Colebatch is very good on Bolte. With his round pug-like face and aggressively plain speaking, he is easy to caricature as a conservative buffoon or a loud-mouthed bully. But he was a very effective and pragmatic politician committed to developing Victoria after the torpor of Country Party domination. He is largely remembered today, though, for his determination to hang Ronald Ryan — who became the last man in Australia to be executed by the state — in the face of huge protests. Hamer was one of three members of the cabinet to vote against it, though at the time his dissent was subdued, subordinated to his loyalty to the leader.

Hamer’s habits of loyalty were learned during his six years in the Australian army, and Colebatch argues convincingly that these years of war service were crucial to his later political success. He was born in the inner-eastern suburb of Kew, in the heartland of Melbourne’s professional middle class, was educated at Melbourne and Geelong Grammar Schools, and studied law and arts at the University of Melbourne in preparation for joining his father’s law firm. At university he mixed with other young men from Melbourne and Geelong Grammars and went to parties and dances with their sisters and cousins. It was a small, interconnected social world, its comfort and pleasures little affected by the depression that had blighted the lives of so many other Australians.

The war changed all this, taking Hamer into a broader social world where he mixed for the first time with men from working class suburbs, farms and country towns. Although he supported appeasement of Germany, as a member of the army reserves he knew that if war came he would go. In December 1940 he sailed to the Middle East with the 2/43rd Battalion as a lieutenant with thirty men to command, leaving behind the young woman, April Mackintosh, he was soon to marry. Hamer’s analytical and organisational skills largely kept him away from the front line, and were rewarded by his promotion to the level of major.

Dick and April married during the war, and he came back after almost six years of service to a child he had never seen. Like so many other young couples they relished the tasks of peace after the sacrifices of war, building a home and raising a family. Dick returned to his father’s law firm, but he was also inspired by the revival of liberalism in the newly formed Liberal Party and the challenge of keeping socialism at bay and protecting, as he saw it, the freedoms he and other men had fought for. He joined the Liberal Party and in 1956 won the Legislative Council seat of East Yarra. A seat in the Council was a part-time job in a part-time chamber, which he could combine easily with his law practice. He became a cabinet minister in 1962, and in 1963 he was appointed local government minister, which, he decided, included responsibility for planning Melbourne. He created the green wedges separating urban growth along transport corridors from farms and parkland between, and developed a network of regional parks for the recreational enjoyment of people living in the fast-expanding suburbs. Refusing an invitation from Menzies to transfer to a federal seat, he transferred to the lower house seat of Kew so that when Bolte retired he would be able to succeed him, which he did in August 1972.

Colebatch lists the initiatives that immediately followed the change at the top. Hamer began negotiations with the other premiers for trials of daylight saving, began to dismantle Victoria’s censorship regime, and lifted a ban on women serving in the senior levels of the public service — not quite as dramatic as releasing draft dodgers from prison, or initiating the recognition of communist China, but enough to mark a regime change.

Hamer’s first years as premier were his most effective. The Victorian Conservation Trust quietly bought up land for parks and conservation, and the Historic Buildings Act preserved much of Melbourne’s Victorian-era heritage. Hamer became arts minister, Victoria’s first, and oversaw a golden decade in arts funding. Many of his priorities were shared by the Whitlam government, and between 1972 and 1975 the state benefited from federal money to improve schools, buy land and public buildings, and reduce the number of unsewered homes. Hamer made it happen, and his popularity increased. He also abolished capital punishment through a private member’s bill he introduced himself. Tellingly, half the Liberal MPs voted against it, with country MPs  opposing the bill three-to-one.

It was an ominous sign. The new politics of Whitlam and Hamer was not sweeping the entire nation before it, and powerful pockets of resistance were building. And when Kerr dismissed Whitlam, Hamer’s centrist style of politics received a severe setback. Malcolm Fraser’s confrontational tactics in precipitating the crisis went against all of Hamer’s cautious, ameliorative instincts and he privately advised Fraser against blocking supply. As a loyal team player, however, he campaigned for Fraser at the subsequent election. During the campaign, backs were turned on him at a Musica Viva concert, and his son-in-law reported him as saying, “That man” — Fraser — “has no idea what damage he’s done.” One of the things that was damaged was the possibility of bipartisan cooperation for reform. And Fraser eventually ended up as one of its casualties, too, as the Liberal Party moved rightwards and power shifted from Melbourne’s courteous traditions of Deakinite liberalism to Sydney’s rougher and more populist politics.

Hamer’s premiership became more troubled after about mid 1976. The reforming impetus continued, with the Equal Opportunity Act and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, but conservatives in the party were increasingly unhappy, particularly with new planning laws and heritage protections that frustrated development. This is a perennial conflict in state politics, and one all state governments find hard to manage. Party unity started to crumble, the cabinet to leak and the impression to grow that Hamer was losing control. Compounding his difficulties was the deteriorating economy, and internal party critics were criticising his lack of focus on economic development. In this they were not entirely fair. Under the spell of the young tourist entrepreneur Sue Calwell, Hamer embraced the vision of Melbourne as a destination for international conventions. But for this Melbourne needed a world-class convention centre, and to make it economically viable, a casino as well. Hamer was early in seeing tourism as an economic driver for the city, but he was not able to get the casino through the party room.

He won a third term in 1979, but with Labor looking more and more like an alternative government and younger Liberal members, led by Jeff Kennett, pushing for more say, his grip on the government was slipping. Early in 1981, after a leaked letter from Kennett highlighted disunity in the government, the Warrnambool Standard published comments by Ian Smith, the economic development minister, describing Hamer as “a far left-wing leader” whose commitment to democracy prevented things getting done. Faced with such outrageous public disloyalty, Hamer resigned in the interests of unity.

Colebatch asks a question he thinks will puzzle many of today’s readers. Why was a man as liberal and tolerant as Dick Hamer, with such a strong commitment to the environment and the arts, a member of the Liberal Party? The question itself is evidence of how the Liberal Party has changed since the 1950s and 1960s, when it was the natural home of “the moral middle class,” those educated men and women who believed in active citizenship, supported the arts, wanted the environment conserved and thought that the state should support everyone’s opportunity to develop his or her full potential. Colebatch has done us a great service in writing such a readable and well-researched biography of the premier who, in his commitment to public service, his vision for Victoria and his unfailing courtesy, represented the best of the tradition that had shaped him. •

The post How Hamer made it happen appeared first on Inside Story.

The prolific psephologist Peter Brent recently asked why, in electoral terms, Victoria is different from the other states. He cited Labor’s dominance of the state’s two-party-preferred vote in every federal election since 1990 – even in the comprehensive defeat of 2013 – and was puzzled that premier Denis Napthine had failed to regain ground in the opinion polls. Flippantly, he identified former Liberal premier Jeff Kennett and the current prime minister, Tony Abbott, as the likely culprits. More likely, though, it was “just something about Victorian voters.”

Brent could have gone further in documenting the Labor dominance of Victoria since the early 1980s. Labor has governed Victoria for two-thirds of that period, a stunning record for a party that sat on the opposition benches continuously from 1955 to 1982. Combined with the federal voting pattern, this suggests something more than transient hostility to particular individuals or even the influence of great policy battles. It points to a matter of political culture.

While the media tend to depict every election as an open contest with millions liable to change their minds over this policy or that personality, the reality is otherwise. Even in an era of more fluid political allegiances, the bulk of citizens vote the same way all their lives. It’s true that some progressives may move from Labor to the Greens and some conservatives may flirt with minority parties, but that matters less in a preferential-voting system than it would under first-past-the-post. Essentially, most people who vote progressive will always do so, and the same is true of conservatives.

Political parties might build campaigns around the quest for the uncommitted voter, but the best way to win an election is to possess a critical supply of the kind of voter who is likely to support the party in good times or bad. If you have enough of them, the need to attract the uncommitted is minimised. Fortunately for Labor in Victoria, it has more of this kind of voter than it seems to have in other states. The question is, why?

For a start, there’s the makeup of the state’s workforce. Despite its overall decline, the manufacturing industry retains an important presence in Victoria, which helps deliver unionised blue-collar workers into the Labor column.

Then there’s the fact that the electorally potent theme of multiculturalism – potent elsewhere, that is – largely attracts bipartisan support in Victoria. In fact, the concept was taken for granted by many on both sides of politics even before the term was coined. Jeff Kennett’s commendable hostility to Pauline Hanson in the mid 1990s amply demonstrated the minimal electoral return on the “race card” in the state; and while there is no reason to believe that Kennett was other than genuine, he possibly had little choice politically. This stands in stark contrast to the situation in some other states, where subliminal racism and “dog-whistling” constitute staples on the conservative menu. It is virtually impossible to “wedge” Labor on race in Victoria.

A third contributing factor is education. Various American studies have linked levels of education with political party support. Overwhelmingly, states with the highest educational levels vote Democratic in presidential elections (think Massachusetts and California) while those with the lowest (think Alabama and Mississippi) are Republican bastions. With only six states, Australia can’t produce as watertight a correlation, but Victoria’s lead on a number of indicators (the proportion of the population with a bachelor’s degree or above, for example) suggests a comparable phenomenon. It is hard not to suspect that this also helps with the embrace of multiculturalism and aversion to extremism.

Labor also benefits from what doesn’t exist in Victoria: a substantial mining industry. While miners were once an important part of the party’s core vote, those days are long gone. The large mining states, Western Australia and Queensland, have delivered appalling results for federal Labor over many decades: since 1949, Labor has secured a majority of the two-party-preferred vote just four times in Western Australia and thrice in Queensland. Mining is the main export industry in each of those states, and its advocates are adept at portraying their own interests as identical to those of the state as a whole – to the obvious detriment of a federal Labor government exploring its taxation options or mindful of its environmental obligations. As “evil, centralist socialists,” Labor is thus vulnerable to perennial bouts of Canberra-bashing. Victoria’s main export is (wait for it) education.

Victoria also lacks a strident conservative talkback radio culture, although one suspects that the likes of Alan Jones are mostly preaching to the converted anyway, and the ageing converted at that. Rabid right-wing radio programs, imported and local, have invariably failed in Melbourne, suggesting the absence of a critical mass for that kind of extremism and minimising its potential to shape debate even around the edges.

The importance of political culture was amply demonstrated in the 2010 federal election. According to the press gallery consensus, Labor’s campaign – with a flawed leader and numerous tactical errors – was one of the worst on record. But someone forgot to tell the voters of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, which each proceeded to deliver a majority of the two-party preferred vote and a majority of seats to Labor. Indeed, the Victorian vote was Labor’s highest ever.

This doesn’t mean that Julia Gillard was a genius or that the campaign was perfect. It does suggest that Victoria is a culturally progressive state where Labor starts any campaign with the advantage of a larger, essentially locked-in vote and with a lot less to worry about from (among others) angry miners and racists. All other things being equal, a Western Australian voter is more likely to see a mining tax as poor economic management than is a Victorian. Put another way, the conservatives have to work much harder in Victoria than they do in Queensland and Western Australia.

This leads us to the current Victorian government and Brent’s puzzlement that although the premier has begun pushing the usual buttons the polls have failed to turn around. One obvious answer lies in the points made above: Labor’s core strength in a culturally progressive state. Equally important is the fact that the current government was essentially an “accidental” one, elected largely on voter disenchantment with public transport in several key electorates. The Coalition’s frail lower house majority has rendered decisiveness almost impossible and it remains unclear whether public transport has improved sufficiently to keep onside those who switched last time. By contrast, “accidental” (minority government) Labor premier Steve Bracks was in much better shape seeking re-election in 2002.

This is not to say that Napthine is doomed: incumbency has its advantages and state Labor is not without its problems. But one-term governments are less unusual at state level than they are federally. Unlike any other state election on the horizon, this one is a contest. •

The post There’s something about Victoria appeared first on Inside Story.

WHILE Julia Gillard has been running a closely watched minority government in Canberra, the Victorian government’s wafer-thin majority has attracted comparatively little attention. For the moment, premier Ted Baillieu has a workable majority of one. But unlike his federal counterpart, if he loses that majority he doesn’t have the option of calling an election to seek a fresh mandate. The inevitable result would be parliamentary deadlock.

The problem has two causes: Victoria’s system of fixed election dates, introduced in 2003, and a very close election result. In November 2010, the Liberal–National Coalition secured forty-four seats in the eighty-eight seat lower house. Labor won forty-three seats, with one seat undecided for more than a week after the poll.

Eventually, voters in suburban Bentleigh gave the seat to the Liberals by a majority of just 261 votes, and Victoria dodged a constitutional bullet. But a similar bullet could be fired again during this parliamentary term, or at some time in the future, this time with a fatal result, because Victoria’s constitution is silent on the question of what would happen if the numbers in the Legislative Assembly were balanced at forty-four all.

The first requirement of any new parliament is to elect a Speaker. But this ordinarily simple process – whereby the party or coalition with a majority of seats usually nominates one of its own for this important post – could not occur in an evenly divided lower house.

Without a speaker, no business can be conducted. Parliament would be deadlocked, proceedings adjourned indefinitely, and Victoria faced with a constitutional crisis. The same problem could occur in Canberra if the two major parties split the House of Representatives seventy-five apiece, of course. But the big difference is that the Victorian Assembly has fixed terms and a fixed election date. Only a vote of no confidence or a failure of the lower house to pass supply bills is grounds for an early poll.

In a deadlocked Assembly, a party that appointed one of its own as speaker would be left with forty-three votes (compared with forty-four for the opposition). Given that the Speaker has a deliberative vote, this doesn’t change the parliamentary arithmetic; the deadlock remains. If a party’s MP “ratted” to accept the speakership from its opponents, it would provide a narrow working majority but end in vilification and indignity for the member concerned. (Notwithstanding recent events in Canberra, it is quite unusual for an MP to make this decision – the last time anyone swapped parliamentary parties in Victoria was in 1980.)

In Westminster-derived systems such as Victoria’s, this stalemate is usually broken by another (albeit inconvenient) election. But it is hard to see how a Victorian premier would be able to advise the governor to dissolve the Assembly given the fixed parliamentary term and the fact that parliament – unable to conduct any business and therefore adjourned – couldn’t reject supply or vote on a confidence motion (or do anything else).

Increasing or decreasing the number of lower house seats to an odd number would appear a logical remedy; raising the number of lower house seats to eighty-nine, for example, would make the numbers in Victoria’s lower house identical to Queensland’s. This would have wider ramifications, of course. The Legislative Council is currently made up of eight regions: each is represented by five members and each comprises eleven contiguous lower house electorates. A change of just one seat in the size of the Assembly would mean that electoral boundaries for the upper and lower houses would no longer correspond.

Nevertheless, the safe option is to increase the Assembly to eighty-nine members and have eight Council regions containing eleven complete lower house districts with the eighty-ninth straddling two provinces. Contiguity of lower and upper house boundaries would be lost, but this is far less an evil than the current time bomb.

But Victoria has one last problem. Because of ill-considered amendments to the constitution made in 2003, a referendum is now required to increase the members of the Assembly. •

The post Victoria’s constitutional time bomb appeared first on Inside Story.

GIVEN the predilection of Australian voters to give an incumbent the benefit of the doubt, by far the hardest task in politics is winning government from opposition. With meagre resources and faced by governments that have an entire bureaucracy on call, an opposition leader who comes from behind to take line honours does so in the face of quite considerable odds.

For a Liberal leader in New South Wales, the task is that much harder. Like Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales is traditional Labor territory, and the history of the past seven decades illustrates a Labor preponderance only occasionally punctuated – just eighteen years out of seventy – by relatively brief Liberal interregnums. When Barry O’Farrell leads the Liberal–National coalition to victory on 26 March, as he surely will, he will join Robert Askin (1965) and Nick Greiner (1988) to become just the third Liberal in the party’s sixty-five year history to take power from Labor. Of course, the task for O’Farrell has been immeasurably easier than it was for Askin and Greiner, if only because he has been ably assisted by a government that has publicly self-destructed.

Despite the Coalition’s unbeatable lead in the polls, public opinion is also registering both caution and concern at the prospect of the inevitable O’Farrell government. Part of this stems from O’Farrell’s reluctance to spell out his policies in detail, but part is because of well-publicised ideological wrangling in the state Liberal Party.

The Liberal Party in New South Wales is a different beast from the Liberal brand in other places. One of the reasons is that historically the forces of non-Labor in that state have been far more inclined to the right of the political spectrum. Alone of the colonies, New South Wales was stridently Free Trade at a time when the rest of the country adhered to various forms of protectionism – a difference that not only threatened the union of the colonies back in the 1890s but also gave rise to a contested liberalism that formed the basis of political disagreement in the first decade of federation. George Reid’s Free Trade followers were opposed by Alfred Deakin’s Protectionists until they buried their differences and merged in the so-called Fusion of 1909. Given that Reid’s band had New South Wales as its base and Deakin’s forces were strongest in Victoria, each came to represent a distinctive strand of liberalism, elements of which are still discernible in the present-day Liberal Party.

Quite apart from its different ideological trajectory, the NSW Liberal Party has been shaped by its long years in political opposition, developing what the political scientist James Jupp has called a “right-wing ratbag character.” Characteristic of a political outgroup, this complexion was largely absent in Victoria, where conservatives were more confident of being in government more often. Indeed, the political outlook of John Howard, especially his hostility to trade unions, can be traced to his formative years, most of which were spent under a state Labor government (1941–65) in which he saw a Labor culture extend its hold over all of society, from the unions, local government and educational institutions to churches, the professions and the judiciary.

In recent years, the religious right has become prominent in the NSW Liberal Party to a much greater extent than has happened elsewhere, and the factional manoeuvring of the right has created instability and some bloody preselection contests. To what extent the faction and its moralistic worldview will play out in an O’Farrell government remains to be seen.

O’Farrell, pragmatic and moderate, is a highly experienced politician, and as a former state director of the Liberal Party he knows how the machine works and is well-connected. He also knows his history, and will have taken note, as Greiner did, of the hard fight by Robert Askin, who ended a twenty-four-year period of Labor rule in 1965, to move the party to the political centre. Explaining how the Liberals could succeed in a Labor state, Askin said it had to appeal to a broad section of the community, and in that appeal there was no room for extremism.

Askin described himself as “a middle-of-the-road-man, a centre-thinker, or more precisely as being 10 per cent to the right of centre,” a label that might just fit Barry O’Farrell. Safe in the knowledge that the predicted magnitude of his imminent victory will see the Coalition in for at least two terms and quite possibly longer, O’Farrell can proceed without any fears that the state is about to revert to Labor in the immediate future.

IN VICTORIA, meanwhile, in the aftermath of its first change of government in twelve years, Ted Baillieu is still being scrutinised for signs of political ideology. He joins a select band of Liberal leaders who have won government from opposition – in Victoria’s case, Tom Hollway (1947), Henry Bolte (1955) and Jeff Kennett (1992). Of these, Kennett was by far the most atypical Victorian Liberal – admittedly a social liberal in the Deakinite tradition, but tempered with a strong ideological conviction that the role of government had to be wound back in the interests of growth and efficiency. Kennett’s neoliberal revolt in Victoria saw a campaign of privatisation unprecedented in Australia, fundamentally altering the state’s political and economic landscape.

Baillieu is no Kennett. A lifelong moderate with a well-developed sense of noblesse oblige, he is very much in the Deakinite tradition. He has made it clear already that he is his own man politically, and let it be known very firmly when Tony Abbott sought his backing to obstruct the National Broadband Network that he had his own ideas, and he could see advantages for Victoria in the Labor proposal. In attitude and ideology, Baillieu seems most closely to resemble the late Dick Hamer (premier 1972–81), the suave city lawyer who succeeded the rough-hewn sheep farmer, Henry Bolte, and began a Don Dunstan-like transformation of Melbourne, with a focus on the arts and quality of life.

While O’Farrell is set to replace an incompetent government that self-destructed, Baillieu has succeeded a moderate Labor government by no means without competence or flair. The challenge for O’Farrell is to restore a modicum of public confidence in government and public administration, while Baillieu in Melbourne has merely to steer a steady course already broadly charted. •

The post “Ten per cent to the right of centre” appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s almost seventy years since an Australian federal government held power without a majority in the House of Representatives. But minority governments have been much more common in the states and territories, particularly over the past two decades. Since 1990, minority governments have held office for at least a short period in all six states and in both territories. Tasmania, Western Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory are currently governed by parties that don’t have an absolute majority of MPs.

Over the past week in Inside Story we’ve published articles about three well-known minority governments – Victoria’s (1999–2002), South Australia’s (2002–06) and Tasmania’s (since March this year). Each of the three was – or, in Tasmania’s case, has so far been – more successful than expected, and in at least one case significant long-term parliamentary reform has resulted. Some other minority governments have been just as successful; a few have ended in failure and acrimony. Drawing heavily on two sources – Brian Costar and Jennifer Curtin’s book, Rebels with a Cause: Independents in Australian Politics, and Gareth Griffith’s report for the NSW Parliamentary Library Research Service, Minority Governments in Australia 1989–2009: Accords, Charters and Agreements – here’s an overview of those governments.

Tasmania: Uneasy alliances

This two-decade period opens and closes with minority governments in the same state, Tasmania – the first headed by Michael Field and the latest by David Bartlett.

For seven years from 1982 Robin Gray had headed a majority Liberal government that’s best remembered for its promise to dam the Franklin River. At the state election in May 1989, well after that battle was over, the Liberals lost their absolute majority and five Green Independents – among them Bob Brown, then a Tasmanian MP – took the balance of power. Not surprisingly, the Greens refused to support Gray, instead signing an accord with the Labor Party that gave opposition leader Michael Field the numbers he needed to govern. “When an attempt to bribe a Labor member to cross the floor – and save Gray’s government – was exposed, the political atmosphere became superheated,” write Costar and Curtin. “Gray lost a confidence motion on 29 June, resigned and was replaced by Michael Field.” They go on:

In hindsight, the accord contained the seeds of its own destruction by being too detailed and prescriptive. The Greens demanded too much and Labor was naive to believe it could deliver on those demands… Of the accord’s seventeen discrete clauses only one dealt exclusively with parliamentary reform. Ten clauses made very specific environmental demands. Section 9, for example, stated that “the state export woodchip quota will not exceed 2.8889 million tonnes per annum.” Other sections dealt with independents’ access to ministers and public servants which, while reasonable in themselves, were presented in an uncompromising tone. Some demands, such as the one that called for the “abolition of subsidised liquor to ministers,” were relatively trivial.

De facto independent leader Bob Brown was correct to state in the foreword to the accord that the Greens had gained “access to and influence on the whole range of government decisions” but, by being so concerned with detail, the document betrayed a lack of necessary trust between the parties.

The parliamentary reforms spelt out in the accord were less detailed than the other clauses but equally ambitious. Foreshadowing themes that run through many of the agreements struck by independents and small parties in similar circumstances, they included “a total review of parliamentary procedures and standing orders,” “the creation of new parliamentary committees including estimates committees,” a provision guaranteeing Green Independent members “pre-cabinet consultation on legislation” and another promising consultation on appointments to selection panels for heads of public service departments. Little of this program was locked in during the life of the accord.

The agreement’s successes included significant improvements in coastal management and marine parks, but the growing hostility between the independents and Labor limited the scope and longevity of reforms. According to the political scientist Steven Reynolds, the accord broke down “over issues of forestry management, bringing to a head clashes that began with education policy issues not long after the accord was signed. It was formally dissolved in September 1991 when the ALP increased export woodchip quotas in specific violation of the accord.” The Greens continued to support Field’s government over his opposition counterpart until the February 1992 election, which Labor lost.

Four years later, the Tasmanian parliament once again lacked a majority party. Liberal leader Ray Groom had promised during the campaign that he would only head a majority government, and Labor also refused to enter into an agreement with the Greens. Groom resigned and his deputy, Tony Rundle, took over and came to a workable arrangement with the Greens that allowed the Liberals to take power. Griffith writes:

This second period of minority government was not based on either an accord or even a “confidence and supply agreement.” Instead, it was founded on the twin rocks of the personality differences between the Labor and Greens leaders (Michael Field and Christine Milne), on one side, and on an “open door” policy adopted by Premier Rundle towards the Greens, on the other. This policy permitted the minor party to pursue its agenda on such issues as an apology for Indigenous Tasmanians and homosexual law reform.

In an attempt to gain a majority, Rundle announced a snap election in July 1998. The major parties had already combined forces to reduce the size of the Legislative Assembly from thirty-five to twenty-five members; this made it more difficult for minor parties by raising the required quota of votes under Tasmania’s voting system from 12.5 per cent to 16.7 per cent. Rundle lost the election and was succeeded as premier by Labor’s Jim Bacon. “Despite achieving some policy outcomes favourable to the Greens,” write Costar and Curtin, “the Tasmanian accord came to be associated with political instability; its foundering provided a pretext for the major parties to entrench their dominance.”

Despite the reduced parliament, the Greens once again managed to capture the balance of power earlier this year. Although the Labor premier, David Bartlett, had ruled out minority government during the campaign, the post-election negotiations eventually led to a novel outcome: no formal agreement between Labor and the Greens as a party; two Green MPs to sit in the Labor cabinet; and the government reliant on the support of the Greens inside cabinet and at least one Green outside cabinet to pass its legislation. Kate Crowley discussed the agreement, and its success to date, last Monday in Inside Story.

New South Wales: The fabulous fiftieth

As the first Labor–Green accord in Tasmania was breaking down, Nick Greiner’s government in New South Wales suddenly found itself without a majority. After a crushing defeat for Labor in 1988, the Liberal–National Coalition had seemed assured of victory in May 1991. But the final result, Coalition forty-nine, Labor Party forty-six, and four independents, gave one of the independents – Tony Windsor, John Hatton, Clover Moore or Peter Macdonald – the power to extend Greiner’s period in office. Windsor declared his support for the government. But the situation quickly became more complicated when the Liberal Party lost a by-election and the government needed the support of at least two more MPs. Greiner began negotiating with the other three independents about the terms under which they might support his government, and the outcome was a memorandum of understanding, signed on 31 October 1991. According to Costar and Curtin:

Like Tasmania’s accord, the NSW agreement was a very detailed and specific document. But almost all of its nineteen pages sought to enhance accountability of the government to parliament and people; it was policy-prescriptive only in the legal and constitutional areas of freedom of information, the powers of the ombudsman and the auditor-general, defamation laws and whistleblower protection. Significantly the memo had nothing to say about regional and rural New South Wales, reflecting the fact that Moore and Macdonald held Sydney seats and Hatton, while he represented a regional constituency, had made his parliamentary reputation as an anti-corruption campaigner.

Among the reforms implemented under the agreement were a referendum on four-year parliamentary terms (which was held and passed), a referendum on independence of the judiciary (also passed) and the introduction of parliamentary estimates committees and whistleblower protection for public servants. Indeed, argues the political scientist Rodney Smith in his book Against the Machines: Minor Parties and Independents in New South Wales, “most of the reforms were achieved in some part, easily making the ‘fabulous fiftieth parliament’ the period in which independents played the greatest legislative role since 1910.”

In a speech in June 2003, independent MP Clover Moore acknowledged the reforms of parliamentary procedures during this period, but added, “Since the return of majority government following the 1995 election, some of the parliamentary reforms we achieved have been watered down or effectively set aside” – a point also made by NSW parliamentary researchers David Clune and Gareth Griffith in their book, Decision and Deliberation: The Parliament of NSW, 1856–2003.

Unlike the fate suffered by premiers Field and Rundle in Tasmania, it wasn’t a breakdown in the minority government’s relations with the non-party MPs that eventually brought down the government – or at least not directly. Costar and Curtin take up the story:

In October 1991 the former education minister, Terry Metherell, who had not been included in the new Greiner cabinet, resigned from the Liberal Party to sit as an independent. He later accepted an unadvertised position with the Environment Protection Authority, precipitating a by-election in his seat of Davidson that was won easily by the Liberal candidate. Greiner was accused of subverting normal public-service recruitment procedures to induce Metherell’s resignation and improve the government’s position in parliament. The independents insisted on referring the matter to ICAC, the Independent Commission Against Corruption, and threatened to support a no-confidence motion if the premier did not stand aside. For its part, ICAC ruled Greiner’s behaviour to be “corrupt” (a finding that was later overturned by the NSW Supreme Court) and he was forced to resign; his successor, John Fahey, presided over a minority government supported by the independents until the Coalition narrowly lost the 1995 election.

The circumstances of the 1995 election revealed the level of hostility towards the independents in both major parties. Greiner (now out of parliament) wrote personally to all voters in the electorates of Manly, Bligh and South Coast urging them not to support the independents, describing the trio as the power “alcoholics” of NSW politics. “Dirty tricks” campaigns were alleged to have taken place in Bligh and Manly, and Clover Moore described the campaign as the “nastiest” she had experienced. With the election result in the balance (Labor eventually won by one seat), the major parties seriously considered contriving another election rather than dealing with the independents.

The amount of vitriol heaped on the independents by the major parties and sections of the media suggests that they might well have achieved their accountability objectives. Certainly the success of the referendums on four-year parliaments and judicial independence put at the 1995 election suggests this was the case. The referendums were part of the independents’ agenda and, despite a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the major parties, they secured Yes votes of 66 per cent and 76 per cent respectively.

Queensland: Two very different independents

After thirty-three years in opposition, Labor returned to power in Queensland in 1989. Three years later, with the corruption of the Bjelke-Petersen years still fresh in people’s minds, Premier Wayne Goss and his colleagues won a second election. The expectation was that Labor would win for a third time at the July 1995 election. Partly as a result of its controversial plan to build a freeway through an environmentally sensitive corridor in Brisbane, though, Labor lost nine seats, giving it a majority of just one over the combined numbers of the Coalition and the newly elected independent, Liz Cunningham. Labor had won the seat of Mundingburra by just fourteen votes; after the inevitable challenge and several months in the Court of Disputed Returns, the Liberal candidate Frank Tanti won the seat at a by-election in February 1996.

“For the first time in the state’s history,” writes the political scientist John Wanna, “a single independent held the balance of power between two equally matched opponents. Parliament as an institution began to matter, for the first time in living memory.” That one member of parliament was Liz Cunningham, who – at a media conference convened under a large tree in Gladstone – declared her support for the Coalition and its leader, Rob Borbidge, on confidence motions and supply but reserved the right to vote on all other legislation as she saw fit. She sought no specific policy commitments from the Coalition but did receive additional staff.

Cunningham argued that her decision was justified for three reasons: it avoided another election; the Coalition had polled over 53 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote; and the agreement between herself and the government was “best for my local electorate and for the state as a whole…” As Costar and Curtin write, “Unlike the Tasmanian Greens, who had Labor over a barrel and knew it, Cunningham installed a Coalition government largely because she sympathised with its conservative social agenda and was prepared to hand it an executive blank cheque.”

Cunningham didn’t demand increased accountability and the Coalition didn’t offer it. In fact, write Costar and Curtin, “The Borbidge government proved controversial and cavalier in its notions of accountability. When the parliament passed a no-confidence vote in the attorney-general in August 1997, for example, the premier backed his colleague’s refusal to resign.” They go on:

Despite numerous gaffes and controversies the parliament ran full term, but the 1998 Queensland state election was to prove one of the most dramatic in modern Australian politics. In the best debut electoral performance by any new party since Labor began entering the colonial parliaments in the 1890s, the newly formed Pauline Hanson’s One Nation won eleven seats – five from the National Party and six from Labor. By winning six seats from the Liberals, the Labor Party, now led by Peter Beattie, emerged with 44 seats to the Coalition’s 42. Two independents were elected: Cunningham, again, and first-timer Peter Wellington, who won Nicklin from the Nationals and with whom Beattie began negotiations to form a minority government. These discussions culminated in a six-page letter of understanding from Beattie to Wellington dated 25 June 1998.

As Antony Green observed, “The only alternative would have been a ramshackle coalition of Liberal, National, One Nation and several independents. Wellington chose to back stability…” Reform of parliament, an ongoing budget surplus and detailed guidelines for ministerial travel and expenses were among the requests he made in return for his support. Beattie refused another proposal – the introduction of citizen-initiated referendums – but promised to hold community cabinet meetings outside Brisbane. Although he didn’t get everything he wanted, Wellington agreed to support Labor, and the new government stuck to its side of the bargain.

Wellington believes that minority government worked well. “[O]ne thing that happened was that every minister was on their toes, every shadow minister was on their toes, and every member of parliament was in parliament,” he told ABC Radio National’s The National Interest recently. “There was a real sort of hands-on, ‘We have to really understand what we are doing.’ But I suppose I was sort of in a desperate situation because my electorate was very conservative, and I’m thinking, ‘Well, I think I’ve done the right thing, but let’s see what happens in the next election, I may not be here after then.’”

He was back after the next election (and is still in parliament) but in the meantime the circumstances had changed. Beattie gained a parliamentary majority of one seat after a by-election in November 1998 and Wellington no longer held the balance of power.

The Australian Capital Territory: Hare-Clark on a Robson rotation

Earlier in 1998 voters in the Australian Capital Territory had gone to the polls faced with a choice between the incumbent chief minister, Kate Carnell, and the Labor opposition leader, Wayne Berry. Minority government had been a fact of life in the territory since it had gained self-government; legislation put forward by a cabinet of four government MPs was negotiated case-by-case through the Assembly. But this election yielded an even more interesting situation.

The succession of minority governments partly reflects the territory’s relatively small population, but more important is its unusual electoral system – initially the modified d’Hondt system and, since 1995, the Hare-Clark proportional representation system, which also operates in Tasmania. Candidates’ names are “rotated” on the ballot paper (using the Robson rotation method, to avoid the influence of the donkey vote) and how-to-vote cards cannot be distributed within a hundred metres of polling booths. Combined, these features tend to dilute the influence of parties over the composition of the Assembly. As the political scientist David L. Hughes writes, “Voters are more likely to choose their own combinations of individual candidates, rather than follow a strict party line in allocating preferences. As a result, the public profile of a candidate is very important, independents have a greater chance of election, and there is much greater competition between candidates within a party.”

Both major parties emerged from the 1998 election with six seats, with the balance held by the ACT Greens (one), the Osborne Independent Group (two), and the Moore Independents (one). To break the deadlock, Carnell offered the sole Moore Independent, Michael Moore, the job of health, housing and community services minister in a Liberal government. Moore negotiated an “unprecedented” arrangement with Carnell, “binding him to the conventions of collective cabinet solidarity only in relation to his own portfolio areas and the annual budget bills,” write Costar and Curtin.

This experiment in government was partly prompted by the findings of the Review of the Governance of the ACT, released in the same month, which had recommended increasing the number of ministers from four to five and pondered the possibility of “a looser coalition arrangement that would enable some cross-benchers to serve as ministers.”

One of Moore’s priorities was drug law reform, and in late 1999 his legislation to establish supervised drug-injecting rooms was passed by the Assembly. Although Carnell resigned in October 2000, Moore remained health minister until he retired from parliament in 2002. “I have achieved more in the three and a half years that I spent as a minister than the years I spent on the cross benches…” he said in 2001. “I make no bones about it, it was a trade-off and in accepting a ministry I did lose some of my independence, but not all of it by any means.” The Liberals continued as a minority government until the 2004 election, when Labor surprised observers by taking power in its own right.

As Norman Abjorensen argued in Inside Story last November, “it was probably an anomaly that the sixth assembly elections in 2004 returned the first majority government to the territory in its twenty years of self-government, an outcome that the champions of Hare-Clark had argued was next to impossible. But an exceptionally popular chief minister, Jon Stanhope, and an especially inept Liberal opposition delivered just that.”

Abjorensen’s article was published to coincide with the first anniversary of the ACT’s return to minority government – a Labor government with Greens backing – at the 2008 election. Labor won seven of the seventeen seats at that election and, with the Liberals holding six seats, needed the support of the four Green members to pass its legislation. The result was an agreement that included the Greens member Shane Rattenbury’s becoming Assembly speaker, and a series of parliamentary and policy reforms. Abjorensen wrote:

Parliamentary reform has ranked high on the Greens’ agenda and forms the first part of its two-part agreement with Labor. A key plank is the adoption of the Latimer House Principles on probity and accountability, so named after a Commonwealth conference at Latimer House, London, in 2004. At the root of the principles is a commitment to ensuring that the executive is held fully and firmly accountable to parliament, and that decision-making is transparent and takes proper regard of civil society.

The Labor Party does not pretend the relationship is an easy one. “They are not a party like us; they are four individuals,” says a senior party figure. “They are really a series of interest groups. And their staff come from those groups, so we have to keep very close tabs on what is happening, because the ground shifts.” Another common complaint from Labor is that the Greens are “manipulated” by the Liberals into thinking that government is a monolith and that ministers have only to snap their fingers to get action. Meredith Hunter [the ACT Greens’ leader] denies this, arguing that the Greens’ long-term deep community roots ensure an appreciation of government decision-making and that the Greens are under no illusions as to the complexities of government.

The second part of the agreement focuses on policy and – under the headings of climate change and energy, transport, waste, water, planning, housing, small business, justice, education and health – progress against stated objectives is regularly discussed not just between leaders but among all four Greens and the ministers they shadow. The state of play is then reported on the Greens’ website.

Another nine months later the relationship still seems in good shape.

Victoria: Prelude to a landslide

“The Kennett government went to the polls in September 1999 in a seemingly invincible position,” write Costar and Curtin. “As in New South Wales in 1995, the election result was a cliffhanger. Strong swings to Labor in country Victoria and the election of a third independent, Craig Ingram, in Gippsland East produced a hung parliament, the Coalition securing forty-three seats to Labor’s forty-one with the three independents holding the balance of power. The inconclusive result was complicated by the fact that the sitting member for Frankston East had died on polling day, triggering a supplementary election four weeks after the poll.”

The result, as Brian Costar and David Hayward described recently in Inside Story, was a minority Bracks Labor government with the support of the three independents. At the suggestion of a former premier of Victoria, Joan Kirner, one of the independents, Susan Davies, contacted Premier Peter Beattie and independent MP Peter Wellington in Queensland to obtain a copy of their 1998 agreement, on which the three then based their Independents’ Charter.

“This issue of the balance of power caused me some significant anxieties and significant grief,” said the third of the independents, Russell Savage, at a conference the following year. “Susan very quickly came up with an idea that was quite brilliant and that was to have a Charter and that would get the media off our backs… It is very easy to succumb to the obvious – well let’s get some significant development in our electorate… We believed that… was immoral because it was exactly how the Kennett-style government worked.” The independents had negotiated with both leaders, but found Kennett intransigent on key points.

Government accountability (including a restoration of the independence of the auditor-general), parliamentary reform and the rejuvenation of rural Victoria were the key elements of the agreement with Bracks. Costar and Hayward’s article recounts the three-year relationship between government and independents, and Labor’s growing popularity in the lead-up to the 2002 state election.

“The Frankston East result had revealed a change in electoral mood,” observes Antony Green, “and over the next eight months Labor won two extra-ordinary by-election victories, first winning the Burwood seat of former Premier Kennett, and later winning the rural Benalla seat previously held by Nationals leader and Deputy Premier Pat McNamara. The good news continued for Labor and at the 2002 election, Labor won its greatest ever victory in Victoria, for the first time winning a clear majority in the Legislative Council.”

Not surprisingly, the independents became less influential after 2002. “But they had managed to lock in a number of important parliamentary and electoral reforms, the most noteworthy being the changes to the Legislative Council, which have now become accepted policy,“ write Costar and Hayward. “Despite dire predictions, Victorian government and politics did not descend into instability or gridlock.” When he was asked to comment on that period on ABC Radio National’s The National Interest recently, Steve Bracks said:

I rate that as one of the best periods of government that I had of the period right through the eight years, and the three terms. We had to be on our toes, there was a lot of accountability, but also we had to explain properly what legislation meant, and what it meant to the broader public. Not just simply driving through your agenda because it happened to be a matter on which you were elected on, but to keep explaining, keep consulting, keep working it through. I enjoyed the periods on each parliamentary session where I sat down with the three independents and worked through the legislative agenda, where we’re going, providing support and assistance in understanding better the legislation so they could make decisions. So, in some ways, it was a moderation on your own party and I found that quite useful.

One of the three independents, Craig Ingram, still sits in the Victorian parliament. He told the Age this week, “Most of the outstanding reforms of parliament came as the result of minority governments. We got a significant change of direction in spending towards the regions. The most positive thing about this federal election is that there will be much greater focus on regional Australia.” During that period passenger trains returned to the Bairnsdale line (which runs into Ingram’s electorate), water allocations to the Snowy River and the Gippsland Lakes were increased, and the government promised that the Mitchell River would not be dammed. But another of the independents, Russell Savage, was less fortunate. “He speaks bitterly about betrayal as Labor broke its promises to him,” reports the Age. “Passenger trains never came back to Mildura. Its hospital remained in private hands, and then Labor chose the Mallee for a toxic dump, sealing his defeat in 2006. He has some pithy advice for Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott. ‘Don’t trust anything they say – get them to put it in writing,’ he says. ‘Watch your back all the time – from both sides.’”

South Australia: Shifting alliances

Minorities were a feature of South Australian politics throughout this period. Between 1989 and 1993 Labor formed a minority government with two “Independent Labor” members, losing to the Liberals in 1993. Four years later, an election swing forced the Liberals to rely on the support of a National MP and two independents to retain government over the period 1997–2002.

It’s at this point that the situation became even more interesting. After the February 2002 state election the House of Assembly had twenty-three Labor members, twenty Liberals and four independents. Labor needed the support of just one of those independents to take office. “When parliament resumed on 5 March 2002 [Liberal leader Rob] Kerin nominated independent Rory McEwen as Speaker and opposition leader Mike Rann nominated independent Peter Lewis,” write Costar and Curtin. “Lewis won in a secret ballot twenty-five votes to twenty-two.” They go on:

Peter Lewis had been a Liberal member of parliament for over twenty years. Since the 1970s he had been a gadfly within his party, advocating parliamentary reform and various rural and irrigation policies. Eventually – on 5 July 2000 – he was expelled from the Liberal party room, and he resigned from the party in October. Lewis contested his seat of Hammond at the 2002 election under the banner of the Community Leadership Independence Coalition and defeated the Liberal candidate by 822 votes. Prior to the poll Lewis gave contradictory indications of which party he might support in a hung parliament…

Between polling day and the first meeting of the new parliament, Peter Lewis negotiated a Compact for Good Government with the Labor Party. The compact drew heavily on agreements in other states and included mechanisms to improve ministerial accountability, reform parliament and assist rural South Australia. What was different in Lewis’s compact was his insistence that the government “pass an Act of Parliament and make other such arrangements as deemed necessary by the Speaker [Lewis] to meet such costs and facilitating such processes as may be involved in any aspects of the work related to the establishment of a Constitutional Convention…” The Convention was held in August 2003 and made a number of recommendations to be considered by the state parliament.

But the most remarkable of Rann’s initiatives was to appoint another independent, Rory McEwen, as his trade minister. Like Michael Moore in the ACT, McEwen remained an independent and was free to criticise the government of which he was a member. Norman Abjorensen described the events surrounding McEwen’s appointment, and the appointment of another non-Labor MP to Rann’s ministry, in a recent article for Inside Story.

Western Australia: The coalition that wasn’t

In early August 2008 the Labor WA premier, Alan Carpenter, called an early election for 6 September 2008. Unexpectedly, the election resulted in a hung parliament – twenty-eight Labor MPs, twenty-four Liberals, four Nationals and three independents. Since he’d taken over the leadership of the National Party in 2005, leader Brendon Grylls had pursued greater independence from the Liberal Party, and during the campaign he ruled out any Coalition agreement. Suddenly, with a hung parliament, Grylls and at least one independent were in a position to dictate terms.

The terms for winning National Party support were relatively simple: Labor or the Liberals needed to accept Grylls’s “royalties for the regions” plan, which had featured in the party’s election campaigning. Twenty-five per cent of the state’s mining and onshore petroleum royalties would be returned to regional Western Australia for use in infrastructure and community services via various programs. After a week of negotiations with both parties, Grylls struck his deal – essentially an informal coalition agreement – with the Liberal leader, Colin Barnett.

To add the necessary extra MP, the Liberals appointed one of the independents, Elizabeth Constable, as education, tourism and women’s interests minister. According to Gareth Griffith, she didn’t enter into a formal agreement with the new government, but it might be significant that the Liberals hadn’t contested her seat of Churchlands at the election. Griffith continues: “The other two independent members (Janet Woollard and John Bowler), who have not accepted government or parliamentary positions, have supported the Liberal minority government in the main. Indeed, it was not until 6 May 2009 that the government lost its first vote on the floor of the Assembly…”

Like Rory McEwen and Karlene Maywald in South Australia, National Party ministers in Barnett’s government are free of the usual cabinet constraints in relation to certain issues. Naturally enough, in the WA case these relate mainly to regional issues, although matters of “conscience” are also covered by the agreement.

Northern Territory: The devil in the detail

In August 2009 a member of the NT parliament, Alison Anderson, resigned from the Labor Party over its Indigenous affairs policies, depriving the government of its majority. Ten days later the chief minister, Paul Henderson, struck a deal with the other NT independent, Gerry Wood, who would stay on the cross benches but support the government on supply and no-confidence motions. In return, the government pledged to honour the terms of a written agreement with the MP. According to Griffith:

The terms of this agreement are wide ranging, including substantial parliamentary and constitutional reforms, as well as other policy measures. Perhaps the most interesting constitutional aspect is the agreement to establish a cross-party Council of Territory Cooperation, comprising two government members, two opposition members and at least one independent. Among its objects would be to enhance inclusion and transparency in decision making. The Council would be empowered to conduct inquiries, either referred to it from the Assembly or self-referred, and to make recommendations on matters of public importance.

The government also agreed to reform parliamentary procedures, including reform of question time to allow more non-government questions.

An appendix to the agreement sets out specific policy commitments under a series of headings that indicate the level of detail in the document. These include prison location, caravan legislation, property law reform, lands and planning issues, the environment protection authority, public housing, natural resources and the environment, a strategic Indigenous housing and infrastructure program, youth, rural area issues, special education, local government and “miscellaneous.” Writing earlier this year, Griffith says that the implementation of this program “remains in its early stages.”

AS THESE examples show, the states and territories have already explored many of the relationships that could develop between the Gillard government and the Greens and independents over the next three years. As the prime minister made clear on the 7.30 Report earlier this week, the government is already looking at the experience of at least two states, South Australia and Victoria, and Steve Bracks was an adviser to Labor during the recent negotiations with the three independents. Bracks’s experience – and those of a remarkably high proportion of the state and territory minority governments – suggest that Labor might not be facing quite as fraught an experience over the next three years as many commentators have predicted. •

The post The fabulous fiftieth NSW parliament, and other minority governments appeared first on Inside Story.

EARLY 1999 was not an auspicious time to take on the leadership of the Labor Party in Victoria. Premier Jeff Kennett was riding high and most commentators gave Labor no chance of winning the next election. And, initially at least, Steve Bracks’s elevation had little impact on Labor’s poor performance in the opinion polls. Yet by the middle of the year his approval rating had reached 54 per cent, a considerable contrast to the poor performance of his predecessor, John Brumby, in 1997 and 1998.

One of Bracks’s advantages was that he didn’t have to contend with the destabilising dissent within the party that had beleaguered Brumby. Labor was unusually united because it was widely believed that Kennett would call an early election, at which the opposition risked a third big defeat. When he did so – the election was set for 18 September 1999 – the opinion polls indicated that Labor would lose seats. The actual result came as a complete surprise. An unprecedented revolt against Kennett in regional and rural Victoria produced a hung parliament, with the Liberal–National Coalition securing forty-three seats to Labor’s forty-one, and three rural independents holding the balance of power. Further drama was injected into the political equation by the death of a candidate on polling day; this necessitated a supplementary election in the former Liberal seat of Frankston East, scheduled for 14 October.

Minority government had returned to Victoria for the first time in fifty years. The three independents who would decide the complexion of the government were Russell Savage, a socially conservative former police officer who had won Mildura in 1996, Susan Davies, who had won the Gippsland West by-election in 1997 after standing as the Labor candidate in 1996, and Craig Ingram, a farmer and abalone fisherman who won Gippsland East in 1999. Led by Davies, the independents drafted a Charter of Good Governance and declared their support for whichever party would promise to legislate its contents.

Accountability of government, parliamentary reform and the social and economic rejuvenation of rural Victoria were the main themes of the Charter, which spelt out principles rather than fine details. In this sense, it echoed the themes pursued by earlier independents in several states when faced with the opportunity to influence the formation of a government, and foreshadowed the themes that have dominated discussions between Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott, Bob Katter and the party leaders.

In the month-long negotiations that followed, Bracks, who had been opposition leader for only six months, displayed considerable political skill and maturity in out-manoeuvring the previously dominant Kennett. Here was a straight contest between “agitator” Kennett and “negotiator” Bracks. Backed by large majorities in both houses of parliament, Kennett’s political style as premier was to be the “CEO of Victoria,” and he pursued his objectives with an at times breathtaking disregard for consultation and a dismissive attitude towards any opposition. These traits were to be his undoing. Kennett’s initial response to the independents was a combination of political bribery and bluster; he offered each of them the job of Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, and then announced (on radio station 3AW) that they had no choice but to support the Coalition because they represented “conservative” electorates. He also attempted to rewrite various clauses of the charter, much to the annoyance of the independents. When he did concede to some of their requirements he was repudiating policies that he had previously declared non-negotiable, and thus appeared opportunistic and insincere.

Bracks, by contrast, left the independents largely to their own devices. He had the advantage, denied to Kennett, of the fact that almost all of the contents of the charter were settled Labor policy. When the major parties formally responded to the independents, Bracks supported the charter “in its entirety,” whereas Kennett rejected calls to change the voting system in the upper house to one of proportional representation. Bracks then acted with uncharacteristic boldness, sending a memorandum of understanding to the independents seeking their formal support for a Labor government. Craig Ingram, who was going to be out of phone range over the weekend, signed the memo but gave it to Susan Davies with instructions to tear it up if Labor failed to win the next day’s Frankston East supplementary election. Labor won easily, and at a press conference on the following Monday, 16 October, the three independents announced their support for a minority Labor government.

Bracks’s achievement in negotiating this outcome should not be underestimated. It was never a foregone conclusion that the independents would back Labor. Kennett never fully comprehended this. Had he not vetoed upper house reform it would have been difficult for the independents not to have supported the Coalition, because only it had the numbers in the upper house to amend the constitution to change the voting system.

WINNING the peace is always more difficult than winning the war, and after Labor’s euphoria had abated the magnitude of the task facing Bracks was all too apparent. The party did not have a majority in either house of parliament and its cabinet was vastly inexperienced – six of its members were sworn in as ministers before they were sworn in as members of parliament. The party, not expecting victory, had developed only a rudimentary “transition to government” strategy; after the election it quietly engaged former Cain government ministers and public servants to tutor the new ministers in how to carry out their duties. Bracks recounted a story about the first month of government: “As I left my office a journalist called out, ‘Premier,’ and I just kept walking. He kept yelling out ‘Premier’ – [finally] he started yelling out ‘Bracksey,’ and I turned around.”

The new government had some lucky early successes that strengthened its position. Kennett announced his retirement from parliament, and at the subsequent by-election, in November 1999, Labor won his seat of Burwood – as it did the retiring National Party leader Pat McNamara’s seat of Benalla in early 2000. Bracks was a prominent campaigner in both by-elections and their results, which confirmed the trend of the 1999 election, strengthened Labor’s legitimacy. Although the party still lacked an absolute majority in the Legislative Assembly, it now held more seats than the combined Liberal and National parties.

Labor had a ready-made agenda in the contents of the Charter of Good Governance, all of which, save reform of the upper house, were accepted by the Coalition majority in the Legislative Council. The Coalition proved more intransigent towards other government legislation, however. For example, when Labor attempted to legislate to extend the entitlements of Victorian workers who were unable to transfer to the federal industrial relations system, the upper house rejected the Bill. The budget, and state finances more generally, were areas in which Labor moved quickly and decisively. In opposition the party had crafted a conservative financial policy, drawing readily on the advice of neoliberal economic think tanks. It had done so in the belief that Labor needed to distance itself as clearly as possible from the perception that the former Labor premiers, John Cain and Joan Kirner, headed big-spending and high-taxing governments that liked to borrow money to pay for their promises. The strategy seemed to be to emulate the Kennett government as much as possible on financial policy in order to highlight the significant differences between Labor and the Coalition on issues to do with democratic rights and social policy.

Bracks took government at a time when internal Labor Party relations were ominously volatile, but the discipline imposed by its minority status did act as a restraining influence, at least until late in the government’s first term. And even then the damage was subsumed by the 2002 election campaign.

For its part, and despite the fact that it had lost the 1999 election by only the narrowest of margins, the Coalition went into a steep political decline. It retained control of the upper house until October 2002, but was unable to exploit the inexperience of the government or to dent Bracks’s popularity and political dominance. Kennett had been the driving force of the Coalition government from 1992 to 1999, and his unforeseen and rapid demise left the Liberal Party, which had over-invested its political capital in him, bereft. In fact the 1999 election saw the Liberals lose almost a generation of potential leaders. Unconcerned at the possibility of defeat, Kennett in July 1999 unilaterally announced the “retirement” of six senior ministers, in order to inject new blood into a post-election cabinet. The opposition was further weakened by the dissolution of the Coalition agreement between the Liberal and National parties in June 2000.

The very cautiousness of the Bracks minority government offered little opportunity for a dispirited opposition to gain political traction, and the Liberal Party descended into destructive factionalism reminiscent of the 1980s. In a manner typical of Australian state politics, the incumbent premier’s personal popularity soared and that of the hapless opposition leader languished. The new Liberal leader, Denis Napthine, was a solid performer but was dogged by a wooden media image, and after the usual rumours and leaks he was replaced by the allegedly more aggressive Robert Doyle in August 2002 – ten weeks before the election, which Labor won in a landslide.

GIVEN his generally cautious and risk-averse leadership style, Steve Bracks seemed an unlikely constitutional warrior. Yet within his first three years in office he enacted the most sweeping changes to the Victorian constitution in 150 years.

Bracks’s place in Victorian Labor history, and indeed in the state’s constitutional history, was assured by his enacting significant changes to the Legislative Council and its relations with the government in the Legislative Assembly. Here Bracks succeeded where many of his predecessors over the previous 150 years had failed. Given that before the 2002 election the Labor Party had enjoyed a majority in the Legislative Council for a grand total of three months (in 1985), it is hardly surprising that the party has been less than enthusiastic about the Victorian version of bicameralism. Before the late 1970s, the ALP’s policy was to abolish the upper house; this policy was replaced in 1981 by a policy to introduce a proportional representation, or PR, voting system. The Cain and Kirner governments (1982–92) made no fewer than six attempts to change the Legislative Council’s voting system to PR, but all foundered.

Following its surprise victory, Bracks’s minority government moved on its promise to the independents and introduced a broad-ranging Constitution (Reform) Bill on 24 November 1999. The Bill encountered difficulties when some of the independents expressed reservations about removing the Legislative Council’s right to block supply, and about the geographical size of the proposed rural provinces (the upper house electorates). The Bill was formally withdrawn in June 2000 and replaced by a Constitution (Amendment) Bill, which dealt with parliamentary terms and supply, and a Constitution (Proportional Representation) Bill, which concentrated on electoral and related matters. Both Bills were rejected in the opposition-controlled Legislative Council in October 2000.

In response, Bracks established a constitution commission and empowered it to make such recommendations as would “enable the Legislative Council to operate as a genuine house of review.” The commission was chaired by a recently retired Supreme Court judge, George Hampel, who was to be assisted by former Liberal federal and state parliamentarians Ian McPhee and Alan Hunt; the latter had been president of the Legislative Council in the 1980s. While the appointment of the impartial Hampel and the former Liberal MPs (both of whom were seen as constitutional reformist Liberals) was politically adroit, the opposition still attacked the commission as “a blatant political con.”

The commission issued a discussion paper in August 2001, conducted seminars and regional consultations and invited submissions from the public. Its final report, A House for Our Future, appeared on 1 July 2002. The recommendations of the commission were to form the basis of the Bracks government’s new legislation, but few predicted that it would be presented to a parliament that, as a result of the November 2002 election, would have Labor majorities in both chambers (sixty-two of eighty-eight in the Legislative Assembly and twenty-five of forty-four in the Legislative Council).

The new legislation replaced the single-member, preferential voting system in the Legislative Council with Senate-style proportional representation, removed the power of the upper house to reject supply Bills, and introduced deadlock resolution provisions that constrained, but did not eliminate, the capacity of the Legislative Council to impede a government’s legislative agenda. The Bill passed the Legislative Council and was proclaimed on 8 April. Given that numerous premiers of all political persuasions, dating back as far as Graham Berry (1875–77), had failed in attempts at upper house reform, Bracks was justified in describing the legislation as his “most satisfying achievement.” Most of Victoria’s media, however, remained unenthused; they were focused on the looming outbreak of war in Iraq.

When the Labor Party secured an outright majority in 2002 the independents naturally became less influential. But they had managed to lock in a number of important parliamentary and electoral reforms, the most noteworthy being the changes to the Legislative Council, which have now become accepted policy. Despite dire predictions, Victorian government and politics did not descend into instability or gridlock. Commenting on that period on Radio National’s The National Interest late last month, Steve Bracks said: “I rate that as one of the best periods of government that I had of the period right through the eight years, and the three terms. We had to be on our toes, there was a lot of accountability, but also we had to explain properly what legislation meant, and what it meant to the broader public.” •

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WITH THE growing number and influence of independent and small-party MPs in Australian parliaments from the mid 1980s, an important new ingredient emerged in state and territory politics: charters negotiated between independent MPs (or, in one case, the Greens) and the major parties as a precondition for supporting a minority government.

These charters usually committed the governing party to a range of parliamentary initiatives to promote executive accountability and honesty; in return, the independents undertook not to bring down the government by voting against supply or confidence motions. The independents reserved their right to consider all other legislation on its merits and to vote accordingly. Sometimes the charters imposed policy demands on the government; improved rural infrastructure and services, and environmental protection are recurrent themes. Seven of these charters involved independent MPs – in Tasmania, New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and the Northern Territory. An eighth agreement, this time between two political parties – the Greens and Labor in the Australian Capital Territory – was examined by Inside Story’s Norman Abjorensen in this article published last November.

The trailblazer, the 1989 Tasmanian Parliamentary Accord, was a little different from most of those that followed. The independent signatories, who called themselves the Green independents, could also be regarded as a political party; and, more importantly, the accord was dominated by very prescriptive environmental policy demands. Each of the charters discussed in this article was the product of the local political circumstances in which the major parties had to deal with minorities to secure parliamentary support to form government. In Tasmania’s case the Liberal government of Robin Gray had lost its absolute majority at the election of May 1989 and five Green independents held the balance of power. The Greens were reluctant to support Gray because of his environmental record, but the premier refused to resign and intimated that he might call a second election. His resolve was not weakened by the publication of the Labor–Green accord on 29 May 1989 and he insisted on his right to meet the parliament as premier. When an attempt to bribe a Labor member to cross the floor – and save Gray’s government – was exposed, the political atmosphere became superheated. Gray lost a confidence motion on 29 June, resigned, and was replaced by Michael Field.

Field himself was to lose office in 1991 because of the collapse of the accord and the withdrawal of Green support. In hindsight, the accord contained the seeds of its own destruction by being too detailed and prescriptive. The Greens demanded too much and Labor was naive to believe it could deliver on those demands. The agreement was a product of Labor’s keenness to return to office after seven years in opposition and the Greens’ eagerness to lock in as many conservation goals as they could as quickly as possible. Of the accord’s seventeen discrete clauses only one dealt exclusively with parliamentary reform. Ten clauses made very specific environmental demands; Section 9, for example, stated that “the state export woodchip quota will not exceed 2.8889 million tonnes per annum.” Other sections dealt with independents’ access to ministers and public servants which, while reasonable in themselves, were presented in an uncompromising tone. Some demands, such as the one that called for the “abolition of subsidised liquor to ministers,” were relatively trivial. De facto independent leader Bob Brown was correct to state in the foreword to the accord that the Greens had gained “access to and influence on the whole range of government decisions” but, by being so concerned with detail, the document betrayed a lack of necessary trust between the parties.

After a term of majority Liberal government, a minority Liberal administration supported by the Greens suffered the same fate in 1998 as Field’s government had seven years earlier. Stung by these experiences, the major parties combined to reduce the size of the Legislative Assembly from thirty-five to twenty-five members which, under Tasmania’s proportional voting system, disadvantaged minor parties by raising the required quota for election from 12.5 per cent to 16.7 per cent. Despite achieving some policy outcomes favourable to the Greens, the Tasmanian accord came to be associated with political instability; its foundering provided a pretext for the major parties to entrench their dominance – until last weekend’s election, that is, when the question of a Green–major party accord became a live one again.

SEEMINGLY dominant, too, was Nick Greiner’s Liberal–National government in New South Wales as it faced an election in May 1991, but here the result would also give independents considerable leverage. The 1988 state election result had been disastrous for Labor and few doubted that Greiner would be re-elected at the 1991 poll. Yet the election produced a lower house in which the Coalition held forty-nine seats to the Labor Party’s forty-six, with four independents. Although one of the independents, Tony Windsor, declared himself in support of the government, the Liberal Party then lost a court-ordered by-election, robbing the government of its majority. Premier Greiner entered into lengthy negotiations with the other three independents (John Hatton, Clover Moore and Peter Macdonald) about the terms on which they might support the government. The result was a memorandum of understanding, signed on 31 October 1991. Like Tasmania’s accord, this was a very detailed and specific document. But almost all of its nineteen pages sought to enhance accountability of the government to parliament and people; it was policy-prescriptive only in the legal and constitutional areas of freedom of information, the powers of the ombudsman and the auditor-general, defamation laws and whistleblower protection. Significantly the memo had nothing to say about regional and rural New South Wales, reflecting the fact that Moore and Macdonald held Sydney seats and Hatton, while he represented a regional constituency, had made his parliamentary reputation as an anti-corruption campaigner.

Somewhat ironically, corruption was to terminate Greiner’s premiership. In October 1991 the former education minister Terry Metherell, who had not been included in the new cabinet, resigned from the Liberal Party to sit as an independent. He later accepted an unadvertised position with the Environment Protection Authority, precipitating a by-election that was won easily by the Liberal candidate. Greiner was accused of subverting normal public-service recruitment procedures to induce Metherell’s resignation and improve the government’s position in parliament. The independents insisted on referring the matter to ICAC, the Independent Commission Against Corruption, and threatened to support a no-confidence motion if the premier did not stand aside. For its part, ICAC ruled Greiner’s behaviour to be “corrupt” (a finding that was later overturned by the NSW Supreme Court) and he was forced to resign; his successor, John Fahey, presided over a minority government supported by the independents until the Coalition narrowly lost the 1995 election.

The circumstances of the 1995 election revealed the level of hostility towards the independents in both major parties. Greiner (now out of parliament) wrote personally to all voters in the electorates of Manly, Bligh and South Coast urging them not to support the independents, describing the trio as the power “alcoholics” of NSW politics. “Dirty tricks” campaigns were alleged to have taken place in Bligh and Manly, and Clover Moore described the campaign as the “nastiest” she had experienced. With the election result in the balance (Labor eventually won by one seat), the major parties seriously considered contriving another election rather than dealing with the independents.

The amount of vitriol heaped on the independents by the major parties and sections of the media suggests that they might well have achieved their accountability objectives. Certainly the success of the referendums on four-year parliaments and judicial independence put at the 1995 election indicates this was the case. The referendums were part of the independents’ agenda and, despite a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the major parties, they secured Yes votes of 66 per cent and 76 per cent respectively. Nevertheless, Clover Moore lamented that as soon as majority government returned to New South Wales after 1995 “most of the parliamentary reforms we achieved have been watered down or effectively set aside.” She explained that, while the independents hoped their reforms would change the “culture of the parliament,” their impact was overwhelmed by the “more powerful culture of the major parties, especially the Labor Party…”

IF THERE were devils to be found in the detail of the Tasmanian and NSW agreements, the same could not be said of the 1996 compact between the independent member for the Queensland seat of Gladstone, Liz Cunningham, and the leader of the National–Liberal Coalition, Rob Borbidge – for the simple reason that the agreement contained almost no detail. In fact it was hardly an “agreement” at all, for Cunningham declared her support for a minority Coalition government by way of a two-page statement read to the media from under a tree near her electorate office.

The circumstances leading to this arrangement were unusual and controversial. With the collapse of the Bjelke-Petersen regime in the wake of a royal commission into corruption, the Labor Party won the 1989 election in a landslide – its first victory since 1956. The 1989 result was replicated by Premier Wayne Goss and his colleagues in 1992. But at the July 1995 election, partly as a consequence of alienating environmentalists by planning a freeway through an ecologically sensitive corridor, Labor lost nine seats. The government emerged with a bare one-seat majority over the Coalition and the newly elected independent, Liz Cunningham. Then the Liberal Party successfully challenged the result in the seat of Mundingburra, which Labor had won by fourteen votes, and the Liberal candidate Frank Tanti won the seat at the subsequent by-election.

The result in Mundingburra robbed Labor of its parliamentary majority and handed the balance of power to Cunningham. In her statement declaring support for Borbidge as premier, Cunningham pledged her vote on confidence motions and supply but reserved her right to vote on all other legislation as she saw fit. Significantly, she did not demand accountability or policy commitments from the Coalition in return for her support, though she did receive additional staffing entitlements. Instead she defended her decision on the grounds that another election was best avoided, that the Coalition had polled over 53 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote (and voters had confirmed this result in Mundingburra) and that she believed the agreement between herself and the government was “best for my local electorate and for the state as a whole…” In expanding on the last point she cited such existing problems as a leaking roof at a local hospital. Unlike the Tasmanian Greens, who had Labor over a barrel and knew it, Cunningham installed a Coalition government largely because she sympathised with its conservative social agenda and was prepared to hand it an executive blank cheque.

The Borbidge government proved controversial and cavalier in its notions of accountability. When the parliament passed a no-confidence vote in the attorney-general in August 1997, for example, the premier backed his colleague’s refusal to resign. Despite numerous gaffes and controversies the parliament ran full term, but the 1998 state election was to prove one of the most dramatic in modern Australian politics. In the best debut electoral performance by any party since Labor began entering the colonial parliaments in the 1890s, the newly formed Pauline Hanson’s One Nation won eleven seats – five from the National Party and six from Labor. By winning six seats from the Liberals, the Labor Party, now led by Peter Beattie, emerged with forty-four seats to the Coalition’s thirty-two. Two independents were returned: Cunningham, again, and first-timer Peter Wellington, who won Nicklin from the Nationals and with whom Beattie began negotiations to form a minority government. These discussions culminated in a six-page letter of understanding from Beattie to Wellington dated 25 June 1998.

In contrast to the Cunningham compact, this agreement required Beattie to pledge the government to reform parliament, maintain a budget surplus and, reflecting recent scandals, issue and enforce detailed guidelines for ministerial credit cards, travel and expenses. Beattie did not agree to Wellington’s desire to implement citizen-initiated referendums, however, promising instead to hold regular “community cabinet meetings.” Despite this disagreement, sufficient mutual trust had been established that on the same day he received Beattie’s letter, Wellington agreed to support a Labor minority government on the usual terms, though Cunningham complained that Wellington had “jumped the gun” in sealing the contract with Beattie before exhausting all other options.

PARLIAMENTARY reforms were also the key to the agreement between Peter Lewis and the Labor Party in South Australia after the February 2002 state election produced a House of Assembly of twenty-three Labor members, twenty Liberals and four independents. Labor needed the support of just one of the independents to turn out the Liberal government of Premier Rob Kerin. When parliament resumed on 5 March Kerin nominated independent Rory McEwen as Speaker, and opposition leader Mike Rann nominated independent Peter Lewis. Lewis won in a secret ballot twenty-five votes to twenty-two.

Peter Lewis had been a Liberal member of parliament for over twenty years. Since the 1970s he had been a gadfly within his party, advocating parliamentary reform and various rural and irrigation policies. Eventually – on 5 July 2000 – he was expelled from the party room, and he resigned from the party in October. Lewis contested his seat of Hammond at the 2002 election under the banner of the Community Leadership Independence Coalition and defeated the Liberal candidate by 822 votes. Prior to the poll Lewis gave contradictory indications of which party he might support in a hung parliament. An article in the Adelaide Advertiser on 28 January 2002 reported that he “would support a Labor government if its major priority was parliamentary reform,” yet when asked by a reporter from the same paper two days before the poll whether he was intending to support the Labor Party, Lewis replied: “You can quote me. That’s bullshit… clear, unequivocal, hot, green, sloppy, fresh bullshit. I’m not into forming government with Labor.” Nevertheless he listed the Labor candidate second on his how-to-vote card. In a later civil case in which the Liberal Party tried unsuccessfully to have his election voided on the grounds that he misled voters, a Supreme Court judge described Lewis as “a man of high principle… at times impetuous and single minded. I must treat his evidence with caution…”

On 13 February 2002 Lewis announced that he would support a Labor government. He defended this “extraordinarily painful decision” in a statement to parliament subsequent to his election as Speaker. He highlighted his desire to provide stability and certainty of government but also said that he was angered by the Liberal Party’s “arrogant” assumption that he would automatically support its bid to continue in power. He also expressed concern at “the lack of ministerial accountability and parliamentary standards” and the spread of the “parasitic weed broomrape” over pasture land. Following Lewis’s statement the Liberal government lost a confidence vote twenty-three to twenty-two; Lewis did not vote.

Between polling day and the first meeting of the new parliament, Peter Lewis negotiated a Compact for Good Government with the Labor Party. The compact drew heavily on agreements in other states and included mechanisms to improve ministerial accountability, reform parliament and assist rural South Australia. What was different in Lewis’s compact was his insistence that the government “pass an Act of Parliament and make other such arrangements as deemed necessary by the Speaker [Lewis] to meet such costs and facilitating such processes as may be involved in any aspects of the work related to the establishment of a Constitutional Convention…” The convention was held in August 2003 and made a number of recommendations to be considered by the state parliament.

OF THE AGREEMENTS between independents and governing parties, the best-documented is the charter that brought to an end the colourful, controversial Kennett era in Victorian politics. Drawing on earlier agreements but heavily influenced by the specifics of the impact of Kennett’s government during the 1990s, the 1999 Independents’ Charter Victoria unexpectedly handed government to Labor under its new leader, Steve Bracks.

A Liberal–National Coalition led by Jeff Kennett had won the 1992 Victorian state election in a landslide following an unprecedented decade of Labor government. The 1992 result was confirmed in 1996, but at that election there were early signs of the shift in voter support that would take place in 1999. In the north-western rural seat of Mildura, Russell Savage became the first independent member elected to the Legislative Assembly since 1976, and independent candidates in other rural and regional electorates performed strongly. The following year another independent, Susan Davies, won a by-election in rural West Gippsland. But the Kennett government went to the polls in September 1999 in a seemingly invincible position. As in New South Wales in 1995, the election result was a cliffhanger. Strong swings to Labor in country Victoria and the election of a third independent, Craig Ingram, in Gippsland East produced a hung parliament, the Coalition securing forty-three seats to Labor’s forty-one, with the three independents holding the balance of power. The inconclusive result was complicated by the fact that the sitting Liberal member for Frankston East had died on polling day, triggering a supplementary election four weeks after the poll.

The month between polling day and the Frankston East “deferred election” was tense and dramatic. Susan Davies set the tone two days after the election when she told Kennett he should resign. Had her advice been accepted, the Coalition may well have retained government because Kennett’s aggressive political style was unsuited to negotiating with the independents. On the advice of a former premier of Victoria, Joan Kirner, Davies contacted the Queensland premier Peter Beattie and independent Peter Wellington to obtain a copy of their 1998 agreement, which served as a template for what became the Independents’ Charter Victoria. This document went through a number of drafts but, like its Queensland model, emphasised principles rather than details. Accountability of government, parliamentary reform and the social and economic rejuvenation of rural Victoria were the main themes.

For the three independent MPs, drafting the charter was easier than negotiating with the major parties and deciding which of them they would install in government. Premier Kennett wasted no time in putting pressure on them by telling the high-rating radio station 3AW on 23 September that they should support him because they held “conservative” electorates. Tension between the Coalition parties was evident when Kennett insisted on meeting with the independents without the National Party leader, Pat McNamara. Kennett’s negotiating tactic was to try to separate the newly elected Ingram from the other two. He offered the speakership to each of them and then later only to Savage and Ingram. In the midst of the negotiations Kennett also offered the speakership to a member of the National Party. Meetings were held between the independents and the party leaders before Labor and the Coalition were presented with the draft charter on 27 September, when the outcomes in several seats were still uncertain.

None of the participants in the negotiations expected the 1999 election to produce such a fluid political environment. The Liberal Party was in shock; Labor had not anticipated forming government; the independents were in the unexpected (and perhaps unwelcome) position of having to decide the next government. There was no shortage of unofficial advisers to the independents as a myriad of groups and individuals put forward interested and disinterested suggestions. Rating agency Standard & Poor’s (an enthusiastic supporter of the Kennett government’s neoliberal economic policies) issued a news release on 28 September that, while not overtly supporting either major party, warned against future temptation “to turn to pork-barrel politics to address the concerns of rural voters… and the independents…” The agency also observed: “A Labor minority government would also have to contend with a coalition majority in the Upper House.”

Upper house reform soon emerged as a critical issue in the negotiations between the independents and the party leaders. Lawyers and constitutional experts convinced the independents that they could best achieve and sustain their accountability objectives by altering the structure of the Legislative Council with a Senate-type proportional voting system. This presented the independents with a dilemma: the Labor Party had long supported electoral reform to the upper house, but a Labor government could not achieve it because of its minority position in the Council; whereas the Liberal Party, and especially Kennett, was on record as opposing proportional voting but had the upper house majority needed to deliver it. As Susan Davies later said, had Kennett given way on upper house reform the independents would have been under great pressure to support a minority Coalition government.

Kennett was maladroit in his detailed negotiations over the contents of the draft charter. His major problem was that accepting much of what the independents demanded, such as restoring the powers of the auditor-general, would mean repudiating policies he had vigorously advocated over the previous seven years. Labor was advantaged by the fact that most of the contents of the charter was settled Labor policy. Kennett’s strong, decisive but non-consultative leadership style proved wanting when he was required to negotiate and compromise with the independents. He restricted his negotiating team to a group of four – himself, deputy premier Pat McNamara and the two deputy party leaders – and as late as 30 September had not shown the draft of the charter to his party room.

Throughout the negotiations Kennett regularly contacted Savage and Ingram but not Davies, whereas Bracks left all three to their own deliberations. Kennett seriously misread the allegiances of the independents – believing, wrongly, that Davies was a lost cause for the Coalition, and underestimating Savage’s hostility. When Savage was first elected in 1996, the premier had directed Coalition members not to socialise with him and in a later parliamentary exchange called him a “fuckwit.” Kennett made the mistake of trying to alter individual clauses of the charter rather than, as the independents insisted, responding to the document as a whole. The formal Coalition response delivered on 12 October was a detailed document of eighteen pages with a further twelve pages of attachments. Kennett committed to the establishment of a Constitutional Commission to report on possible parliamentary reform, but did not commit to acting on its recommendations. Indeed he stated that “the Coalition is of the view that the options for parliamentary change [in relation to the Legislative Council] put forward by the ALP are fundamentally flawed…,” thereby rejecting a key plank of the independents’ reform agenda. On the other key issue, rural reconstruction, much of the response was given over to a tendentious defence of past Coalition policies.

The independents could be forgiven for concluding that Kennett would rather have gone into opposition than accept the constraints of minority government. Or perhaps he was so confident that Savage and perhaps Ingram would not be prepared to alienate their conservative rural constituencies by installing Labor that he believed he could afford to be obdurate on some points and secure a freer hand in government.

The opposition leader, Steve Bracks, also responded to the independents on 12 October. “I support the Charter in its entirety…” he told them, going on to detail how a Labor government would implement its terms. Having received the responses of the government and the opposition, the independents announced that they would give their decision at 11am on Monday 18 October, two days after the Frankston East supplementary election. On 13 October the Labor Party sent a memorandum of understanding to the independents which sought to establish a formal relationship between them. Davies and Ingram had a meeting with Bracks and his deputy John Thwaites at Parliament House on the eve of the Frankston East election at which Ingram, who had kept his own counsel up to this point, said he would support Labor if it won the next day’s poll. Susan Davies recalls what transpired after the meeting ended:

I was half-way down Victoria Parade when I got a call from Bracks on the mobile. He said he wanted me to come back to parliament. He was pretty pushy. He didn’t usually sound like that. I went back.

Bracks and Thwaites had a memorandum of understanding which they wanted Craig to sign there and then. Craig was going to be out of reach up the Snowy [River] over the weekend. He didn’t want to leave them with a signed document which was only going to be relevant if they won Frankston East and they wanted a signed document as early as possible if that was the outcome.

I took it. I drove home with the memorandum of understanding in my glovebox. It was a very strange feeling. I wasn’t going to sign it until I knew what was happening in Frankston East, and said I would only sign then if there was a clear indisputable result. Craig told me to keep it safe and rip it up if the result went the other way.

Labor won Frankston East decisively. On the following day Bracks’s senior adviser flew by light plane to Newhaven airport, where Davies signed the memorandum. The adviser then flew on to Mildura and collected Savage’s signature and then back to Frankston where Bracks, who was attending a celebratory barbecue, affixed his signature. It had been a month of unprecedented high drama which concluded with the installation of the first minority Labor government in Victoria since 1947.

THE LATEST of the agreements involving independent MPs and large parties involves Gerry Wood MP and the governing Labor Party in the Northern Territory. Struck in August last year after the resignation of Alison Anderson from Labor, it shares a potentially fatal flaw with the first case we discussed, the Green–Labor agreement in Tasmania in 1989. It is overly detailed (thirty-seven projects, many in Mr Wood’s electorate, are listed) and is likely to suffer the same fate as its predecessor.

The majority of the charters we’ve discussed were intended – by the independent signatories, at least – to increase the accountability of executive government. Did they achieve that objective? Alas, Clover Moore’s pessimistic appraisal of New South Wales after the return of majority government in 1995 holds true for the other jurisdictions as well. “Accountability independents” discovered that changing parliamentary cultures, especially in the lower houses, was to prove much more difficult than changing governments. Why? As the author of a recent study of the House of Lords explains, “even true democrats [once] in government will find it hard to prioritise a parliamentary reform which will involve their work being scrutinised more closely.”

This is not to suggest that the various independent charters did not bring about important reforms – most notably in Victoria, where the upper house was thoroughly renovated in 2003. The difficulty lies in making the reforms durable when governments regain parliamentary majorities and no longer need to accommodate minorities. The further development of an “accountability culture” in upper houses presents the best option for durable reform. The independents may come to be seen as “pathfinders” in putting issues and reforms like these on the political agenda, to be pursued and entrenched by those who follow. •

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ONCE UPON A TIME, when the Australian Labor Party was a democratic socialist party, it often took seriously Karl Marx’s dictum that “philosophers have interpreted the world long enough: the time has come to change it.” Labor’s Victorian branch needs to listen to Dr Marx once again.

Last week the state ombudsman tabled in the Victorian parliament a devastating report on the goings on in the Brimbank City Council in Melbourne’s north-western suburbs. It was a veritable hamburger-with-the-lot of malfeasance and misfeasance, including conflict of interest, improper use of powers, bullying of councillors and staff, misuse of funds, improper release of information and that hardy perennial – pornography on council-owned laptops.

The ombudsman put his finger on the root cause of this dysfunctional behaviour – internal party factionalism. Brimbank is Labor territory within the federal division of Gorton, which is held for the party with 71 per cent of the vote. Brimbank is also right-wing Labor territory, with the Labor Unity faction dominant. But that faction is itself balkanised, with the report finding that rivals George Seitz MP and local identity Hakki Suleyman have been fighting for political dominance in the area for years. When Mr Suleyman’s daughter, local councillor Natalie Suleyman, failed to win preselection for the ultra-safe state seat of Kororoit in 2008 all hell broke loose.

The progeny of Victorian Labor factionalism is branch-stacking in order to gain preselection for safe seats. It typically works like this: factional warlords, sometimes local councillors, connect up with leaders of ethnic communities to recruit members, known as “stacks,” into Labor branches, where they turn up to vote as directed and are rarely seen again. Often, the ethnic leaders or their family members are then rewarded with jobs in the electorate offices of Labor politicians. What this exploitative practice tells us about a party supposedly committed to fairness and social equity is obvious.

Brimbank and environs are heaven-made for branch stackers. As well as being Victoria’s second largest municipality, with an annual budget of $133 million, it is the most multicultural, with no fewer than fifty-three culturally diverse communities. Over 50 per cent of its 174,000 residents speak a language other than English.

Because of his powers, the Ombudsman’s report is notably thorough and illuminating, but anyone who has not been asleep for the past few decades has known about the factional toxicity and the odious practice of ethnic branch stacking. Labor members were alerted to many of the problems in 1998 when lawyer Mark Dreyfus, now a federal MP, conducted a review of the party’s organisation.

Unlike Dr Marx, Victorian Labor power brokers have only nibbled at the problem, introducing relatively minor rule changes that mean the stackers now have to be a bit more cunning. A cynic might observe that the Labor hierarchs have little incentive for real reform since they flourish under the factional system.

As a follower of Marx (V.I. Lenin) once asked, “What is to be done?” Labor could follow the lead of its fraternal British counterpart and ban factions altogether and expel anyone who tries to form one. While this would win the approval of the majority of genuine branch members who are not members of factions, and many of whom loathe them, it is probably too courageous a decision. But what about a moratorium on factionalism for the life of the next state parliament? We might just discover that parties can function without them, or at least without rigid factions.

The last time the Victorian ALP faced these sorts of problems was in the aftermath of the 1955 split which brought forth the Democratic Labor Party. The problem then wasn’t multi-factionalism but the authoritarianism of a single faction that dominated all layers of the party. That problem was solved by Labor’s federal executive intervening and restructuring the branch in 1970. That was nearly four decades ago and perhaps “it’s time” again.

But why, you ask, does the Labor Party need to put itself though all this political pain when the public don’t seem to care about factional hanky-panky and the state Labor government seems to have insulated itself from the contagion – for now? Well, we saw in the late 1980s how dysfunctional factionalism helped destroy the good Labor government of John Cain.

More importantly, while Labor governments can function in spite of poorly performing party organisations, Labor oppositions cannot. •

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