The sheer volume of material continues to fuel efforts to document and analyse the career of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. The latest is a multi-author, multi-volume (four are promised) appraisal edited by the Menzies Institute’s Zachary Gorman. Based on a series of conferences, the books aim to promote “discussion, critical analysis and reflection on Menzies, the era he defined and his enduring legacy.” Contributions are not limited to those of unabashed admirers; writers from the other side of the political fence also offer their assessments, as do ostensible neutrals.

The first volume, The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942, covers the period from Menzies’s birth in 1894 to 1942, though not all chapters fit neatly within those boundaries. James Edelman and Angela Kittikhoun’s useful chapter on Menzies and the law, for example, takes in the Communist Party Dissolution Bill, eight years beyond 1942.

Following political scientist (and ex-MP) David Kemp’s introduction, the book’s early chapters focus on the family environment into which Menzies was born and the social and political culture of the era. As most readers will be aware, his father ran a general store in the western Victorian town of Jeparit, saving the son from any credible charges of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But while the small business ethos had a crucial impact on Menzies’s political philosophy, he was exposed to a different worldview by his maternal grandfather, John Sampson, an active trade unionist, though without being persuaded to change his own emerging outlook.

Menzies’s academic record in Melbourne University’s law faculty was outstanding and he also took part in student politics and campus journalism. His failure to enlist during the first world war — a family decision prompted by the fact that two brothers were already serving — is well known, and journalist Troy Bramston reveals how it may have contributed to Menzies’s fiancée’s ultimate decision to break off their engagement. Menzies had no doubt that his failure to enlist propelled him away from a brilliant legal career and onto the parliamentary path. He needed to offer “public service.”

For this reviewer, one of the most interesting chapters is historian Greg Melluish’s account of Menzies’s advocacy of liberal education and its connection with his ideas about democracy. That Menzies was a “scholarship boy” at both school and university is reasonably well known and, Melluish argues, helps explain his support for “meritocracy” rather than inherited and entrenched privilege (with an obvious exemption for the monarchy). This commitment seems crucial in explaining Menzies’s insistence that he (and later, his party) was liberal, not conservative.

Of course, conservatism existed (and exists) in Australia, and the parties Menzies joined and led garnered the vast preponderance of that vote. He revered English political and legal institutions as springing from liberal values, but their defence surely entailed a conservative outlook. Melluish stresses that Menzies understood English democracy as reflective of a specific common culture; in contrast to the Americans, “he did not see democracy as being universally applicable.” This could help explain why conservatives may view multiculturalism as a problem, undermining the necessary foundations of their version of democracy — a question that will perhaps be tackled in later volumes. Of course, Menzies’s view could also lend itself to the darker idea that democracy is not suitable for all, especially those viewed as “backward.”

Among other prime ministers, probably only Gough Whitlam could be as closely identified with the case for liberal education. For Menzies, writing in the 1930s, British history demonstrated that such an education “would produce the sorts of people who possessed the capacities to make that system of government [Westminster] work properly.” Ironically, in view of today’s emphasis on utilitarian degrees, Menzies can be seen as enlisting the (now) maligned bachelor of arts in defence of the practical aim of good government.

Melluish also usefully distinguishes between Menzies’s idea of a liberal education and the wider idea of “Western civilisation.” Menzies was fixated on Australia’s British heritage; the Greek and Roman stuff could, it seems, be left to people like Whitlam.

Menzies’s version of the university was obviously not the “oppositional” one. But, as Melluish points out, this critical variant was emerging at the time Menzies was writing. It would probably approach its zenith during the second half of Menzies’s long term in office — which should make for an interesting discussion in the final volume in this series.

Political scientist Judith Brett explores the parallels between Menzies and Alfred Deakin, sons of small businessmen, both of them influenced by the liberalism of the Victorian goldfields, both following very similar educational paths, and of course, both having more than one go as prime minister. It is Deakin, she writes, “whom Menzies might have looked to as an exemplar of national leadership.”

A useful reminder of the important role religion could play in forming political beliefs comes in historian David Furse-Roberts’s chapter on the impact of Menzies’s Presbyterianism. The connection between his faith and his political philosophy seems so strong that a liberal atheist might have felt less than welcome in the party Menzies would form. And, had he been around, Menzies may well have been puzzled to observe some Liberal staffers take an affirmation rather than an oath when they appeared in the defamation case brought by Bruce Lehrmann against Network Ten and one of its journalists.

By contrast, it would be an oddity today if any senior politician identified mainstream religion (as opposed to the “prosperity gospel” variant embraced by some prominent conservatives) as a key factor in their political outlook. As judged by Furse-Roberts, Menzies’s version of Presbyterianism emphasised a “selfless individualism,” acknowledging the ameliorative role of the state but also its limitations: “it fell primarily to the compassionate spirit and self-sacrifice of individuals to succour the needy and further the common good.” This clearly eschews socialism, but Furse-Roberts suggests it goes “far beyond John Stuart Mill’s minimalist ethic of ‘no harm’ to others.” One might observe how that reference to the “common good” contrasts with the overwhelmingly individualist emphasis of the more recent version of the Liberal Party.

Historian Frank Bongiorno’s chapter, “Menzies and Curtin at War,” is a finely balanced contribution, acknowledging the positives of Menzies’s first prime ministership and also (in anticipation) recognising his “postwar nation-building achievements,” which “look better every year, as we contemplate the policy failures of our own century and the conspicuous absence of compelling vision.” This generosity from a Labor-leaning historian suggests that the defensiveness of Liberal partisans in certain chapters may to some extent have been directed at a shrinking target.

Anne Henderson mounts a characteristically robust defence of Menzies from charges of appeasement and softness on Nazi Germany, stressing the absence of a perfect record among any of the key players. Mindful of the passage of time, I was left wondering how many Australians would know to whom “Pig-Iron Bob” refers. How many in the press gallery?

Journalist Nick Cater examines the role of Menzies’s famous “The Forgotten People” radio address in 1942, highlighting the importance of the family home as the central focus of that talk. While a Labor minister could deride this support for increased home ownership as turning workers into “little capitalists,” Menzies’s philosophy emphasised the “social, economic and moral value of home ownership.” Saving for a home was a “concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving.” National patriotism, in other words, “inevitably springs from the instinct to defend and preserve our own homes.” How might the renters on the battlefields in 1942 have responded to this observation, I wonder?

Political scientist Scott Prasser sums up the learning experiences that would enable Menzies to resurrect his career and become Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. This involves some projection, for he still had much learning to do (during seven more years as opposition leader) after the notional end date for this volume. That quibble aside, Prasser’s contribution is a useful one since Menzies’s success can’t be attributed mostly to luck and dud opponents. The checklist: modest promises, sound coalition relations, a willingness to adopt new directions, and an awareness of the nation’s political architecture. His return to power and the use to which he put his learning experiences await us in the next volume.

In his introduction to the second and latest of the series, The Menzies Watershed, editor Zachary Gorman acknowledges the limitations of the “call for conference papers” method the project employs, which risks missing “certain topics of great interest and relevance.” This dilemma is reflected in the ensuing chapters, with some likely to be of appeal to the general political scholar–aficionado and others more in the niche category. My focus will be largely on the former.

In his chapter on Menzies and the Movement, Lucas McLennan makes the case for a good deal of similarity of emphasis between Menzies’s Anglo-Protestantism and the version of Catholic social teaching (and consequent public policy) embraced by lawyer–activist B.A. Santamaria and his disciples in the (Catholic Social Studies) Movement. It is certainly the case that both men would have seen their vigorous anti-communism as having a strong religious component, especially reflected in the anti-communist foreign and defence policies embraced by Menzies’s party and endorsed by Santamaria and (after the Labor Party’s split in 1955) his political creation the Democratic Labor Party.

McLennan’s case is possibly less convincing on the domestic front. While the Movement may have preferred subsidiarity over centralism, it seems unlikely that Menzies would have seen much merit in the (frankly weird) land settlement proposals advanced by Santamaria. And we can be fairly confident that the Movement’s view (as expressed in 1948) that Christians should seek “to break up concentration of wealth” would not have secured much support at a meeting of the Kooyong branch of the Liberal Party. Ultimately, even Santamaria’s version of Catholic social teaching necessarily involved an element of collectivism that would not have appealed to Menzies.

Anne Henderson’s brief chapter on Menzies’s successful opposition to Labor’s bank nationalisation plans possibly tells the reader as much about the Chifley government’s ideological rigidity (or commitment to principle — take your pick) and misreading of the public mood as it does about Menzies’s deft exploitation of the issue. Two decades after the Depression, the anti-banks sentiment was clearly not what it used to be, although Henderson’s depiction of the banks battle as “class war as Australia had never seen it” might have been challenged by some survivors from that period. In passing, it might be observed that since Labor lost the double dissolution election it provoked on this issue in 1951, it has not held a Senate majority on any occasion.

Tom Switzer evidences and reinforces the generally accepted wisdom that Menzies was no radical right-wing reformer. He retained and relied on several of the senior bureaucrats who had advised Chifley, and his economic policies were of the Keynesian variety, reflecting a consensus that would persist until the end of the Fraser period. In his introduction to this volume, Gorman had noted Menzies’s good fortune in not being “exposed to a centre-right echo chamber of policy advice,” insulating him from big overreaches (with the exception of the attempt to ban the Communist Party).

Keynesianism is again a key theme in David Lee’s chapter on economic management. It also contains a useful outline of cabinet and public service structures and processes in the early years of the Menzies government.

Troy Bramston’s chapter, “The Art of Power,” draws on his well-received biography of Menzies and hence comment here will be minimal: Menzies had been an effective political campaigner, “but campaigning is not government” (wise advice). Building on his previous experience, consultation, reflection and wide reading, he developed a capacity for management and administration that served him well.

Charles Richardson examines aspects of Menzies’s approach to the crown and imperial relations, the Statute of Westminster and the office of governor-general, drawing some comparisons with the attitudes of his nemesis H.V. Evatt. In referring to Menzies’s concern about the “separate status of the crown in right of the different dominions”— the question of how the monarch could be at peace and war at the same time in relation to the same foreign power — Richardson delightfully describes this as an “absurdity” that we still live with. The fact that most wars are now waged without formal declarations of war may help, at least at a technical level.

Richardson endorses the view that Menzies should have made the switch from a British to an Australian governor-general before Casey’s appointment in 1965, but notes the prime minister’s quaint criterion that it was essential with any appointment that “the Queen knew them.”

Lyndon Megarrity seeks to correct the misconception that Australia’s involvement with overseas students only commenced with the Colombo Plan. He outlines the history of such activity (which could involve some fancy manoeuvring round the White Australia policy) and describes policy before the second world war as “ad hoc and reactive.” The Chifley government entered the soft diplomacy business of scholarships, but Megarrity sees any potential benefits as being negated by immigration minister Arthur Calwell’s notorious hardline attitude on deportations: no grey areas in the White Australia policy for him.

The role of the new external affairs minister Percy Spender in the creation of the Colombo Plan in 1950 is well known. While acknowledging the Chifley government’s creation (pre-Colombo) of a relevant policy management framework, Megarrity credits the Menzies government with a defter handling than Labor of tensions between the Plan and the White Australia policy, assisting with the overall enhancement of Australia’s reputation in the region. In the cold war context, the scheme could “help maintain stability in Southeast Asia and increase resistance to Communism.”

Chapters on the creation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and on the role of Spender in (among other things) negotiating the ANZUS treaty serve to highlight the electoral supremacy the Menzies government would establish as the guardian of national security, an advantage his party has largely retained to the present day. Nicolle Flint revisits the issue (it probably no longer qualifies as a “debate”) over whether Menzies’s role in the Liberal Party’s creation has been overstated (spoiler alert: no). Lorraine Finlay, addressing the dilemma of “what liberty should be provided for the enemies of liberty,” focuses on the attempts to ban the Communist Party, though current trends may remind us of the timelessness of that dilemma. Andrew Blyth provides an account of think tanks’ influence on the Menzies government, but to some extent the title is misleading: the Institute of Public Affairs was effectively the only player in that game, although pressure groups and committees of inquiry are also covered in the chapter.

Christopher Beer’s chapter uses the federal electorate of Robertson on the central New South Wales coast to make some observations about the impact of early Menzies government policies. He includes useful electoral information about the seat, which serves (for this reviewer) to highlight the absence of comparable nationwide electoral data and commentary on the elections of the period. Clearly, the “call for papers” did not evince the relevant interest.

By the end of the period covered in this volume, Menzies had won three elections as Liberal leader, disarming his internal critics, and even greater dominance lay ahead: Labor partisans might like to look away now. •

The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942
Edited by Zachary Gorman | Melbourne University Publishing | $44.99 | 222 pages

The Menzies Watershed: Liberalism, Anti-Communism, Continuities 1943–1954
Edited by Zachary Gorman | Melbourne University Press | $45 | 256 pages

The post The younger Menzies appeared first on Inside Story.

Evatt’s move from court to federal parliament was considered “a most regrettable precedent” by Menzies, who was by then prime minister. (While it may have been regrettable, it wasn’t much of a precedent, never being repeated over the ensuing eighty-three years.) Evatt responded in kind, suggesting that Menzies would lose the next election. (That, too, proved a less than accurate prediction.) As Anne Henderson sees it in her new book, Menzies vs Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics, battle was joined from that time.

Reading Henderson’s opening chapters it’s hard not to be staggered by Evatt’s workload as external affairs minister and attorney-general. No minister today would take on these dual roles, and Henderson highlights the difficulties the combination caused for Labor in government, especially at a time of war.

It would have been a punishing load for the best-organised minister (which Evatt clearly was not), and was exacerbated by his frequent absences overseas in the pre-jet age, including a year as president of the UN General Assembly. As an often-absentee attorney-general, he was unable to contribute fully to vital tasks, including defending the government’s bank nationalisation plan before the High Court.

Evatt became Labor leader after Ben Chifley’s death in June 1951. His role later that year in defeating Menzies’s referendum to ban the Communist Party is seen by many as his finest moment, but Henderson downplays the victory. Support for the ban was recorded by polls at 73 per cent in early August but by polling day, six weeks later, it had dropped to just under 50 per cent. (The referendum was carried in only three states.) Henderson cites the history of defeated referendum proposals and asks why the Yes even got close — as if falling support for the ban followed a law of nature regardless of effective political campaigning.

It’s true that early support for many referendum proposals has evaporated by polling day. But it is difficult to think of a question for which Yes campaigners enjoyed more favourable circumstances than this one. The cold war was in full swing, Australian troops were fighting the communists on the Korean peninsula (under a UN flag), and communism was seen as an existential threat, broadly detested within the electorate. Menzies had warned of the possibility of a third world war within three years; strong anti-communist elements within Evatt’s own party supported the ban.

Indeed, one might equally ask why Menzies couldn’t pull it off. I suspect that he would have appreciated the irony that it was the internationalist Evatt, not the Anglophile Menzies, who campaigned by citing British justice’s onus on the state to prove guilt rather than (as the anti-communists proposed) on the accused to prove innocence.

As with most failed referendums, the loss did the prime minister no harm. In fact, Henderson makes the interesting suggestion that it saved him from having to enact legislation that may “have been as divisive and unsettling to civic order” as the McCarthy hearings were in the United States. It’s impossible to prove of course, but Australia definitely didn’t need that kangaroo court–type assault on individuals’ reputations and lives.

Henderson’s account of the Petrov affair and the subsequent royal commission — a disastrous time for Evatt — traverses territory that is probably less contentious than it was a generation ago. On the Labor Party’s 1955 split, she quotes with approval the claim by former Liberal prime minister John Howard that Labor’s rules afforded too much power to its national executive: a more genuinely federal structure (like that of the Liberals) would have rendered Evatt’s intervention more difficult and a split in the party less likely.

Whether a Victorian Labor branch left mostly to its own devices would have sorted out its problems is unclear, but the opportunity was unlikely given the hostility of Evatt and his supporters to the group of Victorians they saw as treacherous anti-communists. Ironically, it was this capacity to intervene that would facilitate a federal takeover of the moribund (and still split-crippled) Victorian ALP fifteen years later. That intervention eventually reinvigorated the state branch, establishing a Labor dominance in Victorian state elections and in the state’s federal seats that persists to the present day.

Henderson also poses the question of whether a different Labor leader could have avoided the split. What if deputy leader Arthur Calwell had been installed after the 1954 election loss? She speculates that Calwell might have been able to offer concessions to the anti-communist Victorians and stresses an absence of intense ideological fervour among many of those who would soon be expelled from the party.

While it is hard to envisage a leader handling the crisis less effectively than Evatt did, Henderson quotes Labor MP Fred Daly’s view that Calwell at the time was “hesitant, uncertain and waiting for Evatt’s job” — hardly the stuff of firm leadership. Arthur was always prepared to wait.

It may be true that most of the anti-communist Labor MPs, even in Victoria, were not fervent ideologues, but possibly more relevant was the ideological predisposition of the powerful Catholic activist B.A. Santamaria, who was able to influence state Labor’s decision-making bodies and preselections from outside the party. Santamaria boasted in 1952 to his mentor, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, that his Catholic Social Studies Movement (the infamous “Movement”) would be able to transform the leadership of the Labor movement within a few years and install federal and state MPs able to implement “a Christian social program.”

This may have been overly ambitious nationally, but Santamaria’s undue influence over Victorian Labor was already a concern for some. Moreover, the party Santamaria envisaged might be viewed as essentially a church or “confessional” party, at odds with traditional Australian “Laborism,” not to mention with the main elements of a pluralist, secular democracy.

Henderson’s most interesting observation, for this reviewer, is her contention that Evatt’s lack of anti-communist conviction owed much to his being “an intense secularist.” It is certainly the case that critics of communism in this era often preceded the noun with the adjectives “godless” or “atheistic.” In a predominantly Christian society like Australia, communism’s atheistic nature was a damning feature, especially among Catholics, including Catholic Labor MPs. Presbyterian Menzies also held strongly to this view.

If this review has focused more on Evatt than on Menzies, this reflects the enduring questions Evatt’s leadership raises — including the state of his mental health, which is seen by some as helping to explain his erratic and self-destructive behaviour. (Henderson doesn’t consider this question, but it was well covered by biographer John Murphy.)

Menzies, having survived the referendum result, was also undaunted by his narrow election victory in 1954, secured with a minority of the vote, a lucky escape to be repeated in 1961. He went for the Evatt jugular whenever it was exposed — which was often, as Henderson shows vividly. John Howard would later claim, on his own behalf, that the times suited him. Menzies had that advantage in spades, and he exploited it artfully.

If there is a central theme to Menzies’s approach to his battle with Evatt, it is his characterisation of the Labor leader as a naive internationalist, oblivious to the emerging threat of monolithic communism, especially to the north of Australia. This is a criticism endorsed by Henderson. A cynic might suggest that the communist threat was not only electoral gold for Menzies but also provided a convenient pretext for him to maintain his unwavering support for European colonialism. Better the colonialists than the communists.

Neither character was a team player by instinct, but Menzies adapted better and learned from mistakes. Among other flaws, Evatt’s lack of self-awareness was both crucial and crippling. There is no doubt that the winner of the “great rivalry” was Menzies.

As a known partisan, Henderson runs the risk that her book will be seen in that light, and that her put-downs of Evatt’s admirers — “a collective of scribblers,” “the Evatt fan club” — will be viewed accordingly. Her failure to acknowledge any merit in Evatt’s referendum victory will seem churlish to some. But Henderson can’t be faulted on the book’s readability: it’s a one-sitting job for those fascinated by the politics of that era.

I was left wondering about the depth of the personal animus between the two men. Henderson quotes Menzies accusing Evatt of being too interested in power — as “a menace to Australia” to be kept out of office “by hook or by crook.” Prime ministers and opposition leaders routinely find themselves in settings where some form of civil, non-political conversation is virtually unavoidable. What on earth might these two have talked about? Well, both of them loved their cricket. •

Menzies vs Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics
By Anne Henderson | Connor Court | $34.95 | 236 pages

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In updating his account Rees has been assisted by access to the subject’s extensive personal archives granted by Fischer’s wife Judy. These cover his army experience, his parliamentary career and his time as Australian ambassador to the Vatican, and include a family memoir and (bravely) a pocket diary covering his final months of cancer treatment. Rees also lists an impressive number of interviewees (including Fischer).

Fischer was born to a Catholic sheep-farming family in southwestern New South Wales. After state primary school, he undertook his secondary education at the prestigious Jesuit-run Xavier College in Melbourne. He found the experience less than totally enjoyable, but was no academic slouch and matriculated easily.

He eschewed immediate university study, however, in favour of a return to the farm. He was soon conscripted for national service, and declined to opt for an alternative scheme available for those on the land. Opposed neither to conscription nor to the Vietnam war, he undertook officer training after induction.

As Rees tells it, there was more to Fischer’s decision than the simple conservative principle of doing one’s duty. He extended his national service in order to see action, contending that he would have wasted his eighteen months’ officer training if he didn’t perform the role on the battlefield. His superiors had identified leadership qualities in Fischer and it seems that he was keen to put them to the test.

In Vietnam, Fischer saw death and wounding at close range, and was himself the victim of non-life-threatening wounds. He secured the respect of his superiors and of those under him as a well-organised and measured decision-maker, thoughtful and clear-thinking.

By the time he joined the (then) Country Party in 1969, his war service could only be a plus for his chances of parliamentary preselection, a career direction he seems to have settled on after his return to the farm. If any nascent political ambition played a role in his decision to seek battlefield action, it is mentioned neither by Fischer in his memoir (as related by Rees) nor by Rees as biographer.

At the politically precocious age of twenty-four, Fischer won Country Party preselection for the new seat of Sturt in the NSW parliament. Rees notes the comparative novelty of a Catholic in that party’s ranks, with Fischer mischievously suggesting that his surname (as spelled) may have misled some preselectors to assume that he was of solid Lutheran stock.

Military precision proved to be a transferable skill, and Fischer was able to make good use of his organisational and logistical talents to secure preselection and subsequent election to parliament at the 1971 state election. No matter how small, towns were visited and meetings addressed. He became a prolific worker of local media, print and electronic, as a prelude to doing the same on a national stage.

State parliament proved a frustration for Fischer, possibly stimulating his penchant for the attention-grabbing gimmicks that would be associated with him for much of his career. A speech about lions at risk of escaping the Dubbo Zoo and surviving in the mountains, threatening humans and fellow beasts, was a case in point. On a more serious note, he obtained first-hand experience of the corrupt behaviour of Liberal premier Robert Askin but took no action — a failing he later claimed to regret.

Like many state politicians before him, Fischer decided national politics was where the action was. He secured preselection for the federal seat of Farrer for the 1984 federal election and easily won the seat. But he couldn’t have known that twelve years in opposition lay ahead. After advancing to the opposition frontbench (with, appropriately, the veterans’ affairs portfolio) after John Howard’s accession to the Liberal leadership in September 1985, he established himself as a serious player in both his party and the Coalition.

Straddling the proverbial barbed-wire fence over the unhinged prime ministerial ambitions of Queensland Nationals premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, which effectively rendered the Coalition unelectable in 1987 against Bob Hawke’s Labor government, Fischer justified his ambivalence as a case of not wanting to split his own organisation. A demoralised opposition reverted to internecine wrangling, and in May 1990 a recycled Andrew Peacock replaced Howard. For the first time in their history, the Nationals dispensed with a leader, replacing Ian Sinclair with Charles Blunt. Fischer was active in bringing about the change.

Although the Nationals lost five seats in the Coalition defeat of 1990, Fischer increased his majority in Farrer. Post-election, he decided to contest the party leadership (vacant following Blunt’s loss of his seat) and defeated John Sharp twelve votes to eight after the elimination of the three other candidates. Sadly for many a subeditor, the Nationals had passed up the chance to replace Blunt with Sharp.

Fischer is depicted as a lukewarm supporter of Liberal leader John Hewson’s plan for a goods and service tax, which proved to be decisive in the Coalition’s fifth successive election defeat in 1993. He was clearly more at home with Howard as a Coalition partner and, after Alexander Downer’s failed Liberal leadership, was probably relieved to contest the 1996 election alongside the veteran.

The Coalition victory in March 1996 saw Fischer assume the roles of deputy prime minister and trade minister, later admitting to having elements of self-doubt at the time of his swearing-in. A month later, the first crisis for the new government would come from a tragically unexpected quarter with the mass shootings at Port Arthur in Tasmania.

The Howard government’s consequential restrictions on gun ownership were widely supported in the community but not necessarily in the constituency represented by Fischer’s party. But he was unwavering in his advocacy and made the case to those affected, accepting that the newly elected right-wing populist Pauline Hanson would exploit the situation to lure resentful Nationals voters towards what subsequently became her One Nation Party. Targeted for abuse and threats, Fischer stayed the course in what qualified as one of his most meritorious contributions to public life.

Fischer had taken the leadership when the Nationals were dealing with the winding down of much of the traditional tariff protection that had long been the party’s raison d’être. The result was an identity problem and a new vulnerability to electoral challenge. This added significance to his role as trade minister as he sought new markets for the products of his rural base.

He is generally seen to have done a good job in the portfolio, an impression probably reinforced by the overall bipartisanship in this policy area. His keen interest in Asia, and his success in establishing good relations with various Asian leaders over many years are cited by Rees as contributing factors.

Fischer’s accession to party leadership seems to have prompted him to tackle the conservative male politician’s version of the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice: he was “in want of a wife.” In 1992, at forty-six, he married Judy Brewer. Two sons followed, but the customary family problem of the absent parliamentarian parent hit the family harder than most after his first son was diagnosed with moderate autism spectrum disorder. Duty, of a different nature, now called and he stepped down from party leadership and the ministry in July 1999, and declined to recontest Farrer at the 2001 election. He was only fifty-five, but had been an MP — state, then federal — for more than thirty years.

He was appointed chair of Tourism Australia in late 2004, not long before Scott Morrison was appointed managing director. Suffice to say that nothing in Fischer’s account of Morrison’s turbulent tenure will do anything to improve the former prime minister’s tattered reputation.

Later, Fischer accepted prime minister Kevin Rudd’s invitation to serve as Australian ambassador to the Vatican, which he did from 2009 to 2012. He was an active diplomat and relished the contacts and lifestyle. Of interest in this context was his subsequent reluctance (unlike John Howard and Tony Abbott) to provide a character reference for Cardinal George Pell when he faced a jail sentence over allegations of child sex abuse. A more liberal Catholic than the dogmatic Abbott, Fischer was disturbed by Pell’s refusal to accept responsibility for what happened on his watch and his apparent indifference to the fate of the victims of abuse.

Fischer was silent when Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, defender of traditional family values and opponent of same-sex marriage, was exposed as having had an affair with a staff member, but recorded for his memoir that he viewed him as a hypocrite.

While Fischer was an active Catholic, he was open to the positives of other religions, notably Buddhism, an interest developed during a long relationship with Bhutan and its people. He was also a devotee of classical music and art, but these were possibly not credentials likely to enhance a National Party MP’s standing, and some colleagues were unimpressed when details surfaced.

Rees credits Fischer with ensuring Coalition unity during his years as leader by keeping the Nationals backbench in check, a claim made more credible in light of the subsequent leadership instability, which continues to this day. A believer in climate change and concerned about its effect on his primary-producer constituency, he would probably have struggled to accommodate its emergence as part of the culture wars agenda rather than a matter of science.

Rees clearly admires Fischer, but he is not entirely uncritical. In particular, he instances some of Fischer’s intemperate reactions to the High Court’s Mabo and Wik native title judgements, suggesting that “Fischer’s Social Darwinist speech reflected the thinking to be found in postwar primary school social studies textbooks.” At the time of Wik, Fischer was rebuked by the chief justice for possible breach of the separation-of-powers doctrine. He was suitably chastened, but his “defence” that he should have run his comments by his staff seemed somewhat lame.

A defence of his constituents’ interests might have been mounted with more moderate language, suggests the author, while leaving open the inference that leaders should sometimes lead (as on gun control) rather than follow. In reflective mood, Fischer would later acknowledge to Rees his regret about errors such as these.

In his time, Fischer was probably Australia’s most prominent advocate for rail transport — for both freight and passengers — but reality was always likely to win the unequal battle with the Very Fast Train and other dreams. This magnificent obsession did, however, add a point of difference to Fischer’s political persona. He retired from parliament with the respect and affection of his peers, sentiments that seem to have been echoed in much of the population, especially among his rural constituents.

The stereotype of the unsophisticated yokel politician whose language and manner disguise a shrewd and effective political operator can be overdone, but in Fischer’s case it may have been close to the truth. Peter Rees’s very readable book allows us to judge for ourselves about this very distinctive Australian. •

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The by-election had been brought on by the resignation of the sitting Liberal member, external affairs minister Paul Hasluck, to become governor-general. At any other time, Labor would probably not have bothered to run in this very safe Liberal seat. Indeed, Labor had not run a candidate for Curtin even in the 1963 general election.

Such a cop-out would have been anathema to Whitlam. He had campaigned impressively in two by-elections in 1967, his first year of leadership, and regarded such events as opportunities to spread the party message to a citizenry that had not elected a federal Labor government since 1946.

Nineteen sixty-nine was also a federal election year. Having narrowly won a self-inflicted caucus ballot to reassert his leadership the previous year, Whitlam needed to perform strongly and pull off a decent swing at the election. While a Labor victory was almost in the realm of fantasy, winning just a few seats here and there was unlikely to cut it: too many enemies in his own party were ready to use a weak result as a good reason to turn up the heat on Whitlam.

Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war, and the use of conscripts to fight there, remained major issues, and while it is almost certain that Whitlam referred to them that night in 1969, my only abiding memory of his address was his criticism of the inequities and inefficiencies of Australia’s federal system. What especially stuck in my mind was his scathing description of how different state governments ordered different railway rolling stock from different countries when some coordination and cooperation would make more economic and practical sense. It didn’t exactly bring the (sparsely populated) house down, but it wasn’t without impact either.

Whitlam is associated so greatly with emotion and passion (especially after 1975) it is easy to forget that in opposition he spent much more time criticising the government for its inefficiency and ineptitude than decrying its moral failings (although sometimes it was both) — or that his enduring critique of Australian federalism’s shortcomings was something of a magnificent obsession. Even on conscription, his criticism was often as much about its inherent inefficiency (a view traditionally shared by many in the military) as about its violation of liberty and its cruel impact on those whose lives it took or damaged beyond repair.

What of the Curtin by-election? The seat was retained by the Liberals’ Vic Garland, who would go on to achieve ministerial office in the governments of William McMahon and Malcolm Fraser. But Labor achieved an estimated two-party-preferred swing of 7.9 per cent, closely matching the national swing of 7.1 per cent that Whitlam secured later that year in the general election.

That result set the stage for victory in 1972, although to regard it as inevitable is to ignore the risks Whitlam had to take, the best examples being the decision to launch a federal intervention into Labor’s left-controlled Victorian branch in 1970 and his visit to the People’s Republic of China in 1971, when Australia still recognised Taiwan as the real China.

The “inevitable” tag also ignores the modest nine-seat majority Labor achieved in 1972: the win was no landslide, and it is near certain that only Whitlam within federal Labor’s parliamentary ranks could have brought the conservative domination to an end.

That night in April 1969, I walked home reasonably impressed. But my impression would have been of little use to Whitlam: the voting age was twenty-one and I was too young to vote in 1969 — and indeed, even in 1972. •

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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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Regardless of the date, it is worth emphasising that the result of the last election, in 2019, confirmed an enduring feature of modern Australian federal elections. Yet again, an election that didn’t change the government was decided within the 52–48 range of the national two-party-preferred vote. Conversely, in every change-of-government election since 1972 the winner has secured a two-party vote in excess of 52 per cent. In other words, a close federal election result usually means “government returned.”

Since 1977, there has only been one exception to the rule. That was in 2004, when Labor, under Mark Latham, secured a two-party vote of only 47.3 per cent, confirming the view that caucus members who voted for him to become leader shouldn’t list “good judgement” in the “key attributes” sections of their CVs.

The main point here is that outside changes of government, federal elections are rarely blowouts — at least in two-party-preferred terms — although the uneven distribution of party support can result in substantial majorities in terms of seats. The record suggests a mostly finely balanced electorate nationally (albeit with state and regional variations) most of the time.

The current distribution of seats is complicated by the presence of minor parties and independents (currently totalling six) in the House of Representatives. A glance at the pendulum for the next election reveals a challenging task for Labor, one that would require a uniform swing of around 4 per cent. But the Morrison government would lose its absolute majority with the loss of just two seats (a swing of only 0.5 per cent).

It is true that seats can move in both directions in a change-of-government election, but history tells us that there are limits. Gough Whitlam lost seats in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia in 1972, which helped keep his victory rather narrow. Malcolm Fraser lost none of his own seats in his landslide victory in 1975, and nor did Bob Hawke in 1983. John Howard lost only the seat of Canberra (previously secured at a by-election) in 1996, and Kevin Rudd lost two Labor seats (both in Western Australia) in his substantial win in 2007.

A loss of a seat or two (sometimes because of state, regional or local factors) may be survivable, but the necessary compensatory wins can constitute a challenging task. If several seats are changing hands in both directions, it’s probably safest to bet on the government’s being returned.

Labor’s lost support in mining areas in 2019 remains a lively topic among politicians and commentators. But “mining” seats are few, and there is only one marginal Coalition seat among them: Braddon in Tasmania (scene of Peter Dutton’s expensive visit during the 2018 by-election). Beyond that, the first that would fall to Labor is Herbert (in the federal party’s consistently least successful state, Queensland), on a margin of 8.4 per cent.

Labor strategists might contend that a continuing focus on mining seats is not just about winning the ones the party failed to win in 2019 but also about retaining those pushed into the marginal column in that election. It can also be argued that in Queensland and Western Australia, where mining so powerfully defines the state economies, a perception that Labor is anti-mining may also inflict electoral damage outside mining seats — plausible, but difficult to prove.

Given the swing needed to secure majority government, Labor probably needs to hold virtually all its current seats. I lean to the view that Labor’s path to power involves winning marginal Coalition seats in suburban Brisbane and Perth rather than focusing too greatly on regional blue-collar workers, who ceased to be part of a homogeneous Labor voting bloc some elections ago. Indeed, it could be argued that the non-unionised tradesperson (with an ABN instead of a union ticket) constitutes a growing component of the Liberal Party’s base.

In the unusual circumstances of the pandemic, it is difficult to determine what constitutes a pass grade for an opposition leader; certainly, most of Anthony Albanese’s state counterparts have struggled to make an impact — so much so that incumbent governments have been re-elected in three Australian jurisdictions in the past six months, and who would bet against Mark McGowan in Western Australia next month?

Some might see Albanese to be doing well to have Labor polling in 50–50 territory, and might wonder about the basis of any expectation that Labor should be leading in the polls. Misbehaviour that would formerly have qualified as a political scandal has become so commonplace as to generally be of more interest to political aficionados than to swinging voters, and it can’t be expected to displace management of the pandemic as a key criterion on which the government is likely to be assessed. Clearly, Labor is hoping to use industrial relations policy to undermine the favourable impression Scott Morrison has been able to develop during the pandemic.

But some people obviously hold the view that federal Labor should already be doing better, and history certainly suggests that a change of government is usually preceded by a sustained and substantial opposition polling lead closer to 55–45 than level pegging. That was certainly the scenario that saw the election of the Fraser, Howard, Rudd and Abbott governments. Hawke took and maintained such a lead once Bill Hayden stepped down as Labor leader, just five weeks before the 1983 election. Clearly, Labor has not so far achieved such a lead.

Whether a currently unidentified new leader would do any better is uncertain, although those contemplating an alternative are entitled to remind us that, of the last five changes of government, all winners except Abbott took the leadership a relatively short time before the election, and three of the four deposed the existing leader to do so (Howard was elected unopposed). Then again, Albanese might point to Mark Latham’s successful challenge as evidence that the “change the leader” faction doesn’t always get it right. •

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On the first question, the evidence was easily found. In a letter of 2 October 1975 (two weeks before the deferral of the Senate’s vote on the budget was announced), the Queen’s principal private secretary, Martin Charteris, wrote that the Queen “would take most unkindly” to any advice from Whitlam to dismiss Kerr. “There would be considerable comings and goings,” he added, “but I think it is right that I should make the point that at the end of the road The Queen, as a Constitutional Sovereign, would have no option but to follow the advice of her Prime Minister.”

Only the most obtuse of governors-general could fail to interpret this as a favourable sign; the Palace seems encouraging rather than neutral (as was also evident throughout in the amiable intimacy of the exchanges). The references to “comings and goings” and “at the end of the road” speak volumes: any such recommendation from Whitlam would only be implemented after some delay. Put simply, Kerr now knew that it would be easier for him to dismiss Whitlam than for Whitlam to have him dismissed. (Clearly, Kerr did not take the view that “follow the advice of [the] prime minister” applied to him.)

Given this revelation, part of Kerr’s justification for not dealing frankly with his prime minister — fear of dismissal and the consequent embroilment of the monarchy in Australian domestic politics — is on shaky ground. In any event, it is unclear why the preservation of the monarchy’s interests and reputation should have been Kerr’s greatest concern in a constitutional conflict where more contemporary democratic principles might have warranted a higher priority.

Kerr’s reports to the Queen are consistent with his later claims that Whitlam was so immovable that it was pointless to discuss options with him. This is a cop-out for the person in Kerr’s position, a former NSW chief justice and judge of the Commonwealth Industrial Court who should have been acutely aware that fixed positions often give way in changed circumstances (otherwise no strike would ever end). It is even more indefensible for a man who had secured a 50 per cent increase in the governor-general’s salary and a ten-year (rather than five-year) term as conditions for taking the role. Highly paid jobs occasionally come with heavy lifting.

My second quest — to discover whether the Palace encouraged Kerr to be candid with Whitlam — concerned more than simply a matter of good manners. In English constitutional theory, openness and candour are core principles of the relationship between the monarch (or, in this case, her representative) and her chief minister. The renowned constitutional authority Walter Bagehot summarised the monarch’s three rights as “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage and the right to warn.” Kerr appears to have done little to insist that Whitlam observed the first, the evidence on the second is less clear and he clearly scored a Fail on the third.

It’s true that any encouragement from the Palace for Kerr to be candid may well have constituted “interference” in Australian politics, although surely no more so than (non-lawyer) Charteris’s written response to Kerr on the existence of the reserve powers (with supporting academic literature) and on the powers of the Senate in respect of money bills.

Of course, concern about Kerr’s lack of openness with his prime minister is far from the preserve of supporters of Whitlam. The list of critics on this point includes the man Jenny Hocking revealed to have been his close adviser, future High Court chief justice Anthony Mason, the governors of Victoria and New South Wales, and Kerr’s immediate predecessor, Sir Paul Hasluck.

Hasluck, who had been a senior Liberal minister in the Menzies, Holt and Gorton governments, is the most interesting of these critics because he later contemplated how he might have dealt with the crisis. In a 1972 lecture he had stressed that the governor-general has only one set of advisers — those ministers who are supported by a majority in the lower house. Although he could not have anticipated the events of 1975, that view contrasts with the notion of the governor-general as an umpire or referee, which was held by many of Kerr’s supporters.

The emphasis on a frank and open relationship between governor-general and prime minister features prominently in Hasluck’s lecture and in notes attached to the published version. While those observations predate the dismissal, Hasluck later commented on Kerr’s actions in a series of recorded discussions with former Whitlam government minister Clyde Cameron in 1985 and 1986. Hasluck advised Cameron that constitutional power was less the issue than “whether the conventions of discussions between prime minister and governor-general were observed.” He contended that the traditional role of warning, advising and cautioning the prime minister should precede any constitutional action. Hasluck had read his Bagehot.

In meetings during the crisis, opposition leader Malcolm Fraser had threatened Kerr with public condemnation if Whitlam were not dismissed. Hasluck observed to Cameron that had he been governor-general, he was not sure that he would have had any conversations at all with Fraser, given that the governor-general has only one adviser at any point in time (clearly the prime minister). Any interview that did happen, he said, would have been cut short after such a threat.

Despite Kerr’s views, Hasluck didn’t think that Whitlam was looking for a subservient governor-general; that had not been the nature of his own relationship with Whitlam, who would have given Hasluck a further term if Hasluck’s wife’s ill-health had not made an extension impossible.

On the specifics of the crisis, Hasluck claimed that had he been in office in 1975, “at a much earlier stage there would have been discussions between Whitlam and myself, and some indications to Whitlam that certain matters needed reconsideration.” In his final comments on the matter, Hasluck asserted that “If I had stayed, only for two years, the history of Australian politics would be quite different from what it is.” This uncharacteristically immodest claim is endorsed by Charteris’s Palace colleague (and subsequent successor) Sir William Heseltine, who observed that “Whitlam and Hasluck would have had a relationship which would have precluded the turn of events which took place.” He also suggested that the Palace “view” was that Kerr should have waited several more days before acting.

Whitlam and Hasluck shared the mutual respect of former political opponents, and that background undoubtedly contributed to Hasluck’s understanding of the demands of political leadership and capacity to offer sage advice. Whitlam is said to have regarded Kerr, by contrast, as more of a political dilettante, flirting with the thought of electoral politics but always opting for appointed office as the less onerous path to power.

Even if Kerr’s claim that he was saving the Queen from becoming embroiled in Australian politics is taken at face value, he could have achieved the same end by seeking to minimise contact with the Palace for the duration of the crisis — thus ensuring that it remained an in-house Australian conflict — rather than unleashing a voluminous correspondence that smacks of colonial reporting to head office. This was not a man seeking to spare the Palace from perception of political involvement so much as one confident that the details of such involvement would be hidden from public knowledge for a long, long time. That the Palace could have minimised its exposure (“It’s over to you, Sir John, you’re an independent nation. Let us know how it works out.”) doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone at the London end.

And what of Kerr’s alleged concern about the potential constitutional nightmare of competing dismissals (his or Whitlam’s)? This could have been dealt with quite easily. It was open to the governor-general to advise Whitlam at their meeting on 11 November that he was holding two letters, one of dismissal and one (awaiting Whitlam’s signature) advising a general election. If the second was signed, the first would be redundant. This would have precluded any melodramatic “rush to the Palace” by Whitlam — a scenario regarded as unlikely by several players of the time, incidentally, including some of Whitlam’s opponents. It would also have allowed Whitlam to contest the election as prime minister, mitigating some of the damage caused by the (enduring) perception that Kerr acted in a partisan fashion.

Even if the Kerr–Palace relationship had proceeded along impeccably appropriate lines, though, it is still possible that the ending may have been the same. The encouragement of the Palace was not a necessary precondition for the actions Kerr ultimately took, except perhaps in some psychological sense — a field beyond the expertise of this writer.

Positions are too firmly held for the Palace Letters to change many minds about the events of 1975: a consensus about the appropriate monarch–governor-general relationship and what constitutes “interference” is too elusive. For some on the left, the letters provide evidence of the ruling class looking after its own. Gough Whitlam’s oft-stated faith in royal neutrality certainly seems to have been misplaced, and that proud Australian would have been less than impressed by the fawning tone of much of Kerr’s correspondence. More than ever, he would have regretted that Hasluck had been unable to serve a second term. On that point, many would have agreed with him. •

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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. •

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Forty-five years later, it seems worthwhile to reflect on those three interviews in particular, aided by notes I took at the time and later revelations about some of the contentious matters I raised with the three men.

At the time of our conversation, it had been six months since Hasluck had completed his term as governor-general; his public life was effectively over. Gorton and McMahon were still MPs, by contrast, having remained in parliament after losing office; each was seeking (with minimal success) to retain some influence in Liberal Party and national affairs. All other things being equal, one might have expected Hasluck, the private citizen, to have fewer inhibitions.

Of course, all other things are rarely equal, and any hope of startling revelations from Hasluck was tempered by an understanding that he was an old-school conservative, with a media image as colourless and bland, committed to principles of discretion and restraint, and unlikely to have undergone a personality change after leaving office. During his parliamentary career he had been renowned for his disdain for the plotting, scheming and deal-making of his trade: indeed that “failing” was said to have contributed to his loss to Gorton in the Liberal leadership contest after Holt’s death in December 1967.

It had not been my plan to fill the thesis with quotes from MPs, but where I did wish to cite an interviewee’s comment I undertook to provide him with the context of the quote and seek his written approval. (Yes, they were all men.) Hasluck, however, pre-empted this plan when he wrote agreeing to meet me, making clear that he was “willing to have a conversation… but not willing to have any of our conversation recorded or to be quoted as a source of information.”

In fact, he went further, expressing his lack of sympathy for any excessive dependence on interview-based research. He was “appalled by the quick books on current affairs by journalists,” he wrote, “where backroom gossip and speculation becomes accepted and quoted in academic studies as being ‘history.’” Given that Hasluck had been (among other things) a journalist and a historian before entering parliament, this was heavy stuff. He was to be my first interview and it was dawning on me that I might have been better served starting off with a lowly backbencher.

My apprehension proved misplaced when we met in Perth in January 1975. In person, Hasluck was immensely courteous, not remotely combative, engaging, informative and expansive. It was an early lesson for me about the limited value of media images. In two separate parts of the interview, he was critical of Holt’s dependence on “public relations men” and associated “gimmicks” — an obvious reference to Holt’s press secretary Tony Eggleton — viewing this as the start of the (regrettable) Americanisation of Australian politics.

Hasluck had been external affairs minister under Holt, and during the interview he referred to what he clearly saw as his leader’s excessive faith in personal contacts and tendency to exaggerate the advantages of being on first name terms with heads of government. As Hasluck saw it, the department did the “real” work of foreign policy.

He believed that Holt was secure in the party leadership and would have survived any challenge, although critics might have discounted this confidence in the light of Hasluck’s relative detachment from internal party intrigues.

More surprising for me was his reference to the problems treasurer William McMahon was creating for Holt by “spreading rumours and lies.” Obviously, Hasluck had never gone on the public record with such criticism of McMahon, and telling me didn’t change that. Nor would he have conveyed such a view to any members of that species he despised — the press.

“Party trick”: cartoonist Bruce Petty’s depiction of William McMahon’s destructive capacity.

In later years, however, the public could access his anti-McMahon views in considerable detail, notably in The Chance of Politics, a collection of pen portraits of political personalities he had observed during his time in Canberra, which was published by his son Nicholas after his death. Among the words he used to describe McMahon — a “contemptible creature” — were disloyal, devious, dishonest, untrustworthy, petty and cowardly. Similar scathing observations about his former colleague can be found in Hasluck’s notes from his term as governor-general, held in the Australian National Archives.

The contrast with that rugged, idiosyncratic individualist John Gorton could hardly have been greater. In Gorton’s first interview with me, in Canberra in May 1975, the then Liberal backbencher was critical of Holt for his handing of the Voyager affair and the VIP aircraft affair — two scandals that had caused the government much embarrassment — and especially for his failure to discipline party rebels who made trouble over the Voyager. Not surprisingly, he denied any involvement in discussions to replace Holt as PM, but the denial is credible. Without the lower house vacancy ultimately created by Holt’s death, there was no obvious transition route for a Senate leader to change houses in order to become PM.

Gorton did advise me that Liberal Party whip Dudley Irwin had consulted him over the letter, sent to Holt just before his death, that sought a discussion about concerns that the government had not been performing very well for some time. It would not seem unusual for Gorton, as government Senate leader, to have been consulted. While contending that any challenge to Holt would have been unsuccessful, he could not resist the temptation to suggest that McMahon may have been involved in efforts to undermine his leader.

An opportunity arose in October 1976 for a further discussion with Gorton, now a private citizen following his unsuccessful attempt to win an ACT Senate seat at the 1975 federal election. He took up a very brief appointment as a visiting fellow in the Department of Government at the University of Queensland, where I was then located. In a short second interview, two points stood out.

First, Gorton recalled the story of how former prime minister Robert Menzies summoned McMahon after the leaking of cabinet documents, forced him to sign a confession and threatened him with dismissal if he committed further offences. I am unsure as to how widely known this story was at the time of Gorton’s telling, but it has featured in later accounts of the era, including in Patrick Mullins’s biography of McMahon.

Apparently, Holt didn’t “inherit” the commitment. Gorton claimed that McMahon resumed his leaking habits, which mostly related to an ongoing policy (and personality) war with Country Party leader and deputy PM John McEwen. McEwen attacked McMahon at several cabinet meetings, reflecting the toxic relationship that would see McEwen veto McMahon from succeeding Holt.

On Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War, Gorton claimed that the cabinet consensus lasted until Holt’s final decision (in late 1967) to send more troops. At that meeting, Gorton voiced lone dissent, feeling that Australia had “done enough” and that the United States was “half-hearted” in its war effort. Not quite hawk turning dove, it was nevertheless indicative of the approach Gorton would take as PM: the Australian commitment was not increased on his watch.

Interesting as this conversation was, much more colour attended the lunch held in Gorton’s honour during his visit to our department. There was plenty to eat and drink, and the former PM held little back as he offered (inter alia) a keen analysis of McMahon’s personality failings. It might be observed that some of the language used was not quite consistent with scholarly norms.

Knowing that I would be in Canberra a few weeks later, Gorton generously invited me for drinks with himself and his wife Bettina at his Red Hill home. The visit called for best behaviour and I made no attempt to outdrink Australia’s nineteenth prime minister.

A major purpose of that Canberra visit was an interview with McMahon, a backbencher since his election loss in 1972, with nearly another decade to serve in that role. At the time we met, progress figures from the 1976 US presidential election (in which Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford) were coming through and McMahon was following the result on a small transistor radio. Turning his attention in my direction, he made a point common to several interviewees — that Holt was more concerned with the politics of policy-making than Menzies had been. He also noted that there were more aggressive exchanges at Holt’s cabinet meetings than had been the case under Menzies. Specifically, his nemesis McEwen “went to more extreme ends.” This was probably a reference to the Country Party leader’s criticism of McMahon’s leaking. McMahon told me that he regarded McEwen “as a psychiatric case.” Now, that would have been worth leaking — by me!

On Holt’s leadership, McMahon claimed that there had been discussions, but that he was oblivious to them because his role as treasurer was “very demanding.” It was not for me then, or now, to characterise this as a blatant lie, but I suspect that any Canberra journalist sitting in on our chat might have burst out laughing. McMahon did make the point that Gorton’s supporters seemed suspiciously well-prepared when Holt suddenly died.

It was obviously a rewarding experience to be able to interview a range of political figures, even if most of what I gathered provided background and context rather than revelations to be quoted in my thesis, and the relevant cabinet papers were decades away. The three men had been major players during that fascinating time when the predictability of the Menzies era gave way to a period of sustained instability within the Liberal Party. •

The post After Menzies appeared first on Inside Story.

Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill’s review seeks to dispose of the argument that Labor’s policies on franking credits and negative gearing played a decisive role, citing the swing to the party in more affluent seats. This may well become the accepted wisdom, although it continues to be challenged by Labor’s triumphalist opponents. On the best interpretation for Labor, though, it is surely ironical that the policy seems to have cost it more votes among those who’d never heard of franking credits than among those likely to be most disadvantaged by the proposal.

The more general point made in the review — that the policies were vulnerable to misrepresentation and reinforced perennial concerns about Labor’s economic management skills — seems sound. Remarkably, it seems that none of the party’s strategists anticipated such a danger, naively assuming that they could control the direction of the ensuing debate.

As the review stresses, these revenue measures were designed, above all, to avoid any risk of a budget deficit. If the “all surpluses good; all deficits bad” theme is now settled bipartisan policy, and if revenue-raising measures are inevitably vulnerable to scare campaigns (perhaps more so in the age of social media), then what costly policy proposals can Labor afford to take into an election campaign? “Not many” seems to be the obvious answer.

Not surprisingly, the review pays considerable attention to Labor’s poor performance in Queensland, although its argument that this is a post–Kevin Rudd phenomenon is unhelpfully ahistorical. In the twenty-nine elections since the second world war, Labor has secured a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in that state just three times. Western Australia isn’t much better (five two-party majorities since the war, three of these down to favourite son Bob Hawke), although fewer seats are at stake. While it was understandable that the review would focus on the role played by Adani’s coalmine, federal Labor’s problems in the state are long-term: voters find a reason to reject the party at virtually every election. The puzzle is that Queensland and Western Australia both have Labor state governments, yet large numbers of voters won’t have a bar of the federal version. Perhaps a separate inquiry is needed?

Curiously, the review describes coalminers as “low-income” workers, though this is not generally the case. For them, as I argued just after the election, a conservative vote can be consistent with economic self-interest, especially when the traditional workers’ party seems ambivalent about defending their jobs. These lost votes may not be easily recovered.

For some, the most confronting sections of the review are likely to be those criticising the party for having “been increasingly mobilised to address the grievances of a vast and disparate constituency.” It goes on:

Working people suffering economic dislocation caused by technological change will lose faith in Labor if they do not believe the Party is responding to their needs, instead being preoccupied with issues not concerning them or which are actively against their interests.

The risk, says the review, is that Labor will become “a grievance-based organisation.” It will be fascinating to see how this virtual declaration of war on “identity politics” plays out, and especially whether it is seen as a criticism not merely of style and emphasis, but also of content.

Emerson and Weatherill conclude that “Labor reached voters engaged in the political process while the Coalition reached disengaged voters.” While there is an element of the bleeding obvious in this observation (that’s how elections are won in a system of compulsory voting), its value may lie in reminding party activists that the most important voters are generally not interested in politics and will usually only pay attention (if at all) when the law obliges them to head for the polling booth. They were unlikely to be engaged by the thought of studying Labor’s 250-plus costed election policy proposals; they are certainly not reading the Emerson–Weatherill review; and they aren’t currently interested in how Anthony Albanese is performing as opposition leader.

The review also concedes that the Coalition overtook Labor in social media effectiveness in the 2019 election. While the technical aspects of this are best left to experts (ranks which definitely exclude this writer), it can often seem the case that social media platforms facilitate easy misrepresentation of proposals for change. While Labor ran an effective “Mediscare” campaign in 2016, that was surely matched by its opponents’ allegations in 2019 that a Shorten government would introduce “death taxes.” Perhaps it was ever thus even with traditional media, but those resisting change seem to be working the new technology better than the proponents.

Finally, while Bill Shorten comes in for solid criticism, it may be that the person most threatened by this review will be his successor Anthony Albanese. The authors seem to believe that an opposition leader needs to be highly competitive in the approval/preferred PM polling to have any chance of taking government, and that even a solid two-party-preferred lead could be vulnerable to a focus on the leader’s unpopularity in the heat of a campaign.

Left untackled is the challenge of identifying the point at which an opposition leader is irredeemably unelectable. But it’s true that if Albanese fails to achieve a competitive polling position soon enough for his critics, Labor’s current leadership rules — requiring sixty per cent of caucus votes to precipitate a challenge — may not protect him. The rule is unlikely to survive if it is viewed as an impediment to electoral success.

The review has been praised for its lack of self-pity, and while that is a clear positive, there must be many Labor supporters frustrated by the electoral double standard that seems to apply in the areas of leadership and party unity. In 2013, Labor was punished for the (non-policy-based) Rudd–Gillard divisions yet the Liberals’ disunity (much of it over policy) attracted no sanction in 2019. Liberal leaders as colourless as John Howard or as off-centre as Tony Abbott can win office, yet only dynamic Labor personalities like Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and (sorry, haters) Rudd can get the party into government from opposition.

The likely answer is that the economy trumps everything, and until federal Labor can put voters’ minds at rest over its credentials on that front it may continue to struggle in the heat of an election campaign. Shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers will enhance both his party’s and his own prospects if he can make a positive impact. He would do well to avoid the hubris of his predecessor Chris Bowen, whose channelling of Marie Antoinette (“let them vote for someone else”) possibly offered the earliest clue as to how the 2019 election would play out. •

The post Does the economy trump all else? appeared first on Inside Story.

Back in the world we live in, the electoral arithmetic is brutally different. Of Queensland and Western Australia’s forty-six seats, Labor holds eleven, or just a quarter. Unless that’s remedied next time, this is a near-insurmountable impediment to a majority in the House of Representatives. Elsewhere in the country, NSW Labor has been delivering around half the seats (the precise number this time depends on the result in Macquarie) while Victoria (55 per cent) has long been doing much of the heavy lifting. The other states’ and territories’ numbers (which favour Labor overall) are too insignificant to figure in any grand strategy for victory.

The debate about Labor’s poor showing in Queensland has focused mostly on electorates connected with the mining industry. Comparatively little has been said about the party’s costly failures in metropolitan Brisbane and, on the other side of the country, in Perth. This is not a new phenomenon, and highlights the reality of Labor’s failure across the board in those two states.

The federal mining seats in Western Australia were lost some time ago, and Labor’s flag-flying candidates there essentially run to cover the Senate vote. Federal Labor’s poor record in corresponding seats in Queensland may also signal a near-permanent realignment that is only likely to be unsettled by (rare) Labor landslides.

Commentators often overlook the fact that mining is a skilled and well-paid occupation with an average annual salary of around $125,000, and many earning a lot more. Even if the coal worker questioning Bill Shorten about the tax rates on incomes of more than $200,000 was a Coalition stooge, an important point was being made. Those pushing alternative jobs in tourism (you won’t earn $125,000 handing out brochures for tours of the Daintree) or making the more useful suggestions about opportunities in renewables need to take this into account.

Of the Labor frontbench, Kim Carr has seemed virtually a lone voice in arguing for investment in high-wage, high-skill, secure jobs. With his departure from the shadow ministry, it’s hard to see who will promote this cause, despite the party’s professed desire to reconnect with its roots.

In any event, a decision by workers on that level of income to vote for the conservatives (even if via preferences) could well be consistent with a rational assessment of their economic self-interest. Labor’s sketchily detailed promise of higher wages seems to have failed to trump voters’ concern with immediate job security, as symbolised by the Adani project. And, given that the labour movement itself was conflicted over Adani, the mining union was less equipped to perform its usual role of maximising solidarity at election time. Having voted non-Labor for the first time, a proportion of blue-collar voters may now be comfortable with that choice, and may not easily be lured back to Labor.

Regaining the lost ground in central and north Queensland is a massive challenge. Perhaps the less difficult task lies in the Brisbane metropolitan area, where the seat margins are somewhat smaller and federal Labor may be able to lift its appeal to the sort of voters who support the party in Sydney and Melbourne. Perth needs similar attention.

Of the issues that decided the election, Labor’s franking credits policy has been assigned a key role, although this is not universally accepted. What can be said is that the policy was poorly designed (as evidenced by changes within days of its release) and was easily linked to the Coalition’s favourite theme of economic management, an issue on which its members were solidly united. While it’s disputed in some quarters, there seems broad support for the principle that income-stream plans made for retirement should not be rendered inoperative by subsequent changes to the rules for those already in retirement. The grandfathering of negative gearing but not franking credits lacked consistency and invited the conclusion that Labor was engaged in an ideologically based assault on those with self-managed superannuation.

The hearings of the House of Representatives economics committee, which provided extensive opportunities for criticism of Labor’s proposal, served to remind us that superannuation is no longer seen as merely a means to a comfortable retirement: it is part of estate planning for the more affluent and a tool for intergenerational wealth transfer. In other words, franking credits shouldn’t be seen to only benefit superannuants, as a Coalition member of the committee made explicit. If Labor challenged this view, it seems to have gone unreported.

Raiding existing superannuants for revenue purposes now seems an electoral no-go zone akin to death duties. As with progress on climate change, superannuation may be an area where bipartisanship will be a necessary condition for any substantial policy change. Nor did it help Labor’s cause that the focus on sourcing revenue from superannuation accounts coincided with a period in which predictions of a recession are offered every second day. It’s hardly surprising that superannuants will be adjusting upwards their calculation of “how much is enough.”

(As an aside, if Labor’s franking credits policy did indeed cost it more votes in the marginal seats that swung right, such as La Trobe, than in the previously safe Liberal seats that swung left, such as Higgins, then it could be an age-old problem for progressives: undone less by the aristocracy than by the petite bourgeoisie.)

While the Coalition’s victory was a rare loss for the disunity-is-death axiom, two other historical norms prevailed. Bill Shorten joins the ranks of first-up post-loss opposition leaders who have proved unable to win the prime ministership. And, following a consistent pattern since 1922, a conservative federal government secured a third term.

Anthony Albanese now goes from the easiest job in politics (opposition leader in waiting) to the most difficult, and we can be certain that his Coalition opponents have been planning lines of attack for some time. His accession is a plus for Labor branch members, though, many of whom were alienated last time when the caucus preference for Shorten prevailed over their support for Albanese. But it would be a mistake to regard the views of the Labor branch membership — who are fewer than the number of paid members claimed by the worst team in the AFL — as representative of the wider electorate (and especially swinging voters). Given their meagre membership numbers, the political parties have never been less representative.

An early look at the likely pendulum for the next election makes uncomfortable viewing for Labor and its new leader. Labor holds considerably more marginal seats than the Coalition, and many erstwhile marginals have become much safer for the government, especially in Queensland. Labor is likely to need well in excess of 50 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, with substantial swings in the four most populous states.

If Anthony Albanese is to play the ordinary-bloke card, he might include in one of his trips to Queensland a visit to Barcaldine, just over 1000 kilometres from Brisbane in the central west of the state, regarded as the birthplace of the Labor Party. Shouting the bar in one (or maybe all) of that town’s pubs might be a useful symbolic gesture early in his leadership. •

The post Labor’s numbers game appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s worth noting that the consistent poll consensus (Labor at 51–52) has prompted comment from election specialists who view this pattern of agreement (over dozens of individual polls) as statistically suspect given the nature of polling and the laws of probability. Pollsters can sometimes be guilty of “correcting” for outlier polls, a phenomenon known as “herding.” The recent Victorian state election is cited as a possible example, with polls overwhelmingly predicting a narrow Labor majority rather than the substantial victory that occurred. This election may be a test of the polls as much as of the parties.

Compared with the other changes of federal government since 1972, Labor entered the current campaign with an historically modest poll lead, and hence less margin for error. Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd on the Labor side and Liberals Malcolm Fraser, John Howard and Tony Abbott all entered the campaign with levels of party support (some up to the mid 50s) affording some insurance against any loss of ground in the campaign. Four leaders secured large majorities, with Fraser topping the two-party-preferred ladder (55.7 per cent), followed by Howard (53.6 per cent), Abbott (53.5 per cent), Hawke (53.2 per cent) and Rudd (52.7 per cent). Labor’s Gough Whitlam achieved the same percentage as Rudd, but with an anti-Labor electoral bias and some idiosyncratic seat results could only secure a nine-seat majority.

Labor’s three successful postwar government-winning leaders were all, in their own ways, dynamic, larger-than-life figures, not a compliment likely to be directed at Bill Shorten. But whether this will cost him victory will be known soon enough.

The narrowness of Labor’s lead may have suggested the merits of a cautious, small-target approach, but as has been discussed in Inside Story, the party opted for a big-target (“courageous”) suite of policies, involving significant spending commitments. The substantial revenue required would come largely from involuntary contributors apparently written off as electorally irrelevant by Labor. “They are free to vote for someone else,” as shadow treasurer Chris Bowen so bravely put it.

If Labor assumed that its big-spending agenda would win votes, polling suggests that such confidence was misplaced. Any poll movement during the campaign has been slightly to the government. A big-spending program always had the potential to play into the Coalition’s preferred theme of competent economic management, terrain on which Labor routinely loses. The government has been trying to exploit that advantage, and ally it to Scott Morrison’s lead in the preferred prime minister polling, to eke out an unlikely victory.

National polls cannot tell the full story of what might happen in 151 seats, but it is possible to craft a picture of how Labor might assemble a parliamentary majority. Minimal credence will be paid to single-seat polling or to party polling: the former is largely discredited (see Longman and Braddon by-elections, for example), and the latter is often a case of the media being used by party apparatchiks. A reasonable assumption might be that, all other things being equal, any pro-Labor swing in a state will be larger in the capital/metropolitan area than in the regions/bush.

While Labor won sixty-nine seats in the last parliament, redistribution has meant that it enters the contest with a notionally higher number. It is allocated the new seats of Bean (ACT) and Fraser (Victoria), plus redistributed Corangamite and Dunkley, both in Victoria. It loses the abolished South Australian seat of Port Adelaide, for an amended overall total of seventy-two. It needs a net gain of four to secure the narrowest of majorities.

Queensland is a state where polls promise federal Labor much between elections and then voters fail to deliver on the day. The emerging view suggests that this will again be the case in central and north Queensland, and Labor has already been written off by some in its ultra-marginal seat of Herbert. Labor simply has to win two or three seats in the Brisbane–Gold Coast area to get something out of its apparent rise in support in the state since 2016.

In New South Wales, the enduring stench of the Labor “brand” apparently continues to pose problems. It has been suggested that in the seat of Lindsay, the circumstances of the Labor member’s “retirement” may render the seat vulnerable, and if it were to be lost it is essential that Labor pick up two or three Coalition seats to compensate.

In Victoria, Labor optimists would be hoping for the recent state election result to be transposed to federal boundaries, but it is possible that gains may be limited to La Trobe and Chisholm, with anything more a bonus.

Tasmania often votes differently — electing a full contingent of Liberals in the Hawke Labor landslide election of 1983, for example — and there are enough “difference” vibes around for Labor to be concerned this time.

If Labor loses seats in these three states, it could be a long election night, although Gough Whitlam had just that experience in 1972, with losses in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, compensated for by sufficient gains elsewhere.

In South Australia, Boothby is the government’s most vulnerable seat, but the margin (just under 3 per cent) may be a stretch for Labor. The status quo in the state seems a reasonable bet, with Rebekha Sharkie an overwhelming favourite to retain conservative Mayo for the Centre Alliance.

Attention then focuses on Western Australia, historically as much a boulevard of broken dreams for federal Labor as is Queensland. Starting from a low base, Labor would be in trouble if it could not pick up the marginal Hasluck, and it would be useful to win one or two of Pearce, Swan or (a roughie) Stirling.

These prognostications can identify the elements of a Labor victory, but it’s far from landslide territory. Quite simply, Labor must keep any losses in Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania to a bare minimum. And the Greens are not without hope in the Labor seats of Macnamara and Wills, where victory in one or both could jeopardise a clear Labor majority.

Labor supporters will probably regard the above scenario as understating their party’s chances, and they may be right. I am factoring in some remaining softness in the Labor lead and the ability of some government MPs in marginal seats to hang on through their personal votes. One or both assumptions may prove to be misplaced.

A relevant factor is the likely result, in both city and country, where government-held seats are being contested by well-credentialed independents or (in Victoria) Greens. If sufficient independents are successful, but the government holds enough of its ground against Labor, the possibility of a Coalition minority government can’t be ruled out. Katter and Sharkie could be expected to be onside in such a scenario.

This election will provide answers to at least four questions. Can a government as divided as the Coalition has been in this term still prevail at the ballot box, or does the “disunity is death” axiom still apply? Can a government so consistently behind in the polls between elections still turn it around during a campaign and manage a come-from-behind win? Can an opposition with a big-target strategy withstand the predictable onslaught from threatened interests and secure government? Finally, can a Labor opposition leader with persistent low personal approval ratings still be elected prime minister? (The Liberals have already achieved it: see Abbott.)

These questions are not merely academic. If Scott Morrison prevails, future prime ministers will be able to assert more credibly that continual bad polling between elections need not guarantee defeat. And nor may party disunity. Hardline conservatives within the Liberal Party might feel even more empowered to propagate their views.

A Labor loss would probably consign a big-target strategy to the filing cabinet for some considerable time, and would be a blow to those contending that the “end” of neoliberalism necessarily creates an appetite for a redistributive alternative program. Defeat would ensure that the approval/preferred PM metric resumes critical relevance for future Labor leaders.

Bill Shorten is close to achieving what has eluded some big names in Australian politics, including Billy Snedden, Andrew Peacock and Kim Beazley. No first-up federal opposition leader after loss of government has ever gone on to become prime minister. One — Liberal Brendan Nelson — was rolled by his party before even contesting an election. We will soon know whether the much-maligned Shorten is in fact in the right place at the right time. •

The post A close election draws closer appeared first on Inside Story.

Judith Brett traces the emergence and development of compulsory voting within the Australian political system, but her scope is broader than the sub-title implies, covering aspects of the franchise (especially relating to women and Aborigines) and the introduction of preferential voting and, later, proportional representation.

From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage begins with a question: what explains Australia’s position as one of the few democracies in which voting is both compulsory and enforced? Sixteen countries have it and nine enforce it, none of them countries we would normally compare ourselves with. By way of explanation, Brett points out that Australia — unlike the United States — was not settled by dissidents fleeing autocracy and imbued with John Locke’s social contract theory. While the Americans opted for liberty and rights, pragmatic Australians preferred democracy and majorities, with a dose of bureaucracy thrown in for good measure. The contrast with the American “system,” with its partisan-based election administration and baffling state variations on everything from the franchise to the shape of the ballot paper, is stark.

One of Brett’s many interesting revelations is that compulsory voting was on the agenda, in both the pre-Federation colonies and the new Commonwealth, long before its eventual introduction for federal elections in 1924. But she tracks back even further, outlining in considerable (and often humorous) detail what the voting process looked like before the introduction of the secret ballot. Casting a vote could be a time-consuming affair for the elector: in the pre-ballpoint era, considerable dipping of ink could be required, and it was only with the switch to pencils that the process became more expeditious and the queues shorter.

At the moment of Federation, many of the new nation’s adults were still not entitled to vote. The decision on how far the franchise would be extended was in the hands of that group of white males who constituted the first federal parliament. The debates about the voting rights of women and Aborigines don’t make for comfortable reading: the observations about potential female voters are bad enough in their misogyny, but the vileness of the comments about Aborigines retains the capacity to shock. White women were granted the franchise for federal elections in 1902, but the struggle for full and equal voting rights and obligations for the first Australians would be a longer and more drawn-out affair.

Brett argues that the decision to make voting compulsory for federal elections was a natural expression of the political culture that had emerged over preceding decades. The fact that enrolment had been compulsory since 1911 also made the extension of the obligation to cast a vote less contentious. Concern about low turnout — 58 per cent in 1922, the last voluntary vote — was a critical factor, with supporters of compulsion arguing that genuine democracy required those who governed to represent the majority of those being governed. The cause was assisted by evidence from Queensland, where voting had been compulsory for state elections since 1915. The Queenslanders’ habit had proved transferable to federal elections where, without compulsion, their the turnout was far higher than that of other states in 1922.

With the three largest parties on side, parliamentary opposition to the proposal was minimal. The conservatives, disadvantaged by Labor’s union-based capacity to get out its vote, could view compulsion as helping solve a problem. And, with many voters having developed the habit of demanding to be driven to the polls in vehicles funded by candidates or parties, compulsion would help eliminate an unwelcome election expense. Significantly absent from the debates was any sustained libertarian view. The “right not to vote” simply had no traction, then or now, and compulsory voting continues to enjoy majority support from both voters and MPs.

Brett also covers the introduction of preferential voting for federal elections in 1919, which was prompted by the emergence of the Country Party and the need to avoid splitting the conservative vote in three-cornered contests. Like compulsion, the idea had been around for a while, and the desire for political survival proved a handy stimulus. As an aside, it is interesting to note the gradual dilution of full preferential voting, with eight of the nation’s fifteen legislative chambers now being elected by some version of optional preferential.

Proportional representation also had a nineteenth-century pre-history, although it would be 1949 before it was adopted at federal level — and then only for Senate elections. Opposition to such a system was often based on its alleged complexity, and while Brett doesn’t explore this point in any detail, it possibly warrants more attention than it receives. The proposition that the voting system should be comprehensible to the voter is not unreasonable; indeed, the principle often formed part of Politics 101. Yet today, otherwise informed people can question the legitimacy of a senator because he secured a pitifully low primary vote, obviously unaware that a person could theoretically be elected with no primary votes at all under the proportional system. The same is true of state and territory chambers employing proportional representation. A PhD in mathematics shouldn’t be a prerequisite for understanding a voting system.

I have two quibbles. It is not quite the case, as Brett writes, that a proposed constitutional referendum must first pass both houses of parliament with an absolute majority. Strictly speaking, the Constitution allows one house to force a referendum even if the other opposes it, involving a three-month interval in keeping with the double dissolution rules. Practically, Brett is right, as the power has never been employed and probably never will be.

Of the Whitlam government’s lowering of the voting age for federal elections from twenty-one to eighteen, Brett suggests a link to the age of conscription for military service (which could include deployment to Vietnam). Not so: the age for conscription in Australia at the time in question was twenty, not eighteen — as many ageing male baby-boomers could attest!

Brett’s treatment of her subject leaves us with the impression that, at a time when disillusionment with politicians is at high levels, there is less need for concern about the system that elects them. “We are good at elections,” she proclaims. Leaving aside the vexed question of party funding and donations (not covered in the book), the boast doesn’t seem unreasonable. •

The post A festival of (compulsory) democracy appeared first on Inside Story.

Since the election of Gough Whitlam’s government in 1972, electorally successful opposition parties (led by Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, John Howard, Kevin Rudd and, most recently, Tony Abbott) have essentially pursued a small-target approach, seeking to focus on the alleged shortcomings of the government and minimise the vulnerabilities that a too-detailed policy manifesto can expose. Risk avoidance of this kind possibly reached its height when Kevin Rudd described himself as a fiscal conservative in 2007.

The most celebrated attempt to buck this trend was made by John Hewson, the Liberal leader who lost the “unlosable” federal election in 1993. His proposal for a goods and services tax is widely seen as the main cause of the defeat, with prime minister Paul Keating running a masterclass in how to take apart a sucker who gives you more than an even break. But it’s important to remember that the Liberal leader’s apparent inability to explain the detail of his proposed GST may have contributed to his defeat as much as the tax itself. As Keating advised, if Hewson couldn’t explain the detail, why should the voter bother trying to understand it?

A quarter of a century later, Bill Shorten has taken a similar risk by offering a detailed range of policies. Assorted editorialists and commentators are delighted, but the wider electoral appeal of some of these policies is untested, and will possibly stay that way until they encounter the heat of the election campaign. Labor’s big-target approach gets full marks for political courage, but whether that turns out to be of the “very courageous, minister” variety remains to be seen.

Perhaps the most controversial have been Labor’s policies on negative gearing, the capital gains tax and dividend imputation. Significantly, all fall within the realm of economics, where Labor routinely trails the Coalition in public perceptions of competence.

Of the three, the dividend imputation policy might be the least electorally risky, involving a relatively small number of self-managed superannuants (estimated by Labor at around 200,000) who are seen by the party as unlikely to vote its way anyway. (In passing, it’s worth noting that the proposal affects the “less rich” more than the very rich, since those with superannuation accounts of more than $1.6 million are already paying tax on returns on income above that threshold and would presumably be eligible for a tax refund up to the amount of tax being paid.)

Labor’s potential vulnerability lies more in its plans for negative gearing and the capital gains tax. The reason is simple: they involve property, a matter of concern to a far greater proportion of the electorate than the esoterica of dividend imputation policy. To a considerable extent, Labor’s success in promoting these proposals will be determined by how voters see residential property. Is it primarily a place to live? Or is it primarily an investment? For those who own investment properties, it is clearly the latter, but even among those whose only residential property is the one they live in, it is often viewed not only as an “investment,” but also as an asset that should only ever appreciate in value.

At a time when property values in many areas are falling as a result of market forces, the Coalition is bound to argue that Labor’s plans will drive prices down even more, delivering a further blow to concerned property owners across the political spectrum. This is why media stories focusing on electorates with the highest incidence of negatively geared voters (mostly safe Liberal seats, of course) are missing the point: the Coalition will be attempting to create fears about the flow-on effect for property owners in all seats.

Apart from a scare campaign over Labor’s declared policies, the Coalition could also make mischief about changes not proposed. It isn’t hard to envisage the government claiming that an “anti-retiree” Labor government might lower the threshold above which retirees pay tax on returns on superannuation accounts (currently $1.6 million) and also seek to tighten the income test for access to the seniors health card. Labor would deny any such intentions, but so did the Coalition during the “Mediscare” campaign. The electoral potency of any accusation depends on the extent to which the accused can be seen to have form.

With no chance of a Senate majority, of course, Labor may be courting a lot of pain for uncertain gain, simply because none of the necessary legislation can be assured of a smooth passage through the upper house. Mindful of this fact, shadow treasurer Chris Bowen contended last weekend that, with Labor’s policies out there and tested in public debate up to election day, victory would bestow a clear mandate and should prompt a correspondingly cooperative attitude among senators.

“Mandate, schmandate,” long-term political observers might respond. There is simply no precedent in living memory for a Senate opposition (including a Labor one) to wave through legislation it opposes simply because the new government claims a mandate. Indeed, the concept can be seen to have died (if it ever existed) with the destruction of the Whitlam government. The double dissolution is the prescribed constitutional remedy for governments frustrated by Senate obstruction.

The Greens are likely to support the proposed measures, of course, but the combined Labor/Greens numbers won’t constitute a majority. Like many ministers before him, Bowen will be stuck with the challenge of negotiating with a disparate range of characters, all convinced of their own “mandates” and not necessarily seized with Bowen’s redistributive zeal. The more concessions Bowen is forced to make, the less revenue will be available for spending initiatives. This opens up a further line of potential Coalition attack during the election campaign: Labor’s figures can’t be trusted, the government could argue, because they are based on the unrealistic assumption that the Senate would pass all the relevant legislation without amendment.

That line of argument might impress some voters. On the other side of the ledger, the number of Coalition ministers announcing their retirement from politics has reinforced the perception that a change of government is a near certainty, leaving Labor wondering, what could go wrong? Despite the party’s enduring fear that the asylum seeker issue might cruel its chances, Inside Story’s Peter Brent is right to argue that this seems more a problem for the party’s psyche than anything else, and a tribute to John Howard’s lingering influence. It’s also probably safe to write off any electoral benefit from Scott Morrison’s attempts to rev up some version of the culture wars.

The odds are heavily against a government as disunited as this one, and any slim hope of survival might depend on another of Howard’s legacies — that shift in how Australians view residential property. If it trips Labor up, another generation might pass before an opposition is game enough to embrace the risks of a big-target strategy. •

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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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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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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. ●

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In recent years the statistical picture has been complicated by the increasing tendency for Labor and the Coalition to sit out by-elections in each other’s safe seats. Where a genuine Labor–Coalition contest takes place, the size of the swing can depend on whether the seat is held by the government or by the opposition. Examining twenty-seven relevant by-elections in opposition-held seats since Federation, election-watcher Kevin Bonham finds a median swing of just over 1 per cent to the opposition, although that median embraces a very wide range of movement.

With the contests in Perth and Fremantle effectively Labor versus Greens, the results (likely Labor wins) are unlikely to tell us much about the state of the nation. In Mayo, recent SA election results might have augured poorly for Rebekha Sharkie (Centre Alliance, ex–Nick Xenophon Team) but local polling suggests that she is the favourite. Malcolm Turnbull has a little, but not a lot, riding on the result. A win would be nice, but a loss can easily be spun as the normal result for a government attempting to regain a seat in a by-election.

Braddon in Tasmania, held by 2.2 per cent, is the sort of seat that should favour a Labor opposition pursuing an equality and fairness agenda; it certainly doesn’t contain many voters consulting their accountants about the tax rate on $200,000 or more. The Liberals did extremely well here in the state election, but local experts point to a long history of contrasting state and federal voting behaviour, and the poker machine issue was also a live one in that poll. A Labor loss would be unwelcome, but could almost plausibly be filed under “Tasmania is different.” When Bob Hawke took government in 1983, he didn’t win a single seat on the island.

Most interest will focus on the Queensland seat of Longman, won by Labor in 2016 with the assistance of One Nation preferences, an anomaly not to be repeated this time. Hence, its margin of 0.8 of one per cent is probably artificial, and it may be that Labor itself needs a “real” swing to hold the seat. But it would be unwise to exaggerate the capacity of One Nation to control its preferences. In 2016, with the party card directing preferences away from Coalition incumbent Wyatt Roy, 56 per cent followed that advice but 44 per cent preferenced Roy regardless. Granted, more will be inclined to follow a pro-conservative card this time, but experience suggests that 70 per cent compliance is a likely maximum, which would still put the seat back in Coalition hands if nothing else changed.

It will possibly assist the preference flow to the Coalition if, as expected, more One Nation activists are available to distribute how-to-vote cards than would be the case in a general election, when resources must be spread across the vast state. If there is a donkey vote to be secured, it will be Labor’s, for Susan Lamb appears above the Coalition candidate on the ballot paper. (In Braddon, the Liberals are the donkey beneficiaries.)

Of the ten most marginal Coalition seats in the nation, five are in Queensland, and it is difficult to envisage a path to government for Labor that doesn’t involve increasing its stocks in that state. It might be contended that if Labor can’t prevail in Longman in the congenial anti-government atmosphere of a by-election (against a government that’s been trailing in national polls for most of its term), questions should be raised as to how it would achieve the necessary swing in the more demanding environment of a general election.

The state breakdown of Labor’s national poll lead is positive for the party. Indeed, the authoritative BludgerTrack identifies a movement to federal Labor of more than 5 per cent in Queensland since the 2016 election, a trend reinforced in the recent Fairfax/Ipsos poll reporting a two-party-preferred 52–48 in Labor’s favour in the state. Polling in Longman suggests a much closer contest, and the by-election will to some extent be a further test of the credibility of individual seat polling, following flawed predictions in the federal seat of Batman and the state seat of Darling Range in Western Australia.

Of course, it might be argued that Longman is different and that a general swing across the state may not be reflected in this particular seat: possible, but not obviously persuasive. There is some suggestion that voters may seek to punish Lamb for mishandling her original nomination and Bill Shorten for his hubris in declaring his members free of problems with their citizenship. If this factor is in play, Lamb may need to generate some level of sympathy for the strained family circumstances that led to her problematic nomination.

A more worrying possibility for Labor is not that Longman is different, but that Queensland is different, and that predicted levels of Labor support fail to materialise when the hypothetical of a polling question is replaced by the reality of a ballot paper. That has certainly been the case in previous elections, in which federal Labor has underperformed relative to opinion poll numbers. Only three times since 1949 has the party won a majority of the two-party-preferred vote in the state, and on only six occasions has it won a majority of seats. At present it holds just eight out of the state’s thirty House of Representatives seats.

Queensland has long been federal Labor’s boulevard of broken dreams. Bill Shorten will be hoping that a nightmare can be avoided. ●

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Proportional representation was known to give minority parties and independents a chance of seats, though that factor must have seemed of merely academic interest in 1949. Australia had a solid two-party system (Labor, and the Liberal–Country Coalition) and the only minor party with any profile was the Communist Party, which stood little chance of securing a quota for the upper house. But the Labor split of 1955 changed all that. The breakaway Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist) — later the Democratic Labor Party, or DLP — secured Senate seats right up to 1974, reaching a peak of five members in 1971. Minor parties and/or independents have been a constant in the Senate for more than six decades now.

The conservative parties have fared better than Labor has, securing Senate majorities under prime ministers Menzies, Fraser and Howard. But recent elections have confirmed that governments seem fated not to have a majority in the Senate, at least in the near to medium term.

Before 1949, the Senate electoral systems (there had been two since Federation) invariably produced a substantial majority for one side or the other, which meant that the protocols for replacing deceased or resigning senators were of limited importance. State governments did not always replace like with like, and on three occasions non-matching replacements were appointed to the Senate.

Once proportional representation more or less guaranteed finely balanced Senates, the system for replacing senators assumed critical importance. The Constitution stipulated that replacements were to be nominated by the relevant state parliament, but if such a process followed partisan lines then a state Liberal government could (for example) replace a deceased Labor senator with a Liberal, potentially upsetting the balance created by the voters at preceding elections. After 1951, a convention emerged whereby state parliaments would nominate a replacement senator from the same party as the deceased or resigning senator.

Neither before nor after 1949 did the replacement senator serve the full remainder of the departed senator’s term (which could be anything up to six years). The spot was theirs only until the next election — and in those days, when elections were not synchronised, this could be a separate House election or a half-Senate election (as happened between 1963 and 1972). This gave no guarantee that the departed senator would be replaced by a member of his or her party, but the principle was clear: replacement senators needed to seek electoral endorsement (and implicitly legitimacy) at the earliest opportunity. Resignation from the Senate was not done lightly.

The convention began to unravel in 1974, when Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam sought to manipulate the system by inducing the disillusioned former DLP leader, Queensland senator Vince Gair, to resign his position in return for the ambassadorship to Ireland. The casual vacancy would be filled at the looming half-Senate election (Gair’s position had another three years to run) and, with the quota down from 16.7 per cent to 14.3 per cent, Labor stood a good chance of securing an additional Senate position in Queensland.

In true Baldrick style, the cunning plan was foiled when Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen issued the writs for a “normal” half-Senate election (five vacancies, 16.7 per cent quota) before Gair had got round to tendering his resignation. In the event, the opposition’s moral outrage led to a double dissolution election in which Labor could only manage four out of ten Senate seats in Queensland. (For what it’s worth, it should be recorded that some conservative activists later cited Whitlam’s failed stratagem as the incident whose political immorality justified the Coalition’s own dramatic breach of conventions the following year.)

Two Senate vacancies in 1975 (ultimately) brought matters to a head. In February, Whitlam appointed his attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, to a High Court vacancy, creating a casual Senate vacancy in New South Wales. Party-political High Court appointments were hardly novel, but opposition outrage (confected or otherwise) ensued, with the Liberal premier Tom Lewis indicating his intention to ignore the convention on replacements and instead appoint to the vacancy the former mayor of Albury, Cleaver Bunton (whom he quaintly characterised as a “political neuter”).

At the end of June, Queensland Labor senator Bert Milliner died, which should automatically have resulted in his replacement by a Labor nominee. But Bjelke-Petersen had other ideas. He insisted that Labor provide a panel of three party members from whom he would choose (presumably the least “socialist”). When the party stood on its dignity and provided just one, the premier nominated his own, a right-wing unionist and (apparently) former Labor member named Albert Field, whose main claim to the position seemed to be a strong detestation of the Whitlam government. (In one of politics’ great ironies, after the rejected Labor nominee, Mal Colston, was eventually elected to the Senate he ratted on Labor by voting for the Coalition’s sale-of-Telstra legislation in return for appointment as Senate deputy president.)

Bunton played no role in the constitutional crisis of late 1975, indicating a willingness to support the government’s budget and declining to vote for the opposition’s deferral motions, which were aimed at securing an early election. For his part, Field was absent from the Senate while his eligibility was being challenged (under good old section 44). But the absence of a Labor replacement for Milliner left the government one vote short, allowing the opposition to defer a vote on the budget. The end result was Whitlam’s dismissal.

The departure from the post-1951 convention was short-lived. Whitlam’s vanquisher, Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser, may have benefited from the breach but he was sufficiently concerned about possible future chaos to seek a constitutional solution. In 1977, supported by Labor, his government proposed an amendment to section 15 of the Constitution that would require deceased or resigning senators be replaced by a nominee of the party in whose name they were elected.

Equally importantly, the new senator would serve the full balance of the former senator’s term: there would be no more casual vacancies filled at the next election. The proposal passed in all states with 73 per cent of the national vote. The problems exposed in 1974–75 had now been fixed and the Senate would reflect the balance in membership as elected by the voters for the full term.

As usual, the law of unintended consequences swung into operation. At the time of the 1977 referendum, some discussion took place about how deceased or resigning independent senators might be replaced — something that hasn’t happened in the intervening forty years. What could not have been envisaged was the emergence of personality- and grievance-based “parties” capable of the organisational mayhem we now see on a regular basis, but especially when elected members need to be replaced. The chaos was vividly described last week by Inside Story’s Jeremy Gans, who identified up to eight Senate positions that may end up being filled by people not originally elected. The implications for democracy are serious, but the problem doesn’t end there.

The less dramatic reason for the “unelected senator” problem is the high rate of resignation in recent years, possibly boosted by the constitutional certainty that each departing senator will be replaced by a member of his or her party. With replacement senators now serving the full remainder of the former senator’s term, there is no danger that the position will be lost in a casual vacancy election. Nor can a hostile premier do a Lewis or a Bjelke-Petersen and appoint other than a replacement from the relevant party. The constitutional amendment was undoubtedly desirable, but it means no deterrent exists for the sort of self-serving premature exit that treats the voters with contempt.

A few numbers illustrate the point. At the end of 1977, the year the casual vacancy referendum was carried, only one member of the Senate had filled a casual vacancy (in a Senate of sixty-four) and that had been caused by a death. Forty years later, at the time of the 2016 double dissolution election, there were eight casual vacancies, only one of them prompted by a death. That was a fairly average number for the first years of this century. The high point had been reached in mid 1999 when thirteen senators (17 per cent of the Senate) were sitting as a result of casual vacancies caused by resignation.

The current Senate already has four bona fide resignations (not connected to section 44). If these are added to the eight identified by Gans, this Senate could be 16 per cent unelected before it is two years old.

In the period between 1998 and today, only two vacancies were brought about by death, reflecting the increasing youthfulness of the upper house, a far cry from its earlier characterisation as a retirement home for ageing party hacks. There may still be a proportion of hacks, but they are rarely ageing. With younger membership can come (paradoxically) earlier resignations, with several senators seeking not retirement but new careers. Mark Arbib and Stephen Conroy come to mind.

The major beneficiary of the new system was probably Santo Santoro, a Queensland Liberal. Santoro was nominated to a Senate vacancy in 2002, became a minister in 2006 and resigned (from ministry and Senate) in 2007 over a failure to declare shares activity. He never faced the electors of Queensland.

Equally interesting was the case of former NSW premier Bob Carr. He was “drafted” to fill a casual vacancy in 2012 for the express purpose of becoming foreign minister in Julia Gillard’s government, a position he retained after she was replaced by Kevin Rudd in 2013. He resigned after the government’s defeat in October 2013, but only after having been elected to a full six-year Senate term, a term he never commenced. Indeed, he failed even to complete the term of the initial casual vacancy. His replacement, the Labor nominee Deborah O’Neil, was set to enjoy six and a half years as a senator without being elected, until the 2016 double dissolution — at which O’Neill was elected in her own right — intervened.

So it is no exaggeration to suggest that the Senate has become a part-elected, part-nominated body. Whether this is a desirable feature of a functioning democracy must at least be open to question. Certainly, the ghost of Gough Whitlam might be savaging its lack of legitimacy and Paul Keating (not yet a ghost) could be tempted to reprise his classic hit “Unrepresentative Swill.”

What is to be done? Probably not much. The Constitution was changed in 1977 and we are stuck with the consequences, although the now excessive resignation rate was never envisaged as a possible negative by-product. In addressing the section 44 problems, Jeremy Gans proposes that the parties exert pressure on the unelected replacements to resign to allow the nomination of those originally elected. This seems a tall order and the accidental windfall senators will probably just have to be washed through the system, as he indicates is likely.

It would be helpful, though, if Senate candidates could at least be shamed into committing to a full term (health permitting) prior to election. And where vacancies do arise, perhaps parties should nominate those who at least ran on the ticket. It might even become a “convention.” In a democracy, it seems reasonable that a parliamentarian’s name should appear on a ballot paper before it appears on a Parliament House office door. ●

The post The long road to a hybrid Senate appeared first on Inside Story.

Diametrically opposed to the CPA was the Catholic Social Studies Movement (also known as the Movement or the Show), an opaque outfit formed by a young Catholic lawyer, B.A. Santamaria, with the support of the Australian Catholic bishops. Although it initially focused on eliminating communist influence in unions, the Movement soon adopted the more grandiose ambition of recruiting a majority of Labor Party MPs to its cause — MPs who would implement, when in government, policies based on the Catholic social teaching espoused by Santamaria and his followers. Just as the wartime CPA membership numbers now seem almost unbelievable, it is difficult to imagine an attempt by a church-based organisation to wield that degree of power today.

As a member of a prominent CPA family, Mark Aarons brings an impressive pedigree to his project, although circumstances conspired to extend the time spent on the book — from earliest research in 1991 to publication in 2017 — and to modify the initial plan for a parallel history of the CPA and the Movement. Instead, Aarons offers “an analysis of the impact of Santamaria’s decision to model his Movement… completely on the Communist Party.” Given the dominance of Joseph Stalin’s brand of communism in the 1940s, Aarons contends that the chief characteristic of such emulation would necessarily be Stalinism.

Aarons knows the communist side well; for the Movement perspective, he is assisted by collaborator John Grenville, a Catholic who operated as an undercover member of the Show within the union movement. But some of the most interesting revelations in the book come from declassified ASIO files. Because the Movement was, of necessity, engaged in intelligence gathering, it is perhaps not surprising that links developed with the national intelligence agency. ASIO certainly appreciated much of the information it received in this way, but Aarons records that at least one Movement agent was viewed as unscrupulous, peddling biased and unreliable information (presumably a perennial problem in espionage).

More disturbing from a democratic perspective is the fact that the traffic in information ran the other way as well. As Aarons notes, even if that information was unclassified, “it still sustains the case of ASIO’s critics that it was directly involved in assisting a significant player in Australian politics.” Not surprisingly, Santamaria long denied a Movement–ASIO link, only admitting the truth in 1990.

The cloak-and-dagger theme is evident in much of the book. One vivid instance is a longstanding puzzle over how a vital Movement document fell into the hands of the CPA in 1945. While it suited his purposes, Santamaria supported the story that a careless bishop had left his copy on a train (which was found, conveniently, by members of a CPA-controlled union). Aarons exonerates the bishop, arguing that the leak came from “within” — not a possibility Santamaria could afford to admit.

In keeping with his theme of the CPA and the Movement sharing common methods of operation, Aarons describes internal union battles in considerable detail. On the CPA side, one of the most intriguing figures is the Waterside Workers’ Federation’s Vic Campbell. Neither a teetotaller nor a pacifist, Campbell is suspected of being a double agent (although his story is sufficiently complex that it would be unwise to rule out triple-agent status). Even allowing for the seriousness of the issues involved, Campbell seems to have owed more to Maxwell Smart than to John le Carré.

More broadly, not much that happened within the unions of the period, and especially during union elections, would receive a ringing endorsement in any reputable guide to democratic governance. Self-serving rule changes and rigged elections were not unusual and (in the case of Movement unions) employer donations hardly suggest a vigorous pursuit of members’ best interests.

Two of the most important Movement-controlled unions (the Clerks and the Shop Assistants) became associated with a US-controlled international unions body with the mandatory CIA connections — and with CIA money. Given the ongoing revelations about today’s sweetheart deals between the “Shoppies” and employers, it’s clear that some habits die hard. (If the union hadn’t re-affiliated with Labor, it’s likely that same-sex marriage would have been legislated several years ago and certain members of the right faction may never have made it into parliament.)

As seen by Aarons, the CPA and the National Civic Council (as the Movement became after 1957), equally undemocratic, had lost most of their relevance long before the end of the twentieth century. For the CPA, international events — the new Soviet leadership’s denunciation of Stalin, the denunciation of the denouncers, the Prague Spring — would result in three separate Australian communist parties by the early 1970s. For its part, the National Civic Council underwent what Aarons describes as a schism after its model, in which unions were effectively “run” by an outside body, became unsustainable. The victory of Lindsay Tanner’s team in the Victorian branch of the Clerks’ Union in 1988 was clearly a seminal moment.

Completing Aarons’s picture of the Movement as Stalinist in its operational behaviour was Santamaria’s self-elevation to cult status. “As undisputed leader of the Show,” writes Aarons, “he wrapped himself in an aura of infallibility.” While some may find the Stalinist parallel a stretch, it is certainly the case that the authoritarian Santamaria seemed to share with his communist contemporaries a lack of enthusiasm for pluralist democracy. Aarons endorses the view that Santamaria was essentially railing against modernity, a difficult battle to win in a free society.

Assisted by Grenville, Aarons sheds new light on the role of Santamaria’s Movement, and especially its relationship with ASIO and — at a time when unions mattered — within key trade unions. It is a useful addition to the scholarship on an important aspect of cold war Australia. •

The post How the Show went on appeared first on Inside Story.

Mostly missing from this narrative was that old political adage, disunity is death, the truth of which was routinely demonstrated by Labor in the 1950s and 1960s. Put bluntly, history tells us that unless the Coalition can convince the electorate that it meets threshold levels of political harmony, it will find government very hard to retain. The initial response to Turnbull’s ministerial changes suggests that doing so will be challenging indeed. Every reshuffle produces winners and losers (and whingers), but the prime minister’s apparent need to placate conservatives at the expense of his natural supporters carries the dual handicap of highlighting ongoing internal differences and reminding the electorate that this is still not the authentic Turnbull.

Of course, the Liberals have experienced periods of disunity before — hardly surprisingly, given that its history now spans seventy-three years. After its founder Robert Menzies retired in 1966, the party went through five leaders in nine years, a figure that now seems less remarkable than it did at the time. For the most part, those changes, and the disunity they reflected, had more to do with the search for an electoral winner than a struggle for the ideological soul of the party.

That said, the differences between 1968 and 1975 were not without some ideological and policy content. John Gorton was heretically lukewarm about states’ rights and this, combined with his fairly non-consultative cabinet style and disdain for social conventions, made him a large swag of enemies in a short space of time. After the divided Coalition, now led by the unimposing Billy McMahon, lost government in 1972, party conservatives and moderates differed on how to respond to an apparently more progressive electorate. With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to say that there was less to this struggle than met the eye, especially outside Victoria. And once the Whitlam government entered terminal decline after the 1974 election, those differences were largely buried and Malcolm Fraser led an ostensibly united team to victory in 1975.

Fraser, from the party’s conservative wing, ironically encountered most internal criticism from hardline neoliberals (the “dries”), concerned that the leader was failing to inflict his “life wasn’t meant to be easy” philosophy on enough of the population. But the critique was civilised and almost academic in tone, wasn’t associated with an alternative leader (certainly not leadership rival Andrew Peacock), and caused little electoral damage for the government.

Back in opposition for its longest-ever period (1983–96), the Liberals once again churned through various leaders. By the time a recycled John Howard led the party to victory, it was arguably a less broad church than had been the case over the preceding fifty years. Assisted by some preselection culling of more liberal elements, Howard managed the conservative and less-conservative wings with aplomb, a task in which electoral success was a reliable ally. Several Liberal MPs crossed the floor on various occasions, but this could not be portrayed as an existential threat to the regime. Differences over specific policies (such as asylum seekers) were not battles to define the party.

And the Liberals’ partner, the National Party? Menzies regarded the creation of an enduring coalition with the Country Party, as it was then named, as one of his main achievements. The leaders with whom he dealt (Arthur Fadden and John McEwen) delivered a largely united party. By contrast, today’s National Party lacks the internal unity of previous years, with a major contributing factor being the re-emergence of One Nation as a force on the right, especially in Queensland.

The merger of the Queensland Liberal and National parties might have seemed like a good idea when it was engineered in 2008, but its proponents couldn’t have foreseen how a revitalised One Nation (and indeed Katter’s Australian Party) would depict the Nationals’ absorption as evidence that they had sold out to Brisbane-based Liberals. With the state having returned to a compulsory-preferential voting system, the need for the LNP to placate One Nation supporters in some way was bound to alienate Brisbane voters who find Pauline Hanson’s party anathema. And while the state election demonstrated One Nation’s limited ability to win seats, its uneven record with preferences certainly leaves some sitting LNP MPs vulnerable at the next federal election. With de-amalgamation of the LNP not entirely out of the question, rocky times lie ahead.

It’s also important to remember that Malcolm Turnbull is hardly the Nationals’ preferred leader for their coalition partner. Indeed, it is hard to think of any Liberal leader since the party’s formation who has been less compatible with the Nationals in background, values and style.

The times have been challenging, but Barnaby Joyce has been notably unsuccessful in imposing the discipline achieved by previous leaders, notably the legendary McEwen, who led the party from 1958 to 1971 and was so effective as leader, minister and parliamentarian that some Liberals briefly considered him as a post-Menzies prime ministerial option in the early 1960s. And while politics occasionally requires a leader to replace a talented minister with a less talented aspirant, this week’s ministerial changes will test Joyce’s ability to manage his party room. It will be interesting to see whether his performance justifies the views of the media cheer squad that has viewed him (without obvious evidence) as some sort of political genius.

And so, while no government can ever be written off, the Coalition faces a unity problem possibly not seen by the conservatives since the late 1930s/early 1940s. A section of the Liberal Party doesn’t regard Malcolm Turnbull as a legitimate representative of the party’s values, and has shown no willingness to mute those views in the interests of party unity and electoral rehabilitation. Combine that problem with a National Party facing a populist assault on its right flank, and the Coalition would be foolish to rely on Bill Shorten’s shortcomings as a route to survival. Of course, it may be that a modern electorate is more at home with a range of differing views within a party, but that is probably not a risk many would want to take. ●

The post Broad church blues appeared first on Inside Story.

For those who came in late, Burke first sprang to national attention when he became WA premier in 1983 at the youthful age of thirty-six, having won the party leadership in 1981. The victorious Labor Party replaced a conservative coalition that had been in office since 1974. While the Burke government’s policy achievements were reasonable, its excessively cosy relationships with colourful business identities, and associated deal-making (including costly bail-outs) gave rise to the uncomplimentary tag “WA Inc.” Harsher critics saw the state as having descended into a form of corporatism.

Burke’s government was re-elected in 1986 and the premier himself continued to record stellar levels of popularity. He left parliament at a young forty-one, but his subsequent tenure as Australian ambassador to Ireland and the Holy See was cut short when the findings of a royal commission led to his being charged with various offences. He served seven months’ jail for travel expense rorting (paroled from a two-year term) and was later sentenced to three years for theft of campaign contributions, serving six months before the conviction was quashed on appeal.

Burke renewed his acquaintance with the WA justice system early in the new century when his lobbying activities came under scrutiny. A friend in the WA cabinet bit the dust as a result, and Burke was fined $25,000 for providing false testimony to the Corruption and Crime Commission.

What drove this tumultuous career? Burke’s father was elected as the federal Labor member for Perth in 1943, but lost his seat at the 1955 election, immediately following the split in the Labor Party. Although he was part of the faction opposed to the federal leadership of H.V. Evatt, the elder Burke declined to join his Catholic co-religionists in the breakaway Democratic Labor Party. Yet he was expelled from the Labor Party in 1957 for his anti-Evatt statements, and only readmitted eight years later. Brian Burke admits that it was only late in life that he came to a realisation that his father’s treatment was the “biggest single factor” driving his own political career.

Burke relates the story of a fairly conventional Catholic schooling, including the routine brutality of the Marist Brothers who provided his upper primary and secondary education. His school reports lamented a lack of application on the future premier’s part. At the time, though, less than brilliant results were no barrier to entering the law school at the University of Western Australia (or anywhere else). Oddly, Burke covers his short university career in three lines, citing a lack of interest and enjoyment to explain his exit before the end of first year. By any measure, this is cursory treatment of a significant decision.

The same deficiency is apparent in his failure to discuss in any more than one passing line the defining issue of his generation: the controversy over the conscripting of young men to fight in Vietnam. Burke’s own vulnerability to conscription ended early, at the age of eighteen, when he married Sue Nevill, whom he had met at school dancing lessons. With married men exempt from conscription, he was free of the fears of his contemporaries as they approached their twentieth birthdays. This is not to suggest that the marriage was opportunistic (the couple have remained married to this day), but it is difficult to resist the conclusion that once he was no longer threatened by the draft he had minimal interest in the issue, or at least none that he wants to commit to print — which is curious, to put it mildly.

After dropping out of university, Burke worked at WA Newspapers, starting as an assistant proofreader before securing a journalism cadetship. He later moved to radio and then television, becoming a familiar face on evening news bulletins. He became involved in state Labor Party affairs, serving on the state executive, but he makes no mention of any parliamentary ambition until 1973, when he sought preselection for a by-election in the (normally safe) state seat of Balcatta; even then he refers to being urged on by others. This was no ordinary by-election: the state Labor government held a one-seat majority. Were he to lose the seat, the government would fall. He won (after preferences) by thirty votes.

Having been elected, Burke (now twenty-six) mainly focused on tending his now marginal electorate. He omits any mention of the fact that he was initially unpopular with his fellow caucus members. Over time, though, he joined forces with other like-minded Labor MPs seeking to oust the party’s old-school leaders, who usually combined minimal energy with maximum electoral unpopularity. (Similar trends were evident in other states in the 1980s.) Burke’s energetic alliance-building and media skills saw him win the leadership in 1981. His election to government in February 1983 came the year after that of the Cain Labor government in Victoria, and was soon followed by the Hawke federal Labor government in March 1983.

No politician’s version of his or her own time in government is likely to be objective and balanced, but it is useful to have even imperfect accounts on the public record. In A Tumultuous Life Burke stresses his pride in abolishing capital punishment, and provides interesting insights into battles with Canberra over native title and a proposed gold tax. Electoral reform, the reopening of the Perth–Fremantle railway line, environmental protection and advances in equal opportunity laws also feature prominently.

It is unlikely that many will be satisfied by Burke’s explanation for the all-too-close relationships with business figures for which his government was notorious. Clearly, this was more than just an effort to improve Labor’s traditionally poor relationship with business, and Burke certainly embraced the 1980s Labor theme that new money was preferable to old money. He is brutally candid in admitting that he “set about divorcing these entrepreneurs from what were really temporary political affiliations,” and his obvious comfort with the links between donations and policy is, in an age of spin and dissembling, almost refreshing in its honesty. The same might be said of various government appointments, but he seems to take cronyism as a virtual given, no explanations needed. To be fair, he is hardly alone in that respect.

Naturally, the former premier puts on the record his version of the various charges and accusations that form such a significant part of his public life, and readers can make of that what they will. For this reviewer, the oddest item on the charge sheet concerns the way he treated a Labor Party campaign fund as his own social security kitty, dispersing funds both to worthy causes — people down on their luck and a local soccer club, for instance — and to less worthy causes, such as a suitably aligned union. For a hard man of the realpolitik school, this was extraordinarily naive. (For the record, this activity led to the conviction that was later quashed.)

In his account of his controversial lobbying activities, Burke sees no need to justify the rights of the well-heeled to make representations to government through highly paid intermediaries while the less well-off have no such opportunity. And he conspicuously fails to comment on the accusation that he used his enduring Labor Party links to bring improper pressure to bear on ministers.

Having experienced the penal system firsthand, Burke is in the position to make some informed comments about its operation. He acknowledges that political reality works against genuine prison reform: voters want punishment, not rehabilitation, and the only education taking place is of the sort that helps inmates to be better criminals. In a depressing observation, he sees it as “next to impossible to know how to improve the prison system, or even to understand how it works.”

Although he is hardly a disinterested observer, Burke’s comments on WA’s Corruption and Crime Commission are disturbing. He cites parliamentary confirmation that the CCC acted unlawfully when it charged 171 people with 1976 offences. He also identifies at least one suicide flowing from tardy CCC processes, and while he draws no wider conclusions, some of the “star chamber” aspects of state anti-corruption bodies (and the Australian Building and Construction Commission) should be of greater concern to civil libertarians than they apparently are.

A critical biographer once observed that the pragmatic Burke had no interest in the battle of ideas, and that view is certainly vindicated by this autobiography. In a rare reflective section, Burke considers the “What went wrong?” question, and identifies the fact that he started young and was over-confident of his own abilities. For his critics, this will prove unsatisfactory: only some sort of confession and apology will suffice. Even the more neutral will be disappointed by the lack of any serious discussion about ends and means, the purpose of politics, or even how Burke’s most controversial policies and decisions fitted into a Labor view of the world (except at the tribal level). At the intra-tribal level, some WA observers see Burke as driven by a need to triumph over the Labor left, which had effectively destroyed his father.

At 564 pages, the book is excessively long, although it is an easy enough read and a reminder that, decades ago, Burke was a capable journalist. Tighter editing would have been useful: the detailed life stories of various Perth wheelers and dealers (Alan Bond, Robert Holmes à Court and others) could easily have been dispensed with. One suspects that an editor is less influential when dealing with a self-publishing author.

While the book is unlikely to generate wide interest outside Western Australia, Brian Burke was a significant figure whose fall from a great height ensures that he will retain a prominent position in the pantheon of Australian premiers. ●

The post The long shadow of the Labor split appeared first on Inside Story.

On the same day, another proposal was put to the Australian electorate. Unlike its Indigenous counterpart, this largely forgotten referendum was defeated by almost 60 per cent of voters, and the consequences of that vote persist to the present day.

Section 24 of the Constitution requires the number of members of the House of Representatives to be “as nearly as practicable, twice the number of senators.” Holt’s government wanted to remove that clause (the “nexus”) so it could increase the number of lower house seats without increasing upper house representation. (At the time, the 124 MHRs were roughly matched by sixty senators, ten from each state. The two mainland territories had no senators until 1975.) Given the amazing disparity in electorate sizes (some having four times the enrolment of others), a redistribution of the electoral boundaries was long overdue.

The plan to abolish the nexus had its origins eight years earlier in a recommendation of the 1959 report of the Joint Standing Committee on Constitutional Review, a body that gave a young Labor MP, Gough Whitlam, the chance to shine – and to develop thoughts on federalism and an enhanced role for the Commonwealth that he would later set about implementing as prime minister. But the change in the relative sizes of the two houses required a referendum to amend the Constitution.

Under Holt’s predecessor, Robert Menzies, the necessary legislation was passed unanimously by the House of Representatives in 1965. Such harmony was less forthcoming in the Senate, where the two Democratic Labor Party, or DLP, senators and a number of independent-minded government senators registered their opposition. There could never have been any doubt about how the DLP would react: the influence and status it gained from its representation in the Senate would be at risk if an increase in House numbers (where it could never hope to win seats) were not matched by an increase in upper house membership.

Among the Liberal opponents, the most vocal was the Tasmanian curmudgeon Reg Wright. Not overly concerned with Westminster norms, he frequently conveyed the impression that the Senate was the superior chamber in Australia’s bicameral system. Given that his state had ten senators and only five MHRs (and even the latter reflected a constitutionally guaranteed minimum rather than a population-based entitlement), his philosophy may even have had a gram of merit – for a Tasmanian. Three Liberal senators joined Wright in his opposition.

Also on the government side, two Country Party senators opposed the referendum. Although they had broken ranks with their parliamentary leadership, their stance also reflected reservations within their party organisation. At the heart of Country Party concerns was a fear that an enlarged House of Representatives would reduce the overall proportion of rural seats and enhance the Liberal Party’s prospects of governing in its own right – a status they came within two seats of securing in the 1966 election.

After succeeding Menzies as prime minister, Holt postponed the referendum on the grounds that pressure of business (a federal election was looming) would not allow the government to campaign properly, making defeat of the proposals more likely. This was certainly true in relation to the nexus proposal, though less so in relation to Aboriginal recognition.

Polls taken between early 1966 and May 1967 revealed substantial opposition to the plan to break the nexus, leaving its proponents with a formidable task. While all three supportive party leaders (Holt, McEwen and Whitlam) campaigned for the Yes case, Holt as prime minister was under most pressure. Anticipation of likely defeat may have made for less enthusiasm on the government side, whereas the No case was pursued with vigour by Wright, the DLP and sections of the press. Misleadingly, if predictably, they argued that a Yes vote would result in an increase in the number of parliamentarians. In a nation not renowned for holding politicians in high esteem, this was a sound strategy.

Holt and his allies had the more complex task of advocating the breaking of the nexus in order to limit future increases in the number of MPs to the lower house only. Delivered on ABC TV and radio a mere twelve days before voting day, the prime minister’s “campaign” address was almost a case study in how not to resurrect a struggling cause. Well over 1000 words of detailed argument would have driven all but the most avid of political tragics either to a commercial alternative or to the kettle. By contrast, Holt’s advocacy on the more popular Aboriginal question was just a few hundred words.

In addition to their anti-MPs theme, the No advocates argued that the status of the Senate must be preserved in order to protect the smaller states. Any evidence that the Senate had ever played such a role had always been minimal, but the claim may have had some appeal to voters outside New South Wales and Victoria.

A poll taken a week before the vote indicated a 51–33 advantage to the No side, with 16 per cent undecided. Polling day revealed that the undecideds had broken marginally with the No side for a national vote of 40.25 per cent for and 59.75 per cent against. New South Wales was the only state to record a majority (51 per cent) for the Yes side, and while it was no surprise that Tasmania (23 per cent) and Western Australia (29 per cent) most favoured the status quo, the votes of Victoria and Queensland, as judged by today’s political culture, seem anomalous. The latter recorded the second-highest Yes vote of 44 per cent. Perhaps the absence of an upper house in that state may have left voters less concerned about a strong Senate, but the explanation remains elusive. The Victorian vote (a low 31 per cent) seems even more curious, judged from today’s perspective, in which the state is seen as a long-term bastion of progressivism. South Australians voted 34 per cent in favour.

The loss had several consequences. For Holt, it was the start of a poor electoral sequence that took much of the gloss off his record victory in November 1966. The referendum would be followed by the loss of a government seat in the Corio by-election, a loss in the Capricornia by-election (a Labor seat that he foolishly declared he might win), and a vastly reduced Senate vote in November 1967. At the time of his death in December, Holt no longer represented a self-evident electoral plus for the government.

For political scientists, the result confirmed the dictum that for a successful referendum, the support of government and opposition is a necessary but not sufficient condition. The opposition of the DLP and a few government dissidents, supported by some sections of the press, was enough to carry the day. In this, they were assisted by the ease with which an anti-politicians theme could be pursued, even though the argument was essentially dishonest and misleading.

The anti-politicians theme would rear its head again in the 1999 referendum on whether Australia should become a republic. Opportunist monarchists manufactured common ground with those republicans who favoured a directly elected head of state and opposed the “minimalist” model on offer on the grounds that politicians would probably choose another politician or a member of the “elite.” Any vote that can be represented as giving politicians a beating seems close to a sure bet.

While the referendum result didn’t preclude future increases in the size of parliament, Holt accepted the outcome as a vote against any increase in House numbers for the immediate future. Indeed, three governments (McMahon, Whitlam and Fraser) would fall before the Hawke government legislated to enlarge the House by twenty-four in 1984. With the nexus still in place, this necessitated an increase of twelve in the number of senators – and a consequent reduction in the quota for election in both half-Senate and double dissolution elections. Various micro-party candidates who may have been unsuccessful under a higher quota have since been elected as a result.

The more famous of the two 27 May 1967 votes, meanwhile, deleted that part of section 51 that had prohibited the Commonwealth from making laws with respect to “the aboriginal people in any State,” along with section 127, which had precluded “aboriginal natives” from being counted in “reckoning the numbers of people” in Australia. The 91 per cent vote in support was a record not surpassed by any referendum since then. If an enhanced constitutional recognition proposal is put to the electorate at some future date, it will be interesting to see whether that high-water mark can be matched. •

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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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Federal opposition leader Bill Shorten is an obvious beneficiary, and not simply because he is the federal leader of the party that won a landslide victory on Saturday. Premier-elect Mark McGowan, elected state Labor leader in January 2012, was a relatively long-term opposition leader. He had lost one election, in 2013 – hardly his fault after only a year in the job – but hung on to the party leadership and used the next four years to position himself for a credible run at the premiership.

While the NSW Labor right would no doubt have ditched McGowan after his 2013 loss (or maybe even before it), the success of WA Labor’s more patient approach has implications for the federal party and for Shorten. After five years in the job, McGowan was a known quantity: for better or worse, voters knew him as well as they can an opposition leader. And while he is clearly neither charismatic nor a great orator (hardly a novelty in state politics), Labor’s consistent poll lead suggested that the party was electable with him as leader. The danger of being defined by one’s opponents (see Mark Latham in the 2004 federal election) had essentially been neutralised.

Given McGowan’s massive victory, last March’s attempted putsch by Stephen Smith to replace him from outside the parliament now looks more farcical than ever. Presumably Smith, who demonstrated the lack of any necessary correlation between conventional good looks and political judgement, is not waiting by the phone for an offer of well-paid consulting work in the new government.

Bill Shorten is in a comparable, though not identical, situation. He has been through one election and, unlike McGowan’s first, actually won extra votes and extra seats. Federal Labor has been ahead in the polls for quite some time, and while Shorten is clearly charismatically challenged and has a unique style of voice modulation, he is both a known quantity and a given for those expressing a preference for Labor in the polls.

The notion that Labor would be even further ahead with a different leader – a view advanced mainly by Labor partisans rather than the uncommitted voters who decide elections – is simply untestable. What is clearer is that a change of leader would remind voters of the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd fiasco and suggest that the party has learnt nothing from its previous self-indulgence. Rudd was dumped in 2010 when Labor was leading 52–48 in the polls, and we all know how that worked out. The party’s recent stability and comparative unity (certainly when contrasted with the Coalition) are electoral pluses.

Labor’s current situation resembles neither 1983 nor 2006–07, when it changed leaders in order to turn a possible victory into a likely one. In the first case, Bob Hawke was a known political celebrity at no risk of being defined by his opponents. Kevin Rudd was less well known than Hawke had been, but his ubiquitous television presence ensured him a more than adequate popular image among swinging voters. Both Hawke and Rudd won substantial victories, which suggested that Hayden and Beazley would probably have won anyway.

By contrast, there is no Hawke or Rudd on the current Labor frontbench. While certain names suggest themselves as potential leaders (Albanese, Plibersek, Bowen), they are comparatively unknown to the electorate and would be vulnerable to definition by their opponents. Moreover, suitability for the job of opposition leader is rarely predictable in advance: only work experience counts.

So, barring any revelations that might cripple Shorten’s credibility, federal Labor is probably best served by following the example of stability provided by WA Labor and Mark McGowan. If the electorate is set on a change of government, history tells us that as long as the opposition leader meets a basic electability threshold, victory is likely. For evidence that the threshold can be quite low, see Tony Abbott.

More attention has focused on the performance of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and its federal implications. Pre-election polling appeared to ignore the fact that One Nation was not contesting all lower house seats, and therefore tended to inflate the vote in individual lower house seats. But that doesn’t detract from the reality of a recorded drop in support during the last week of the campaign.

A more accurate measure of One Nation’s support can be garnered from upper house results, where the party contested all six regions. Its figure of 7.5 per cent is (predictably) superior to its lower house effort (4.7 per cent) and close to its average in lower house seats contested (around 8 per cent). All these figures are a far cry from the 15 per cent predicted in earlier polls, but the upper house vote provides an interesting comparison with the WA Senate vote in 2016. On that occasion, One Nation secured 4 per cent. So, in a comparable contest with the party on all ballot papers, it has nearly doubled its vote in eight months, albeit from a low base.

Even if the Liberal–One Nation preference deal hadn’t generated cultural repugnance among moderate conservatives, the Liberals seem to have overlooked the relative inability of One Nation to discipline its preferences. In times past, the Democratic Labor Party (assisted by elements of the Catholic Church) would deliver around 90 per cent of its preferences to the Liberal–Country Party coalition, and even the Greens average round 80 per cent to Labor. For both organisational reasons (an inability to staff all polling places) and ideological ones (not all of its supporters are disgruntled Liberals), One Nation will struggle to deliver the goods. Liberal Party strategists will need to take this into account when considering the value of a deal for future elections, state and federal. Unless One Nation can deliver around 70 per cent or better, it is probably not worth the pain. •

Author’s note: election figures are from the WA Electoral Commission website and may change marginally as the count continues.

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The Labor Party, crippled by a split in 1955, was led by Arthur Calwell, a character as far from generational change as could be imagined, especially in the swinging sixties. Aged sixty-nine at the start of 1966 – but seeming older, in age and outlook – Calwell had secured the leadership in 1960, but his narrow, two-seat election loss after the 1961 credit squeeze was to prove a false dawn. Labor was, in fact, only halfway through its wilderness years. Normal transmission – which for Labor meant divisions over policy and leadership – was quickly resumed and Menzies secured a comfortable majority of twenty-two at an opportunistic early election in 1963.

A modern observer might wonder at Calwell’s ability to retain the party leadership after two consecutive election defeats. Simple as it sounds, part of the rationale was that since his predecessor Bert Evatt had been afforded three (losing) elections, Calwell was entitled to no fewer, and this carried weight with some of the more sentimental sections of the caucus.

But there was another element. Calwell’s obvious successor, deputy leader Gough Whitlam, was the object of suspicion among much of the party’s left, and increasingly of hostility from Calwell himself, a sentiment reciprocated by the deputy. Whitlam won no friends with his immodest, if accurate, public observation that he was destined to lead the party. Incredibly, an attempt was made to expel him from the party in early 1966 (of which more below). He narrowly survived, challenged Calwell’s leadership and lost, but still continued as deputy leader – a somewhat less than ideal sequence of events in an election year.

The polling of the time was infrequent and basic, with no questions about preferred prime minister or leadership approval – metrics that these days drive politicians and the media into a frenzy, provoking leadership speculation and indeed leadership change. Even had modern polling been in vogue, though, it would have been unlikely to have influenced pre-modern Labor.

On the policy front, Labor continued to struggle over the question of state aid to non-government schools, an issue older than federation and one on which the party had been artfully wedged by Menzies’s recent introduction of grants. It was Whitlam’s attempt to overturn Labor’s age-old opposition to state aid that had brought him to the brink of expulsion. And while party policy was amended in mid 1966 to accommodate this kind of funding, the political advantage now lay with the Coalition.

Even more damaging for Labor was its opposition to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war. While the party leadership had not opposed the government’s initial support for the South Vietnamese government and American goals, it was firmly against the commitment in 1965 of Australian troops to participate in the conflict. At the same time, the party proclaimed its support for the US alliance, the cornerstone of Australian defence policy.

For Menzies and then Holt, this was electoral manna from heaven. Convincing the electorate that Labor was pro-alliance yet unwilling to fight with the Americans in Vietnam would have tested the skills of the most talented politician: it was certainly a challenge beyond Calwell.

The reintroduction of conscription and the inclusion of conscripts in the Vietnam contingent affected Calwell profoundly. Having fought against conscription successfully during the first world war and unsuccessfully as a minister in the Curtin government during the second, the ageing warhorse sensed a last chance for some form of vindication. He was to be bitterly disappointed.

While Labor was apparently united in its opposition to the commitment of Australian troops, it was divided on the process by which a Labor government would withdraw them from the battlefield. Calwell and Whitlam appeared to embrace contradictory positions, with the latter suggesting that regular troops might remain while conscripts would come home. This would have been logistically challenging, to put it mildly, but Whitlam was keen to provide some nuance in a policy that he suspected was leading to electoral annihilation. Predictably, what the electorate saw was division and ineptitude.

Labor’s task was rendered even more challenging by a pre-election campaign visit by US president Lyndon Johnson. This breach of political etiquette may have irked Labor and the diplomatic purists, but it certainly did the Liberal leader no harm: LBJ was clearly “all the way” with Harold Holt.

The 1966 election represented the high point in the conservative government’s electoral supremacy in foreign affairs and defence. The cold war was alive and well in Australia, and the gravitational logic of the domino theory was irresistible: “better to fight them there than here.” The communist threat merged seamlessly with ancient Australian fears about invasion from the Asiatic north.

Coalition advertising was in no danger of erring on the side of subtlety, with thick red arrows pointing menacingly in the direction of the Kooyong Tennis Club, and Labor maligned as a collection of traitors ready to hand the country over to the communists. By comparison, Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign in 2016 seems the essence of moderation.

Even had Labor not been beset by problems over leadership and defence policy, economic conditions were favourable for the government. Unemployment stood at 1.6 per cent and inflation at 2.6 per cent – both figures very acceptable by the standards of the day.

And so, as the campaign began, all that was in doubt was the magnitude of the government’s victory. In the event, the margin probably surpassed the fears of even the greatest Labor pessimist. Labor’s primary vote dropped to 40 per cent, a loss of 5.5 per cent from 1963 and the worst primary since the federal Labor–Lang Labor warfare of the early 1930s. While federal Labor often polls below 40 per cent today, the 1966 result was much worse because the party had a monopoly on the left/progressive vote in those days, a far cry from today’s contest with the Greens.

In two-party-preferred terms, the estimated swing was 4.3 per cent. Labor’s two-party vote of 43.1 per cent was the worst since 1931: worse than in the year of the 1955 split, worse than Whitlam’s post-dismissal loss in 1975 and worse than the loss of government results in 1996 and 2013. Labor lost ten seats: nine to the government and one to an ex-Labor independent who had quit the party over Vietnam. The Holt government now had a majority of forty in a house of 124.

Post-election, commentators were quick to identify an existential crisis for Labor, with some predicting its demise, while others opined that only some rapprochement with the breakaway Democratic Labor Party could produce an electorally competitive party. Such predictions failed to reckon with the phenomenal efforts of Gough Whitlam, and six years later Labor was in government. But while they were literally wrong, the pundits were half-right: 1966 was the end of old Labor, and fifty years later we can identify the key characteristics of new Labor.

The most obvious change has been the intolerance of multiple election-losing leaders. The notion that a leader would be permitted to lose three consecutive elections is now unthinkable: modern Labor would have despatched Calwell after his 1963 loss, as it did Kim Beazley who, like Calwell in 1961–63, had a near win in 1998 and then lost ground in 2001. Indeed, one Labor leader, Simon Crean, was disposed of without being allowed to contest even one election – ruthlessness unheard of in old Labor.

A second change has been the management of internal differences, with no replication of the policy divisions so evident in the 1950s and 1960s. Controversial and difficult issues (think uranium mining or asylum seekers) have been managed and negotiated through the formalised factional system – a feature not in place in 1966. While the system has its imperfections (notably the selection of many people totally unfit to be parliamentarians), it has ensured that policy differences are sorted out mostly behind the scenes and that a relatively united front is presented to the electorate.

After 1966, Labor became more committed to winning and less interested in defending election losses as evidence of a commitment to “principle.” Certainly, Whitlam had no patience with those who seemed content with a series of “principled losses.” In terms of party membership, this probably came at a cost, with idealists now more likely to be found in the Greens than in Labor, but in terms of electoral success (the main aim of major political parties), post-Calwell Labor has governed for twenty-two of the last fifty years – a far cry from the prolonged electoral misery of the 1950s and 1960s.

Compared with the 1966 version, modern Labor is simply too pragmatic to split over ideology or policy. Its most recent internal division – the Rudd–Gillard fiasco – concerned leadership style: it had no policy dimension. These days, it is the Liberal Party that must cope with the challenges of a “broad church,” the breadth of which is testing the building’s walls.

Defence and foreign policy have never again caused Labor the sort of electoral damage sustained in 1966. A bipartisan approach has been the norm, with support for the US alliance a given: the days of critics such as Jim Cairns seem as distant as they (actually) are. Labor did oppose Australia’s troop commitment to Iraq, but this was never popular to start with: hence, the electoral impact was nil.

On the Liberal side, Menzies-era party stability was nearing its end in 1966. For the briefly triumphant Holt, 1967 would be a year of mistakes and misjudgements, culminating in a poor vote in the November half-Senate election. The following month, Holt disappeared at Portsea and the party would commence a period of division, disunity, plotting and intrigue: it would have five different leaders in just over seven years, during which time Labor had just one, Whitlam.

The title “end of an era” is often overused, but a strong case can be made that the 1966 election was, indeed, a seminal moment in Australian political history. •

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Two grim features of Evatt’s younger years can be seen as explaining much of the man. The first was the death of his father when Evatt was only seven, placing him in that formidable club of public men effectively raised by widowed, abandoned, or just evidently strong mothers. In Murphy’s depiction, “ambitious” would hardly be an adequate adjective for Jeanie Evatt’s determination that her children would do well. Once Bert’s talent was clear, he was the one most pushed; in turn, he felt driven to prove himself to her. First-class results in nine senior public examination subjects attracted less attention than the second-class result in the tenth. A reader who knew nothing of Evatt but much of biography would already suspect that this may not turn out well.

The second tragedy was the death of two of Evatt’s younger brothers in the first world war. The ensuing emotional devastation was hardly unique to the Evatt family, but in Bert’s case, Murphy sees a possible explanation for his later commitment to internationalism and the creation of structures aimed at making war less likely. To pursue those issues, and his broader political career, Evatt made the (now unthinkable) switch from High Court justice to federal MP just as the second world war was heating up in 1940 (having been appointed to the bench at the unlikely age of thirty-six).

Evatt’s conviction that he could make a difference went beyond the standard line routinely uttered by even the dullest of parliamentary candidates. As outlined by Murphy, Evatt’s confidence and ambition bordered on the messianic. His strong support for conservative prime minister Robert Menzies’s proposed all-party wartime government (which was contrary to Labor Party policy) didn’t endear him to his new parliamentary colleagues. He seems to have viewed the plan as his fastest path to the prime ministership, but he was fortunate that his collusion with his political opponents (as revealed much later in correspondence) was not undertaken in the WikiLeaks era.

This tone-deafness to the views of others reinforced his outsider status within the Labor Party. His links with the party’s industrial base had been largely limited to his work as a Sydney barrister in the 1920s, and he had been expelled from the party in 1927 when, after the radical forces around premier Jack Lang blocked his re-endorsement for the NSW parliament, he ran (successfully) as an independent.

As a middle-class intellectual in the Labor Party, Evatt would have attracted suspicion and hostility whatever his personality. Arthur Calwell’s line that working with “horny hands” was a necessary prerequisite for membership of a Labor ministry was a revealing one, although this was clearly not a criterion that ex–public servant Calwell ever applied to himself.

Usefully, Murphy outlines in some detail Evatt’s early political philosophy. He was an admirer of the brand of liberalism associated with Australia’s second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, but when Deakin’s version of the Liberal Party merged with the free traders, Evatt saw Labor as the chief proponent of liberal ideals (a contention that would partly be validated during the 1951 referendum on Menzies’s bid to outlaw the Communist Party). Hand in hand with this liberalism went a faith in legal reasoning; as Murphy observes, Evatt believed that legal reasoning “could arrive at the truth,” a belief “that shaped his conduct in life and was reinforced by his undoubted talent for legal rationality.” Alas, such skills have proved of limited utility in democratic politics at the best of times; they would prove even less useful in the emotional cold war environment in which Evatt would lead Labor.

Evatt’s work as attorney-general and external affairs minister in Labor governments from 1941 to 1949 was beyond substantial. For all his personal failings, he did much to defend and advance his country’s interests while also contributing to the creation of the United Nations and establishing Australia, albeit briefly, as an international player. Murphy writes of Evatt’s alleged intention to quit party politics after the war, although it is unclear how genuinely such thoughts may have been entertained. Life would certainly have been easier for Evatt and different for Australia. Judgement on such issues was not assisted by Evatt’s inadequate record-keeping (no surprise there). In terms of correspondence, he clearly saw it as more blessed to receive than to give. In practical effect, he resembled his nemesis Daniel Mannix, the long-serving archbishop of Melbourne, who would handicap future biographers by burning vast volumes of records.

Murphy spends less space than might be expected on details of the Labor split and its consequences, observing that a “huge literature” exists about the issues in question. Fair enough: his summary version does the job. One marvels again at Evatt’s work in turning around public opinion on the Communist Party referendum. We learn that pre-campaign polls revealed a high point of 82 per cent support for Menzies’s plan, a figure that had been reduced to 49.4 per cent (with the proposal carried in only three states, and thus defeated) on polling day.

What should have been Evatt’s finest hour was, of course, anything but, as warring forces within Labor headed closer to fracture. By now, Evatt was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. In a series of low points over the ensuing years, surely nothing can match Evatt’s letter to Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov seeking advice as to whether there were Soviet spies in Australia. Here was legal reasoning gone mad, or Evatt gone mad, or both. Misjudgement followed misjudgement, and any revenge that Menzies KC sought for long-past High Court slights from Justice Evatt was secured in spades.

Which leads us back to the two key questions in the opening lines of this review. After a careful weighing of views, Murphy concludes that Evatt “was out his depth in politics,” and “had little grasp of what was happening” and “little control over events.” He sees that the “powder keg” that Evatt touched off – and that would trigger the Labor split – “was already in place and it is difficult to imagine how it could have been made harmless had he not been in the picture.”

As for Evatt’s sanity, the issue is addressed in a substantial eleven pages. Again, Murphy weighs a range of views, and cautions of the need to distinguish between eccentricity and a psychological disorder. Evatt would eventually be diagnosed with cerebral arteriosclerosis, and some Labor colleagues wondered when it might have begun, with Clyde Cameron opting for as early as 1951; for others, the Petrov affair or the Molotov letter are viewed as decisive.

Murphy sees Evatt as “unhinged” by the mid 1950s, but finds it “impossible to determine, though, whether this was due to a physiological condition affecting his mind, or just the extreme reaction of a paranoid narcissist put under incredible pressure.” Ultimately, Murphy plumps for the latter, while conceding that vascular dementia may have played some role.

Evatt: A Life is a quality addition to the literature on one of Australia’s most enigmatic political figures. Anyone with an interest in Australian political history will find this a rewarding read. •

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From the start, there were risks in Labor’s new process for selecting the federal parliamentary leader. Establishing dual electorates (the parliamentary caucus and the branch membership) left open the possibility that the successful candidate would be supported by one constituency and not the other, resulting in a potentially damaging perception of division. And this is exactly what occurred in the first vote under the new system, with Albanese winning the grassroots vote but losing the caucus contest by a margin that gave Shorten the leadership.

That this was the lesser of two evils can be seen in the experience of the Labour Party in Britain, where the reverse occurred. The result was a leader embraced by the grassroots (assisted by a ludicrously permissive franchise – a mistake not made by the ALP) but overwhelmingly opposed by his parliamentary colleagues. While it may have been uncomfortable for Shorten to lack a branch membership majority, the Jeremy Corbyn experience highlights the perils of attempting to lead while demonstrably (and in some cases, vociferously) opposed by most of one’s parliamentary colleagues.

A predictable consequence of the new Labor process in Australia has been that the defeated candidate is effectively installed as the leader in waiting, provided he or she has secured majority support in one of the two constituencies. Albanese’s defeat created a level of frustration at the branch membership level, and that seems to have nurtured the idea that it would be “his turn” to take the leadership when it next fell vacant – a dubious basis on which to approach such a critical issue. Shorten’s better-than-expected campaign performance has seemingly denied Albanese and his faction their turn – for now at least.

With only one case study available for analysis, much of this speculation is premature, of course. It’s certainly unclear how many of these issues were thought through when Kevin Rudd effected the changes in the dying days of his leadership. Gough Whitlam, who fought successfully to empower the parliamentary party at the expense of the (electorally damaging) “faceless men” of the party machine, might have been puzzled by this “reform.” Indeed, he may well have reflected that had such a system been in operation for the party leadership ballot in 1968, he would have been defeated by Jim Cairns.

Rudd’s other rule change, which renders it more difficult to change leaders between elections, is more clearly a positive. It effectively took leadership speculation off the table for almost three years (much to the annoyance of the media) and allowed Shorten the security to focus on policy development. If it is true that he might have been rolled by Albanese late in 2015 if the previous rules had still been in place, then Labor should be grateful that they had been changed. Such a move would have confirmed the party’s reputation for poll-driven, revolving-doors leadership and revived memories of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd farce – hardly a desirable basis on which to contest the 2016 election. And, in the light of Shorten’s solid performance, Albanese supporters should concede that it is far from self-evident that their man could have done better, or would do better if elevated to the top post.

Labor would be unwise to assume that the close election and the obvious disharmony within the Coalition means that government will fall into its lap next time. It will still need a solid work effort and an enduring appearance (at least) of unity. Labor simply can’t afford another descent into endless leadership speculation, especially when there seems to be no policy content at stake, but merely a battle of personalities. If the election demonstrated anything, it was that the leaders’ personal approval metric is overrated as an indicator of ultimate voting intention.

History had a pretty good election, and it delivered a sobering message for Bill Shorten. No federal leader has achieved what he is trying to do: advance from first-up opposition leader to the position of prime minister. Every leader in his position has secured a positive swing at their first election, but none has taken the next step, as Bill Snedden (1974), Andrew Peacock (1984) and Kim Beazley (1998) can attest. Indeed, of that trio, only Beazley survived even to contest (unsuccessfully) the next election. It’s a fair bet that both Shorten and Albanese are familiar with that particular curse. •

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Results in the various states also ran true to historical form. Labor maintained its traditional two-party-preferred dominance in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. Significantly, it came close (49.6 per cent at time of writing) to doing the same in New South Wales. Remarkably, it secured the (bare) majority of seats in that state, suggesting that the voters’ continuing punishment of NSW Labor might now be restricted to the comrades seeking election to Macquarie Street.

On the other side of the coin, Queensland and Western Australia maintained their reputations as electoral deserts for federal Labor. Only three times since 1949 has it secured a majority of the two-party vote in Queensland, and just four times in Western Australia (three of those down to Bob Hawke).

On election night, Labor seemed to be doing well in several Queensland regional seats, but the later count revealed slim pickings, with only Longman (margin 6.9 per cent) secured and an apparent near miss in Herbert. The vote in Capricornia (Labor unable to secure a mere 0.8 per cent swing) was especially poor. The Brisbane area was a disaster, with a swing to the Coalition in four seats, perhaps suggesting that Malcolm Turnbull’s agile hipster/innovator types live in the Queensland capital rather than further south.

The prospects for a federal Labor renaissance in the two frontier states seem as remote as ever. If those states were magically excised from the nation, Labor would have won this election fifty-eight seats to forty-four. Party realists probably accept that a future Labor federal government will be structured around the regular majorities in the southern states and further improvement in New South Wales.

Had Labor’s 3.2 per cent two-party swing been uniform, it would have secured twelve seats, the precise number gained from the Coalition. But only six of these were won from the lower-hanging fruit, tending to validate pre-election claims that the party would fall short in key marginals. This shortfall was compensated for by six (mostly unanticipated) wins in seats with bigger margins. The solitary loss (Chisholm in Victoria) is probably attributable to the retirement of a longstanding local member and the (often overlooked) role of demographic change in the suburbs concerned.

In Victoria, premier Daniel Andrews will be unpopular with those Labor supporters who blame his handling of the Country Fire Authority issue for the failure to win marginal seats. This is a tricky area for judgement, made more so by the absence of any vaguely uniform vote movement in the seats most affected. I tend towards the view that even without the CFA crisis, Labor might have struggled to win back seats held by 3 per cent or more by well-established local Liberal members.

Still in Victoria, the Liberal Party blundered in the seat of Indi by re-endorsing the distinctively unpopular Sophie Mirabella. While it can’t be proved that a different candidate would have won the seat back from independent Cathy McGowan, it can be confidently asserted that any other candidate would have done better. Wiser preselecting heads are likely to prevail next time.

Labor’s normal disadvantage on the key issue of economic management was perhaps less in evidence in this election. Malcolm Turnbull did himself no favours with an economic “plan” that was easily represented as mainly a company tax cut in the far distant future, and this is a leader who can’t afford to be too closely identified with the big end of town. Nor was the government’s customary perceived superiority on economic matters enhanced by the performance of the treasurer. Put charitably, Scott Morrison is no Peter Costello; and shadow treasurer Chris Bowen is one of Labor’s best assets.

To its advantage, Labor (normally the loser in the politics of fear) was able to run an apparently successful scare campaign around alleged threats to Medicare, with Turnbull later conceding that the Coalition’s past form had provided fertile ground. Given Australia’s ageing population, and unless the Coalition can reverse current perceptions, this may turn out to be the gift that keeps on giving. We can be certain that older voters will tend to be more worried about the quality and cost of healthcare than about the tax regime on multimillion-dollar superannuation accounts. Moreover, the baby-boomer demographic already constitutes a comparative electoral advantage for the progressive side of politics, compared with their (departing) parents.

The election reconfirmed the death of the two-party system, though some people seem to have trouble adjusting to that reality. In an emerging multi-party system, major parties are bound to lose primary votes, but the preferential system ensures that this isn’t fatal: it merely necessitates a decent harvesting of preferences. Contrary to suggestions that Labor needs a given primary vote (40 per cent, 37 per cent, whatever) in order to govern, no such figure exists: it is a variable dependent on the votes for other parties (especially the Greens) and the flow of their preferences.

By way of illustration: at Gough Whitlam’s 1975 election wipeout, Labor secured 44 per cent of the primary vote but only 24 per cent of lower house seats. In 2016, Labor secured 35 per cent of the primary vote, but 45 per cent of the seats. One was operating in a two-party system; the other is not.

Both party leaders face challenges in the forty-fifth parliament. Turnbull leads a divided party whose conservative elements appear to believe that elections can be won by pandering to the extreme rather than tacking to the centre – a dubious idea in any polity, but especially in one that employs compulsory voting. He must regret bitterly not calling an early election soon after his accession to the prime ministership.

Bill Shorten has the advantage of having exceeded (fairly low) expectations, and was smart enough to undertake his novel “victory” lap and convene a caucus meeting before it became apparent that Labor’s gains were fewer than first thought. He would do well to drop the routine about the certainty of an early election: Gough Whitlam ran a similar line in 1969, when he missed out on government by a handful of seats. Although Liberal prime minister John Gorton was replaced by Billy McMahon in early 1971 (a precedent that might disturb Turnbull), the government itself went full term and Whitlam was obliged to be patient. Shorten may have to do likewise, performing strongly and maintaining party morale over the best part of three years. •

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Holt, who succeeded Robert Menzies as Liberal prime minister in January 1966, had no interest in altering the substance of Australian foreign policy. This was hardly surprising: he had been a member of Menzies’s cabinet since its creation in 1949 and shared an aggressive anti-communist worldview that reached its apex with the commitment of Australian troops to the Vietnam War in 1965.

Through the cold war, the government’s hardline policy had delivered considerable electoral benefits to the Liberal–Country Party government. For its part, the opposition Labor Party (which had split in 1955 over attitudes to communism) had struggled to develop a coherent approach to the perceived threat of communism, both internationally and at home. Holt, facing his first election as prime minister in late 1966, was keen to retain this advantage.

Outside the cold war framework, Holt was essentially a moderate. He had shown more than a modicum of compassion as immigration minister, and as labour and national service minister had enjoyed a productive and amicable relationship with ACTU president Albert Monk, a consensus approach simply unthinkable in today’s Liberal Party. Later, as treasurer, he was as Keynesian as the next fellow.

But while Holt’s accession saw no significant change in substance, there was certainly a difference in style. This was true both generally and in relation to foreign policy. At a general level, the fifty-seven-year-old was presented as a man of his (swinging ’60s) era, a contrast to the old-fashioned Menzies. The age gap seemed greater than the actual fourteen years, and Holt also seemed a full generation younger than his sixty-nine-year-old Labor opponent, Arthur Calwell, a man who certainly had no interest in adapting to the mood of the decade.

Holt’s daughters-in-law posed for photographs in bikinis and Holt himself enjoyed spear-fishing. (The leisure activities most usually associated with Menzies – watching cricket or football – were passive.) Holt’s wife, the colourful Zara, ran her own dress shop. Symbolically, Holt’s accession had coincided with the introduction of decimal currency.

Soon after taking office, Holt offered the view that managing foreign relations, largely in southeast Asia, would be his government’s main challenge. Central to that challenge was the war in Vietnam. Holt’s first parliamentary address as prime minister announced an increase in troops numbers from 1500 to 4500. In December, the numbers were raised to 6300, and finally, in October 1967, the commitment was raised to just over 8000 – the peak Australian involvement.

Holt embraced the full range of arguments for Australia’s participation in the war: China was a puppet-master pulling Hanoi’s strings as part of the Communist Chinese philosophy of world domination; the South Vietnamese needed help in resisting aggression; commitments under the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization had to be honoured; and the domino theory would be validated if Saigon fell. His most honest explanation was probably the contention that Australia needed the great power presence of the US in the Asia–Pacific region.

Holt’s commitment to the Vietnam War must also be viewed in the context of two important factors: the impending British withdrawal from Asia and his personal relationship with President Johnson. Menzies would have found the former development difficult to accept. His attachment to Britain and the Commonwealth was all-important and had not been weakened by the realities of the mother country’s inability to assist Australia during the second world war. Holt was less emotionally attached and viewed the exit of Britain from the region as bolstering the case for maintaining and strengthening the US presence in Asia. Because he died before the war “went bad,” Holt never had to contemplate the possibility that the US’s failure could achieve the opposite outcome.

Australia’s desire to be seen as a loyal American ally was personified in the relationship between Holt and Johnson, a “spectacular friendship” that “simply exploded” between them, according to Zara Holt. “All the way with LBJ” was not an original slogan – it had been used by Johnson in domestic election campaigns – but it was clearly an inappropriate expression of fealty from the leader of a supposedly independent nation. But there is no evidence that the pledge, coming as it did at the height of public support for the Vietnam War, did Holt any electoral damage, although it was not unreasonably viewed as sycophancy by the vocal minority opposing the war. Johnson rewarded his ally by visiting Australia just prior to the 1966 federal election, a breach of political etiquette which would never have worried LBJ, nor Holt, who romped to a (then) record electoral victory over Labor.

Holt’s concern that the US remain focused on southeast Asia produced at least one faux pas. While he was in Washington in June 1967, he was alleged to have described the then raging Arab–Israeli war as “only huffing and puffing,” and although he did not utter the words himself (it was his press secretary Tony Eggleton) the observation was indicative of a fear that events elsewhere could divert the US from its focus on Vietnam, which Holt viewed as more relevant to Australia’s immediate security.

Even more curious was the Holt government’s decision to open an embassy in Taiwan in 1966, a move that had been resisted by even hardline anti-communists in the Menzies government. Explanations for this initiative have varied, from Holt’s wife being enchanted by the Taiwanese ambassador to Australia to (more prosaically) lobbying by local Taiwan interests. Whatever the rationale, it was an odd decision, opposed by the foreign policy establishment and fated for reversal once the Whitlam government recognised the People’s Republic of China in 1972.

In his approach to foreign policy, Holt, an amiable and gregarious person, placed a heavy emphasis on the development of personal relationships with other heads of government. He travelled extensively, including to Asia (another departure from the Menzies era). Ironically, his external affairs minister, Paul Hasluck, held antithetical views about the value of personal diplomacy, regarding the practice as mischievous and (at its worst) an impediment to the progress of peace. He mocked the “almost pathetic belief” by some leaders “that if they have had lunch with someone and called him by his Christian name they have changed the fundamental facts of relationships between nations.”

If Holt was offended by this critique, it did not lead to any obvious conflict with Hasluck, who in turn appeared to harbour no reservations about remaining a minister for such an avid devotee of the personal touch. Hasluck might have viewed Holt’s travels and meetings as mostly harmless public relations, allowing the minister to get on with the substance of foreign policy.

If foreign policy is taken to include immigration, then Holt deserves credit for an important policy departure from his predecessor. An early initiative was a reduction from fifteen years to five in the period of prior residence required in Australia for non-Europeans to quality for permanent residence or citizenship, bringing it into line with the rules for Europeans. In addition, the entry category of “distinguished and highly qualified” (for non-Europeans) was replaced by the less onerous “well qualified.” Mindful of the longstanding appeal of the white Australia policy, Holt ensured that these reforms were preceded by an extensive round of consultation with interested parties, including employers, unions, the RSL and the opposition Labor Party (led at the time by notorious white Australia supporter Calwell).

The dismantling of white Australia is meritorious enough to have attracted multiple claims of ownership, but Holt deserves a substantial slice of the credit. Unlike Calwell, he appears to have been genuinely moved by those hardships cases that had crossed his desk when he was immigration minister. While the reforms had the benefit of enhancing Holt’s image of being his own man, with different priorities from Menzies’s, the former secretary of the external affairs department, Alan Watt, was surely accurate in describing the changes as of “fundamental importance in the development of Australian foreign policy and the search for friendly relations with non-European countries.”

Prime minister for less than two years, Holt was fortunate to govern in a period when the conservative coalition’s electoral advantage in foreign policy was supreme. Indeed, 1966 was its high point – the last election in which foreign policy and defence would be both the subject of fierce partisan disagreement and a clear electoral bonus for the conservatives. While foreign policy was controversial under Whitlam, it was of minimal relevance in the elections of 1974 and 1975.

If there is a foreign policy legacy for Holt, it may be found in the bipartisan consensus that has been the norm for (at least) the past thirty years, with Labor seemingly forever anxious to avoid the electoral vulnerability of 1966. While no Labor leader may have offered any cringeworthy “all the way” pledges, the party’s commitment to the US alliance, in word and deed, stands in stark contrast to the battle lines of the Vietnam War era.

Holt died in December 1967, six weeks before the Tet offensive, the communist campaign which indicated that the US and its allies had underestimated the enemy and overestimated their own chances of victory in Vietnam. His premature demise spared Holt this reality check, and it is unclear how he would have adjusted to changed circumstances that also served to undermine the longstanding perception that his party held the monopoly of wisdom in defence and foreign affairs.

Leaving aside the tragedy of Vietnam, Holt’s foreign policy is remembered for its welcome focus on Asia, a point generously acknowledged by Gough Whitlam in his parliamentary eulogy when he asserted that Holt had “made Australia better known in Asia and he made Australians more aware of Asia than ever before.” It was an acknowledgement that would have pleased him. •

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The question mark over the crossbench also serves to highlight the limitations of the opinion pollsters’ concept of the two-party-preferred vote. This tool works best in a setting where Labor and the Coalition win all 150 seats between them; it is less useful when the waters are muddied by Greens and independents. A two-party-preferred vote of just over 50 per cent is less likely to deliver a lower house majority if there are ten or so crossbenchers in the chamber.

Notionally allocating Clive Palmer’s seat of Fairfax back to the Coalition, we are left with a “current” crossbench comprising two seats historically held by Labor (Denison and Melbourne) and two historically by the Coalition (Kennedy and Indi). In the event of a close contest, the Coalition would not want additions to the crossbench to come exclusively from their side, via the loss of New England to independent Tony Windsor, for instance, and Mayo to the Xenophon Party.

If Labor does fall short of the necessary swing, explanations can start with that most durable of excuses, the historical record. No first-term federal government since 1931 has lost office – and in that case it took a major economic depression. Whatever the current state of the economy, we are not in a depression.

Some political observers have viewed this pattern as a minor obstacle, citing the recent fall of one-term state governments in Victoria and Queensland. The comparison has always been flawed. The election of Victoria’s Coalition government in 2010 was as close to an accident as is possible in electoral politics, and it fell into effective minority government status in the second half of its term. This left premier Denis Napthine with no margin for error, and effectively doomed his government. The Queensland case was different, but Campbell Newman (unrestrained by an upper house) governed with an arrogance and political ineptitude that even Tony Abbott could not have matched. And, of course, it is far more difficult to secure a large swing across six states of a federation than it is in a single state, even one as large and diverse as Queensland.

Another factor is also at play. State government is essentially about service provision (a perceived Labor strength) while federal government is essentially about economic management (a perceived Labor weakness). The Victorian and Queensland results are consistent with that differentiation.

The federal campaign has highlighted the enduring difficulties that Labor faces on the key issue of economic management. While polls show that the party is preferred by voters on health and hospitals, education and the environment, the Coalition is preferred on the economy by a two-to-one margin. Astonishingly, the same is true on interest rates, despite the low levels maintained under the Rudd and Gillard governments. This speaks in part to a failure of communication or, as Peter Brent has put it, a vain hope in Labor ranks that if it hammers on about “fairness,” concern about economic management will go away.

Ominously for Labor, polls reveal a heightened concern about economic management in marginal electorates, a significant barrier to securing the necessary swings in those key seats. If Labor can win government with this handicap, the rules of the game will certainly have changed.

The British vote to exit the European Union can’t have helped Labor, with any hint of financial instability playing to the strength of the incumbents. There is a faint echo of the 1963 federal election, when US president John F. Kennedy was assassinated a week before polling day. The tragedy helped validate the Menzies government’s case for re-election in an unstable world.

Several poor-quality preselection decisions were exposed during the campaign and it will be interesting to see whether this proves costly in the seats concerned (as it did for the Liberals in Greenway in 2013) or whether national issues prove more important in local voting. The ubiquity of social media now means that indiscreet and imprudent comments that in the past may have been picked up only by one’s fellow drunks in the pub are now out there for all to see. While some slack may be cut for those whose gaffes might be filed under “youthful indiscretions,” several problematic comments turned out to have been made in quite recent times.

This trend does suggest that parties are still undertaking inadequate due diligence when they select candidates, and this needs to be sorted out, at least in winnable seats. It may also indicate that major party preselections are based more on ideological intensity (in the case of the Liberals) or the factional merry-go-round (in the case of Labor). Merit and a trouble-free social media history seem to have been of no great concern.

At state level, the Victorian government’s politically inept handling of the proposed changes in the union/volunteer firefighters’ relationship leaves open the possibility of voters in affected areas opting to punish federal Labor. The seat of McEwen is intriguing in that context: it is vulnerable for the sitting Labor member on the firefighters issue, but the Liberals are disadvantaged by their less than brilliant choice of candidate.

Questions arise as to why premier Daniel Andrews chose not to defer decision-making on this politically tricky issue until after 2 July. In the event that it does prove electorally costly, federal colleagues may be especially keen for some explanation.

The impact of one development late in the campaign can be confidently assessed. Paul Keating’s robust attack on the Greens, supporting Anthony Albanese in his vulnerable seat of Grayndler, no doubt played well to the Labor tribalists but is unlikely to have moved any votes from the Greens to the ALP. Abuse has a fairly poor record as a change agent, even when laced with the picturesque language of the former prime minister.

Keating’s attack included criticism of the Greens for blocking Labor’s access to potential majority government. It was left unclear why a party that routinely polls less than 40 per cent of the national vote should enjoy some god-given right to majority government. But then again, democratic principles have rarely featured prominently in the syllabus of the New South Wales Labor right. It is curious that major party figures (including Malcolm Turnbull) who regularly extol the virtues of diversity seem unable to accept the diminishing appeal of a two-party system that can’t reflect that diversity.

Critically, the economic debate has not seemed to be going Labor’s way in the last week of the campaign. Polling conducted a week before the election has suggested two-party-preferred support at 51–49 in favour of the Coalition, an outcome predictably promoted by the media as suggestive of a “close” election. While 51–49 might be a close result in a sporting contest, it need not be so in an election for 150 single-member constituencies. Indeed, in a worst-case scenario, a two-party-preferred vote of around 49 per cent could limit Labor to a mere handful of gains and result in Bill Shorten’s main problem after 2 July being the question of whether to serve in his successor’s shadow cabinet. •

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This confidence would have been bolstered when it became apparent that the opposition Labor Party, led since early 1967 by the impressive Gough Whitlam, was still some way from presenting as a credible alternative government. Frustrated by party traditionalists, Whitlam resigned his leadership in April 1968 and then re-contested it, hoping to enhance his authority with a substantial victory. Instead, he narrowly beat left-wing challenger Jim Cairns, leaving Liberal strategists reassured that it was business as usual in the perennially divided Labor Party.

In this environment, it would have been quite unusual had Gorton not considered an early election. In Westminster terms, he had every right to seek his own personal mandate; in political terms, the state of the Labor Party virtually guaranteed few casualties on the government benches. And a customary argument against an early election – that it would throw House and Senate elections out of sync – didn’t apply because they had already been held separately (for the Senate in 1964 and 1967; for the House in 1966) following Menzies’s premature election of 1963.

Gorton did give consideration to an early poll, and press speculation continued through the year. Ultimately, though, he decided against it. The conventional explanation assigns the key role to the Democratic Labor Party, the breakaway anti-communist party that had formed as a consequence of the 1955 split in the Labor Party. Since its formation, the DLP had helped ensure the re-election of the conservative Coalition through its ability to discipline its preferences in Australia’s compulsory preferential voting system. In return, the party demanded strong anti-communist defence and foreign policies and what it saw as educational justice through government aid for private (in their case, Catholic) schools. Under Menzies and Holt, the smaller party mostly got what it wanted.

Early in Gorton’s term, reservations developed within the DLP about both the style and content of his leadership. He was not viewed as sufficiently hardline in his anti-communism and concerns about his personal life (mostly, it seems, his liking for a drink and the company of women) had surfaced in some political quarters, though they were not yet on the radar in the electorate at large. By the second half of the year, the DLP was sufficiently disillusioned to threaten a withdrawal of preferences if Gorton sought an early poll. It can never be known whether they were serious, although stories did the rounds that how-to-vote cards favouring Labor over Liberal had indeed been printed. Gorton’s subsequent claim – that the DLP’s threat played no role in the decision to hold off – seemed less than persuasive.

The governor-general of the day, the busybody Richard Casey, would later claim some credit for dissuading Gorton from an early election, but as with much of Casey’s diary output, this assertion needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Had Gorton insisted on an early election, it is hard to see how the governor-general could have resisted.

By the time Gorton called a House election, on schedule, in late 1969, his fortunes were in decline. All of the DLP’s reservations about his behaviour were now out in the open, and a Liberal backbencher (Edward St John) had launched an extraordinary personal attack in parliament earlier in the year. At a more substantial level, Gorton had antagonised conservative state premiers with his heretical centralist views on federal–state relations, and his idiosyncratic decision-making and office arrangements had disturbed those accustomed to the norms of cabinet government (including, as diaries later revealed, a new governor-general, Paul Hasluck, and deputy prime minister John McEwen). On the latter issue, the comparison with Kevin Rudd is unavoidable.

Despite Gorton’s growing problems, it needs to be remembered that public opinion polling was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it was to become in subsequent years. The expectation that, for all its problems, a government with a record majority would be comfortably returned was only shattered once the campaign was under way. A poll suggesting a genuinely close contest came as quite a shock – probably to both sides.

Ultimately, Gorton prevailed, but only just, securing a seven-seat majority in an election which, for a brief period on the night, looked like it might produce a change of government. While unfortunate for Labor, the outcome was a good one for Australian drama, providing David Williamson with the material for his marvellous play, Don’s Party.

But for Gorton, the party was essentially over. The loss of fifteen seats eroded much of his legitimacy, and while he survived an immediate post-election leadership challenge, instability and speculation were constants until he voted himself out of the party leadership (after a tied vote) in March 1971. For survivors in Coalition marginal seats, even those of them who weren’t too bothered about prime ministerial peccadilloes, federalism or cabinet government, the political future seemed bleak under a leader who had managed to lose most of a record majority in a single election.

With hindsight, it is difficult to see how Gorton could have done any worse had he gone to an early election in 1968. Labor was still in considerable disarray and, even had the DLP preferenced against the Liberals, the government majority was substantial. Moreover, Gorton appeared to enjoy solid public support throughout 1968: it was not until the following year that criticism of his performance made an impact in the wider public arena. Opportunity lost.

At one level, it is hard to envisage a Liberal leader less like Gorton than the suave, sophisticated, silver-tongued Malcolm Turnbull. In terms of the early election option closed off, though, the parallels are irresistible. After succeeding Tony Abbott, the new leader’s approval ratings were sky-high and his party’s poll lead suggested not simply minimal losses, but even a gain in seats. It’s true that a campaign may have trimmed some fat off the lead indicated in the polls, but it is difficult to envisage anything but a comfortable re-election had Turnbull gone early. Concerns about throwing House and Senate terms out of sync have some force, but the problem is solved by bringing forward the following House election (as happened in 1977 and 1984).

Latest polling seems to be more favourable to the government than earlier in the campaign, which means, as long as he doesn’t lose too many seats, Turnbull won’t need to entertain regrets about having held off. But an increased majority seems unlikely at this stage.

How many seats can Turnbull afford to lose before he needs to worry about his security of tenure? I suspect he might need a majority in double rather than single figures. If that is so, he will be hoping that the party hard-heads (on both sides) who see Labor struggling to reach double-figure gains are correct.

There is only one leader in this campaign who could feel secure with a narrow win, and it’s not Malcolm Turnbull. •

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Asylum seeker policy, an area that has bedevilled the Labor Party since 2001, was first off the rank. While it can be argued that the vote-changing effect of this issue is exaggerated, it certainly seems to play with the collective Labor mind – and that probably means it’s a case of the perception becoming the reality, at least as far as Labor’s capacity to respond goes. As a political minefield it has now been around for twice as long as Australia’s Vietnam war/conscription controversy (1965–72), and it isn’t going away unless war itself suddenly loses its appeal as the preferred tool of conflict resolution in various parts of the world.

Labor’s weakness is accentuated by the revelation that several of its candidates are on the record as opposing the party’s asylum seeker policy, hardly a good look from the campaign team’s point of view, but no real surprise given the ongoing lack of due diligence in the preselection process. This is a curious shortcoming given that social media often provides the opportunity to find out the views of candidates seeking party endorsement. Of course, this presumes that parties are seeking to nominate the best-qualified, most electable candidate available, rather than give a seat to the next factional aspirant in the queue. This is not a uniquely Labor ailment, as shown by the experience of the (now ex-) Liberal candidate for Fremantle (who withdrew his candidacy, neatly complementing the disendorsed Labor candidate) and some other recent preselection history.

The second diversion from Labor’s preferred policy script concerns the relationship with the Greens. Convinced that Julia Gillard’s “deal” with the Greens was a key component of her government’s unpopularity, the Coalition has sought to use the prospect of a close election to scare voters into believing that another Labor–Greens deal is imminent, and that the only way to avoid such horror is to re-elect the government.

Labor’s response – that it would seek a new election rather than enter into any arrangement with the Greens – may sound suitably macho, but ignores the complexities of a hung parliament. It smacks of a refusal to accept the judgement of the electorate and poses the question of how the party would respond to an identical result: send the voters back to a third poll, until they get it right?

Importantly, such a reaction ignores the role of the governor-general. A hung parliament is one of those rare occasions on which, in the absence of a party leader commanding a clear lower house majority, scope exists for vice-regal discretion and independence. Certainly, Peter Cosgrove would be under no obligation to call a new election on the advice of a party leader who hadn’t won a lower house majority. He would be entitled to seek alternative ways of avoiding a new poll so soon after the one held on 2 July.

In such a scenario, for all its bluster, Labor could be forced to at least consider a limited agreement with the Greens. This could involve support for a Labor minority government on matters of supply and confidence, but without any commitments on policy. In the event that the Greens sought policy undertakings, and Labor called their bluff, it would be open for the Greens to offer a supply/confidence arrangement to the Coalition, perhaps for a limited time. While such a deal may well be anathema to both the Coalition and the Greens, it can also be argued that the desire to retain office, or secure office, will trump everything else. It is worth remembering that the Greens supported a minority Liberal government in Tasmania in the 1990s.

None of this is to argue that, given a hung parliament, a fresh election might not be held sooner rather than later. But it is important to remember that the idea that Bill Shorten, without a lower house majority, could advise a fresh election some time the following week is fanciful.

Labor’s frustration, while understandable at one level, seems to contain a fair element of denial about the modern party system in Australia. Put simply, the two-party system is dead, and has been for some time. The conservatives had to confront this reality on their side nearly a century ago, giving rise to the coalition agreements that characterise non-Labor politics federally and in most states. Even then, the Coalition church is not broad enough to encompass the entire conservative congregation, with other right-wing alternatives securing support from time to time, especially at Senate elections.

Historically, Labor did much better than the conservatives, retaining a virtual monopoly of the progressive/left vote long after the disappearance of the class system that had underpinned this dominance. But, as in most parts of the democratic world, it is simply not possible for one party to represent the totality of (sometimes conflicting) interests on that side of politics. This is not necessarily a reflection of some inadequacy on the part of Labor, any more than it is for the equivalent party in other comparable democracies: it is a reflection of social reality.

An intelligent discussion of this difficult truth is unlikely in the heat of an election campaign, but the problem for Labor is that it seems incapable of dealing with it at any time in the political cycle. Perhaps the party needs to balance its focus on strategy and tactics with a cool, dispassionate, intellectually informed analysis of relations with the Greens.

Still, it is difficult not to feel some sympathy for Labor partisans aggrieved at the way in which (apart from the Murdoch press’s incessant preaching to the converted) the Greens are treated with kid gloves by much of the media. By way of illustration, contrast leader Richard Di Natale’s promotion of his party as more mainstream and ready to help govern with the utterances of Jim Casey, the Greens candidate with a realistic chance of defeating Labor’s Anthony Albanese in the seat of Grayndler. Casey is credited with suggesting that it would have been preferable for Tony Abbott to retain office in order that his oppressive policies could provoke the oppressed masses into some form of street protest and civil disruption. How this burst of Trotskyist nostalgia is compatible with Di Natale’s “ready to help govern” theme is not readily apparent, but the leader seems to have escaped the scrutiny that should have resulted. This is probably a more important question than are his problems with the parliamentary interests register and his creative approach to the payment of his au pairs.

While all of these issues are of interest to those who follow elections closely, it seems that none has been important enough to produce a significant change in voting intentions, as measured by the polls. In a campaign this long, it is likely that the uncommitted voters who decide election results have simply not tuned in yet, and may not do so for quite some time. •

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As the campaign progresses, breathless references to “party polling” and polls in individual seats will suggest that things are perhaps not as they seem in the published polls. But individual seat polling has a mixed record of accuracy, and it’s hard to know why journalists allow themselves to be used by apparatchiks peddling self-serving “party polling.”

Malcolm Turnbull is unlikely to imagine himself running a close race, but that prospect has at least eliminated any complacency among Coalition MPs and officials. Turnbull still leads a first-term federal government – a species, as history tells us, that has been re-elected at every relevant election since 1931. While it is equally true that these elections see a swing away from the government, it is not unknown for the government to make up ground during the campaign itself. In a campaign as long as the one that awaits us, it is possible that the movements will be greater than usual.

Bill Shorten must be in emotional rollercoaster territory by now. Having been a strong chance to defeat Tony Abbott, he has seen his party’s polling fall away with the accession of Turnbull, only to return to 50–50 territory in recent weeks. How much of this can be credited to the revitalised, policy-toting Shorten and how much to the Turnbull disappointment factor is hard to assess.

The downside for Shorten is that he almost certainly needs a win to retain his leadership. The expectations generated by polling leads in the Abbott era did him no favours, and they have now returned. While first-up federal opposition leaders who secure a positive swing have always been re-elected (albeit not always for a full term), defeat for Shorten will be interpreted as an opportunity lost because of the failings of the leader.

Shorten’s low personal approval ratings have been a constant throughout his leadership. But no questions about personal approval or preferred PM appear on the ballot paper, and it is not unknown for leaders to surmount this obstacle and emerge victorious. John Howard was hardly Mr Popular in 1996 and Margaret Thatcher (back in 1979) is an outstanding example from a comparable jurisdiction. But Shorten’s numbers are so consistently poor that this looms as a serious barrier to success.

This is especially the case given how poorly Shorten rates on that vital subset of personal approval, trustworthiness. Almost certainly, this reflects his active factional leadership role in the chaos of the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd era, in which he can be seen as having “knifed” both leaders. It is unlikely that this perception will change much, if at all, and this experience should serve as a lesson to future leadership aspirants. Put simply, you can be a visibly active factional heavyweight and numbers person or a leadership candidate; you cannot be both kingmaker and king. The former role necessarily entails too many tasks unlikely to assist one’s image in the role of party leader. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating were hardly political virgins, but they could rely on others to do their organising and number-crunching (think Graham Richardson and Robert Ray).

The election itself will be a test of what might be seen as three competing theories about what determines election outcomes. The first contends that Australian federal elections are largely about economic management rather than specific policy issues, and that an opposition party must meet a threshold level of perceived economic competence to take government. The argument goes that Labor is regarded as the inferior economic manager and has an ongoing reputation as the party of “debt and deficits.” This constitutes a fatal liability in an election campaign, and thus the government will be comfortably returned. John Howard is an outstanding example of a PM whose individual policies were not always popular, but who secured re-election through his reputation for sound economic management.

The main competing theory elevates policy to a key role. Put simply, if Labor’s policies are more popular than those of the Coalition, Labor should win. Obviously, not all policies will be equally important and not all policies will move votes. One problem with this theory is that those most interested in policy tend to be those most interested in politics, and they tend in turn (understandably) to have a firm political commitment. Among uncommitted voters – the people who decide elections – interest in politics and policy is usually minimal and only likely to manifest itself closer to the mandatory act of voting.

While supporters of the policy thesis might point to Labor’s lift in support as a consequence of various policy announcements, this is impossible to validate. Malcolm Turnbull’s growing reputation as a disappointing vacillator may be equally or even more relevant.

Policy was not a critical determinant of the five changes of federal government since 1972. Leadership and government longevity were the key factors that helped Whitlam in 1972; a perception of chronic government incompetence ensured the election of Fraser in 1975; leadership and government longevity combined again to see Hawke elected in 1983; government longevity and declining economic credibility saw Keating fall to Howard in 1996; longevity saw Howard ousted in 2007 (though not for nothing did Rudd stress his own credentials as an economic conservative); and Labor’s loss in 2013 was a predictable electoral response to several years of self-indulgent chaos.

The classic example of policy losing an election for an opposition is John Hewson in 1993. His failure to satisfactorily explain and defend his proposed GST is almost universally regarded as the key factor in his loss of the “unlosable” election.

The third theory about elections is an emerging one that owes something to the policy thesis but is seriously at odds with the economic management theory. Its essential contention is that the Australian electorate has a threshold notion of fairness and that voters will punish the government when its policies and actions move into demonstrably unfair territory. In this context, Tony Abbott’s blatantly unfair 2014 budget (rendered worse by broken promises) led to a fall in support that no election campaign could have reversed: fair-minded Australians would have tossed him out regardless. Unless Malcolm Turnbull succeeds in having his pre-election budget regarded as “fair,” he is likely to lose. In passing, it is worth mentioning that supporters of the economic management theory regard the notion that “fairness” could be a key election issue as unconvincing.

Some have linked this third theory with developments in other democracies where anger at growing inequality has led to the emergence of populist parties (or sections of parties). These parties contend that the system is rigged against ordinary citizens who, despite working hard and paying their taxes, are being ripped off by (mostly financial) elites, completely unaccountable and indifferent to even the vaguest notions of fairness. Some have argued that Australia’s superior response to the global financial crisis and its social security safety net have prevented the worst excesses of inequality, with the result that there is less fertile terrain for populist politics than that which is sustaining Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. It is virtually impossible to imagine the views of a Sanders or a Corbyn securing a champion within the narrow church that is the modern Labor Party. Moreover, the issue of corrupt campaign financing, so vital to Sanders’s overall critique, secures virtually no traction in Australia, despite this country’s manifestly inadequate regulatory framework. If there are MPs who have concerns, they seem to be rendered mute by the disciplined party system.

Although it is never possible to determine with absolute certainty what issues decide election outcomes, the forthcoming contest certainly provides an interesting test for these three theories, which might be usefully characterised, respectively, as the realist, the rationalist and the romantic. Hard-noses will find it difficult to move far beyond the first, backed by history and key polling indicators. The Coalition’s reputation for superior economic management is an asset that will be bolstered by Turnbull’s superior (if fading) leadership approval ratings. A party leading on perceptions of superior economic management and preferred leadership will be hard to beat.

Whether the Labor Party can make this an election about “fairness” remains uncertain. For one thing, most of those for whom fairness is a key issue are probably committed progressive voters; Labor needs to convert people who voted for the Coalition in 2013, voters whose views about fairness may well be viewed through the prism of what is “fair” for them. Altruism has a very modest record in changing electoral behaviour.

As for policy debates, they are unlikely to take place in isolation, but rather in the context of the parties’ preferred themes: competent economic management for the Coalition and fairness for Labor. It needs to be remembered that even if Labor succeeds in establishing fairness as a key issue and securing increased support, the task, in terms of swing and seats, is more than formidable. Swings are never uniform and the government’s survival chances are enhanced by the new personal vote factor (the so-called “sophomore surge”) for the large number of Coalition MPs first elected in 2013.

Since 1931, every newly elected federal government has been re-elected, but with a negative swing ranging (two-party-preferred) from around 0.4 per cent (1951) to 4.6 per cent (1998). In the six relevant elections, five (all but 1998) have seen swings less than what Labor requires in 2016. If Shorten did pull off a win, the second-biggest casualty (after Malcolm Turnbull) would be history. •

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In her slim book (at ninety-one pages, essentially an addendum to her two-volume biography of Whitlam), political scientist Jenny Hocking uses new material to argue that there was a conspiracy to overthrow Australia’s first federal Labor government in twenty-three years. In their more substantial contribution (310 pages, plus detailed appendices), journalists Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston access a wider range of sources, in Australia and Britain, and draw on new interviews with nearly forty participants in the crisis.

Hocking’s most contentious claims concern the role of Buckingham Palace. In his papers, Kerr claims that he was in written contact with the Queen and her private secretary, and in oral and written communication with Prince Charles, about the prospect of having to dismiss the Whitlam government. According to Kerr, the Queen expressed (via her private secretary) a willingness to “delay things” in the event that Whitlam pre-empted Kerr and sought to have Kerr dismissed.

But Kerr’s version of events, conveyed in a handwritten journal from 1980, is Hocking’s sole evidence for this point. Kerr, whose concern for his own tenure runs through the narrative, is hardly the kind of witness whom Hocking and other critics of the dismissal would normally use to advance their case. Indeed, his endless quest for self-justification should surely prompt any author to seek independent verification.

This is the approach taken by Kelly and Bramston, who have drawn on Kerr’s papers, interviewed Palace staff and used journal notes made by former governor-general Paul Hasluck, who discussed Kerr with some of those staff in 1977. Far from endorsing Kerr’s actions (let alone conspiring in them), Palace interviewees regarded Kerr as having acted prematurely; after the dismissal, indeed, the Palace was keen for his early departure from the post. As for a willingness to “delay things,” this appears to have been Kerr’s take on the Palace’s advice that his own dismissal could not simply be effected by a prime ministerial phone call to the Queen: documentation would be required. Kerr, by contrast, could dismiss Whitlam at the stroke of a pen. Instead of being reassured by the advice, Kerr remained obsessed about his own job security, and this was his main explanation for ignoring the Crown’s duty to warn the chief minister.

In her biography of Whitlam, Hocking has detailed the hitherto largely unknown role of High Court justice Anthony Mason in advising Kerr, especially in the period prior to the dismissal. This included, bizarrely, Mason’s organising of ANU law school members to tutor Kerr on aspects of vice-regal power (raising the question of why lawyers are appointed as governors-general if they have to drop by the local campus for a refresher course in Constitutional Law 101). Hocking now takes this part of the story further, revealing that Mason helped reinforce Kerr’s resolve on the afternoon of 11 November, advising him that the House of Representatives’ vote of no-confidence in the new Fraser government was “irrelevant,” a curious interpretation of a fundamental tenet of the Westminster system.

Hocking’s elaboration of Mason’s role leads her to conclude that chief justice Garfield Barwick was, in effect, the judicial fall guy – that he entered the drama (to advise Kerr) later than Mason but was prepared to take the flak in order to protect “the younger man” (as Kerr and Barwick cryptically described Mason). This protection was of no minor significance as it is scarcely conceivable that the Hawke government would have elevated Mason to the position of chief justice had they known of his role in advising and fortifying Kerr (as Hawke and several former cabinet ministers confirmed in interviews with Kelly and Bramston).

A vital feature of the constitutional crisis was Malcolm Fraser’s apparent confidence that events would unfold as they did. Did Fraser have private, unauthorised discussions with Kerr in the weeks before the dismissal? While Kerr and Fraser initially denied any pre-dismissal hints, both were later forced to admit to telephone contact on the morning of 11 November. Kerr maintained that he was merely establishing that the opposition’s position had not changed, but Fraser (supported by witnesses) claimed that Kerr had asked a series of questions relating to his being commissioned as prime minister. Only a fool or a sophist could deny that such questions presaged the imminent course of events.

In terms of earlier contact between Kerr and Fraser, Hocking considers a claim by former Liberal Senate leader Reg Withers (in an oral history interview in 1997) that he witnessed a phone conversation in which Fraser exchanged private phone numbers with someone who could only have been Kerr. This conversation, in early November, constituted a clear breach of Kerr’s undertaking to Whitlam that he would only contact or meet Fraser with the prime minister’s knowledge and approval.

Kelly and Bramston go back even further. They located a note of Kerr’s concerning a state dinner on 16 October, at the beginning of the crisis. In the note, Kerr records two detailed conversations with Fraser that night, at the end of which Fraser could have been in no doubt that Kerr’s fear of his own dismissal was a major concern, and that his trust in Whitlam was non-existent. These sentiments, improperly conveyed to Fraser, ensured that the opposition leader held a significant advantage over Whitlam for the duration of the crisis: he knew Kerr’s thinking; Whitlam did not.

Fraser denied that these conversations ever occurred, but Kelly and Bramston regard Kerr’s account as credible. Moreover, Fraser had form in this sort of fudging, having previously denied the phone call from Kerr on 11 November – until he was “outed” in 1987. A key theme in the dismissal saga is Fraser’s astute reading of Kerr, a complete contrast to Whitlam’s naive overconfidence and mishandling of the relationship. So confident was Fraser that on 6 November 1975, in an off-the-record chat with Kelly, he confided his belief that Kerr would sack Whitlam.

The least convincing part of Hocking’s case concerns Whitlam’s plan for a half-Senate election, which he proposed to recommend to Kerr on 11 November. She is convinced that had that election been called, opposition senators would have capitulated and supply would have been granted. But Fraser had advised Kerr that supply would not be available for a half-Senate election (only for an election involving the House of Representatives). It is of course possible (albeit not probable) that the announcement would have had the effect claimed by Hocking – just as it is possible that one or two Liberal senators might have caved in over the next few days even without the half-Senate election being called – but it can’t be treated as anything but speculation. This possibility is of such little consequence that it is not even mentioned by Kelly and Bramston, the former of whom was a Canberra press gallery member at the time.

In any event, there was a reason why Kerr would have been within his rights to question Whitlam about the proposal for a half-Senate election and, indeed, why he should have done so days earlier when Whitlam first signalled his intention. (By this stage, of course, Kerr had long passed the point of frank discussion with his prime minister.) Under section 12 of the Constitution, it is the state governors who “cause writs to be issued” for the election of senators from their states, and the conservative state governments, in support of their federal colleagues, had indicated their likely intention to advise their governors not to do so. Ironically, it was taken as a given that the governors would act on the advice of their chief ministers. Kerr could have sought to discuss with Whitlam the merits of approving a half-Senate election that might only take place in the two Labor states and in the territories. Kelly and Bramston are correct in asserting that any attempt to pressure the opposition with the threat of a half-Senate election would have needed to come at the start of the crisis, not at a stage when the exhaustion of government funds was such a live issue.

Interestingly, Hocking reveals Fraser’s admission (in an oral history interview in 1987) that securing supply was not a condition of his appointment as prime minister. Had supply not been secured, Kerr would still have allowed him to proceed to the 1975 election. This revelation should at least render largely irrelevant the speculation about what Labor senators might have done on 11 November to frustrate the passage of the budget by the new government.

Both books deal with the parliamentary drama of the afternoon of 11 November, as well as Kerr’s indifference to the passage of a no-confidence motion in the new prime minister and his delay in granting the speaker an audience until the parliament had been dissolved. One wonders what Kerr thought Whitlam would do after his dismissal: go away and write his election campaign speech? He certainly appears not to have anticipated Whitlam’s parliamentary tactics. Any expectation that Kerr would recommission the dismissed prime minister was surely misplaced, though, as this would have involved deceiving Fraser on a grander scale than Kerr had deceived Whitlam. It was gripping parliamentary drama on ABC radio that day; it would surely have been brilliant television.

Together, these books add to our knowledge of the most controversial event in Australian political history. Kelly and Bramston’s is the more important contribution, but they observe that lack of access to key materials (especially relating to the Kerr–Palace communications, vital to evidence the collusion claimed by Hocking) still hinders a more complete understanding of the crisis and its resolution. Broadly, access to a range of relevant documentation will be denied to the interested researcher until at least 2025 and 2037. This is completely unsatisfactory, and Kelly and Bramston deserve support in their representations to the federal government to overturn these embargoes.

There is much in both books to reinforce the view that Kerr behaved dishonourably in misleading and deceiving his prime minister. Even dismissal supporters such as Anthony Mason were adamant that a warning should have been provided to Whitlam, advice Kerr chose to ignore. And Kelly and Bramston do well to remind us that, in contrast with his soft left persona in post-parliamentary life, the Fraser of the constitutional crisis “engaged in the serial smashing of conventions that had long underpinned stable government in Australia” and “resorted to a mixture of persuasion and intimidation in the quest to have Kerr dismiss Whitlam.”

Thus, for some readers of a certain vintage, forty years after the dismissal, there is still reason for some rage to be maintained.

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The new procedures for electing the Labor leader are in their early days, but one of their possibly unintended consequences is that the defeated candidate lingers on as a live alternative for those disenchanted with the initial decision. This is especially the case when the grassroots membership convincingly backs the defeated candidate, in this case Albanese, allowing him to retain his standing as some sort of “people’s choice.” Even though no MPs have indicated an interest in challenging Shorten, Albanese’s previous candidacy appears to bestow on him the status of a kind of leader in waiting.

Whether he would be a more effective leader is a moot point. Certainly, he is more aggressive and robust than the wooden Shorten, but while these qualities will always play well with the base, they are a less certain advantage with swinging voters, who often find partisan aggression a turn-off.

While Abbott was prime minister, an Albanese candidacy possessed a certain logic: fight fire with fire; pit a fierce tribal Labor partisan against a fierce tribal Liberal partisan. Albanese’s rough-around-the-edges persona was no real liability against someone so lacking in class and sophistication as the slogan-fuelled, eloquence-averse Abbott.

But Turnbull’s election probably renders Albanese a less attractive alternative. By his own admission, Albanese likes “fighting Tories.” Leaving to one side the cringe inherent in the use of the English nickname for conservatives (how many voters under forty would know what a Tory is?), the electorate is probably more interested in what leaders stand for than what they oppose.

As leader, Albanese might find irresistible the temptation to assail Turnbull as an out-of-touch, super-rich toff, the stereotypical class enemy. To be fair, that temptation may not be restricted to Albanese: it is possible that many Labor geniuses regard a class-based assault as Plan A, or at least Plan B. But the idea is fatally flawed. Outside the Labor base, there is simply no evidence of an appetite for such a critique. While Australians may be less in thrall to wealth than are Americans, Turnbull is a self-made man whose success constitutes no electoral liability of any sort. He is no Gina Rinehart.

As I suggested in an earlier article, it is Bill Shorten’s misfortune that the Abbott government’s chronic ineptitude raised expectations of a Labor victory at the next federal election, expectations that in normal circumstances would be seen as both unrealistic and unreasonable. Since 1931, all first-term Australian federal governments have been re-elected, and a first-up opposition leader who secured a half-decent swing (which is also the historical norm) and didn’t scare the horses too much could be assured of keeping the job. No such solace is available to Shorten: nothing short of a win will see him remain as Labor leader.

Of course, some critics would prefer that Shorten not even contest the next election as leader, that he be replaced by someone able to generate higher personal approval ratings. Shorten-led Labor might have routinely led Abbott’s government in the polls, but the personal approval polling battle was something of a nil-all draw. Early post-Abbott polls suggest that there is still a competitive two-party contest, but Shorten trails Turnbull by so much in the personal approval stakes that the leadership factor can only assist the government in the lead-up to the election and during the campaign.

Shorten would not be the first federal Labor leader to be rolled without being allowed to contest an election (Simon Crean has that dubious honour), and the Liberals have had three (Alexander Downer, Brendan Nelson and Turnbull Mark I), but for Labor to cull yet another leader in such circumstances would invite caricature and ridicule: the revolving door metaphor would scarcely be adequate. Moreover, Labor’s new leadership rules render the process of change a little more complex than a knock on the door from some latter-day version of Julia Gillard: effectively, a strong factional consensus would be needed to secure the 60 per cent no-confidence vote in caucus (or 75 per cent if the party were in government). There is possibly a point where the party has to stick by its decision and allow its leader to be tested in an election. Sometimes, people can surprise (see Liberal opposition leader Andrew Peacock in 1984).

Still, if the momentum for a change grows, are there alternatives to Albanese? Deputy leader Tanya Plibersek has her supporters and is an impressive performer, but she may be reluctant to subject herself to anything resembling the sexist onslaught directed against Julia Gillard. While conventional thinking would have seen Abbott as the leader most challenged by a female opponent, Turnbull might find such a situation a little more interesting. Already, Plibersek has sought to nail him for “mansplaining” in parliament, and there can be a thin line between Turnbull’s confident, articulate advocacy and a perception he is lecturing or patronising. Plibersek is the opponent most likely to exploit that tension.

Shadow finance minister Tony Burke is also mentioned in leadership speculation, but it appears that his role as manager of opposition business has left him with less opportunity to make a mark in the policy area.

There is a case for shadow treasurer Chris Bowen – articulate, presentable, able to master a brief, and with a touch of style and wit. His economic literacy would be a considerable plus given the reality that economic management is likely to be the dominant issue in the next election (as it is in all elections), with Turnbull far more capable than Abbott of prosecuting an economic argument. Labor may try to make “fairness” the key issue, but that will only be possible after it has achieved threshold credibility on overall economic management, and debt/deficits specifically. In whatever role, Bowen is critical to the task.

The fates have turned on Bill Shorten. This is not quite Malcolm Fraser suddenly facing Bob Hawke rather than Bill Hayden in 1983, but the game has certainly changed. He finds himself with a by-election result rendered more modest by Abbott’s departure, whereas in “normal” circumstances, Labor would probably not have even fielded a candidate in the safe Liberal seat. And the trade union royal commission has converted the narrative of Shorten the moderate trade union leader, working cooperatively with business, into the story of a wheeler and dealer who sells out his members.

Abbott’s departure means at least the partial resumption of normal transmission within federal politics, with some of the conventional advantages of incumbency back in operation. True, Turnbull must overcome a reputation for poor judgement, and his need to appease his right-wing party opponents will limit policy options (a chink of opportunity for Labor). But, regardless of who leads Labor, if this first-term government loses office it will be as a consequence of its own weaknesses, not the strength or otherwise of its opponents. •

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The only other post-loss leader, defeated prime minister Gough Whitlam, was the beneficiary of an act of emotional self-indulgence by a devastated Labor caucus at the end of 1975. It is virtually inconceivable that any future defeated prime minister would follow his lead and contest the party’s leadership.

And yet the record is not all bad news. All four of the post-loss leaders who went on to contest an election, even Whitlam, secured a positive two-party-preferred swing, ranging from modest (Snedden, with 1 per cent in 1974) to substantial (Beazley, with 4.6 per cent in 1998 and a majority of the two-part-preferred vote). In fact, every newly elected federal government since forever has sustained a negative swing at its first attempt at re-election, although none has fallen since 1931.

On the surface, this should be good news for opposition leader Bill Shorten, who would make history (of the worst kind) if he didn’t secure a positive two-party-preferred swing. Getting a swing their way was enough for Snedden, Peacock and Beazley to retain the leadership, although only Beazley survived to contest the following election.

And yet it is possible that a decent swing and a narrow loss may not be enough for Shorten to keep his job. The most obvious difference from the past is federal Labor’s new system for electing its leader, involving votes of both the parliamentary party and branch members. The fact that Shorten was preferred by the former but not the latter can hardly have enhanced his legitimacy and authority, but such an outcome is an intrinsic risk in the dual voting model imposed on the party by Kevin Rudd.

If the views of Labor partisans, as measured by comments in traditional and social media, are any guide, Shorten has failed to convert many to his side since taking the position. Some of this probably reflects his eventual withdrawal of support for the leadership of Julia Gillard, who is now (a little like Whitlam after 1975) enjoying sainthood among the party faithful. In a post–election loss party ballot, Shorten would start from a clear minority position among the true believers.

Shorten is also vulnerable to unrealistic expectations about the outcome of the next federal election. A combination of persistent poor government polling and the fall of two first-term conservative state governments has led to a virtual consensus that the defeat of the Abbott government is not only possible, but likely. This is a serious misreading. Of the two defeated state governments, Victoria’s was an “accidental” one, struggling to hold its ground in a now naturally progressive state; and Queensland’s was led by a man of no parliamentary experience seemingly intent on alienating the voters, incapable of even faking remorse, and with no upper house to save him from himself. On top of that, state elections are usually about health, education and other services, a perceived Labor strength.

Such a situation doesn’t apply federally. While the initial poll responses to the government’s “non-austerity” budget have not been uniform (assorted Labor leads or a 50–50 tie – take your pick), more telling has been the recently reported focus group research with voters who switched from Labor to the Coalition in the last election and have “marked favouably” this month’s federal budget.

These are the voters whose support Labor must recapture if it is to win. Their overall support for the budget is obviously good news for the government, and a reminder that bad polling early in the life of a new government need not be fatal. A first-term government is more likely to be forgiven its excesses than a long-term one: despite results in Victoria and Queensland, the inclination to give a government a second term has not disappeared. And federal elections are usually about economic management, a perceived Labor weakness.

The same research indicates that Shorten has serious problems connecting with swinging voters and that he is as unpopular as Abbott. In such an unpopularity contest, the traditional incumbency advantage will operate. While some of the problem lies in the opposition leader’s robotic delivery and lack of spontaneity (what a contrast with Mark Latham), more worrying for Labor is voters’ linking of Shorten with the Rudd–Gillard leadership circus. Given Shorten’s versatility in helping depose both leaders, this isn’t surprising. But whereas matters of style can sometimes be worked on, a reputation for treachery is not easily dispensed with.

Whether Anthony Albanese, the branch members’ preferred candidate in the 2013 party ballot, would be faring any better must be assessed as doubtful. He is certainly more aggressive and forceful than Shorten, but while fiercely partisan leaders go down a treat with the party base, they rarely make an effective connection with swinging voters (see Abbott). Holding the base might be critical in a system of voluntary voting, but it is of minimal consequence under compulsory voting, where the emphasis must be on attracting those without a firm partisan identification. Albanese seems no more likely than Shorten to recognise economic management – an issue constantly neglected by Labor as a whole – as the key election issue. And it may be that Albanese is just too rough around the edges. The idea that voters prefer an ordinary person as leader is largely a myth.

By definition, the role of an opposition is largely to oppose, but this necessarily makes it difficult for the leader to establish a positive image. Incumbency is still worth something, and most new governments manage to secure a second term; opposition leadership is rarely the decisive factor in such an outcome. And, in Labor’s case, it’s not as if a Whitlam or Hawke is marking time somewhere, waiting for the call: the talent bank is modest. This is of small solace to Bill Shorten who, unlike other first-up federal opposition leaders, probably needs an election win to retain his position. •

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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. •

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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. •

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In his infamous address to a conservative religious gathering last November, Joe Bullock reassured his audience that unions are a conservative force helping save the Labor Party from domination by lesbians and other dubious inner-city types. (By the time the speech became public, Bullock was at the top of Labor’s WA Senate ticket and just such a person was his number two.) Other union heavies see it differently, characterising their organisational links with Labor as a guarantee of an enduring radicalism. The truth is more mundane: the Labor/union relationship guarantees a parliamentary career to some people of real ability, but also to many of moderate talent (and sometimes moderate integrity), on salaries they could never otherwise dream of.

Apart from anything else, Joe Bullock must have been living in a cave for the past few years. Since Barack Obama’s “guns and religion” gaffe, it’s widely accepted that there is no such thing as a private speech. In front of any kind of audience, politicians should only utter views they are happy to have exposed to the world at large. And it is always interesting to see union leaders like Bullock can still be praised (or praise themselves) for representing the “most lowly paid workers” – hardly a glowing testimony to their effectiveness as advocates.

But the real problem is revealed by the selective way in which Labor goes about saving the voters from undesirable candidates. Prior to the 2013 election, Geoff Lake was stripped of his preselection for the safe seat of Hotham, in Victoria. His offence? A youthful indiscretion amid the hurly-burly of local government, in which he directed some inappropriate (verbal) abuse at a wheelchair-bound adversary. By contrast, Bullock’s CV includes an actual conviction, at a mature age, for (physical) assault. But in the deal-making context of his preselection, this was not seen as disqualifying him for a guaranteed six-year term in the federal upper house.

It is now suggested, in “seminal moment” terms, that the emergence of Bullock may serve to stimulate much-needed reform within the Labor Party, especially a reduction in the influence of affiliated unions and a corresponding empowerment of ordinary branch members.

In theory, it seems self-evidently a good thing for a political party to be as internally democratic as possible. For parties of the “left,” which historically pushed forward parliamentary democracy in the face of conservative opposition and obstruction, it seems at least credibility-enhancing if practices within their own ranks reflect principles they see as desirable for society as a whole. In this context, it might seem axiomatic that the union movement should not expect the same influence when it constitutes 17 per cent of the workforce as it did in the days when the figure stood at 70 per cent. But no quantitative fine-tuning seems to inform the outlook of those who support the current union dominance. That is their prerogative, of course, but we may take the view (to channel a recent prime minister) that we will not be lectured on matters of democracy by those who embrace the concept on such a selective basis.

When it comes to democracy and preselection, the problem is that branch members can make the wrong call just as often as union heavyweights or the party’s central office, especially when branches are so stacked that the process can’t be regarded as remotely democratic. In such a scenario, local preselection battles are likely to mirror broader factional power struggles, with no obvious benefit for party democracy. Those who regard an assault on branch-stacking as a necessary pre-condition for genuine party democracy would seem to be on the right track.

Nor is this problem restricted to Labor, as the preselection of detail-averse Liberal Jaymes Diaz in the federal seat of Greenway demonstrated in 2013. Unable to recall more than one point of a six-point policy, Diaz, who apparently secured endorsement through an ethnic stack of relevant branches, became something of a national media spectacle. The seat, which should have been a shoo-in for the Liberals, stayed with Labor. Had the central party apparatus overruled the locals, any vaguely suitable candidate would have almost certainly secured Greenway for Tony Abbott.

Even where no stacking exists, it doesn’t always follow that branch members will select the most suitable candidate with the greatest likelihood of winning the seat. This may not matter in safe electorates, but it can be important in marginal seats. Virtually by definition (leaving aside branch stacks), people who join a party are strongly committed to a certain worldview. The temptation to select those reflecting their own ideological rigidities, rather than more flexible types likely to appeal to the broader electorate, can be difficult to resist.

If Labor Party branch members had enjoyed the right to vote for the federal parliamentary leader in 1968, for example – as they do now – it is overwhelmingly likely that Jim Cairns would have beaten Gough Whitlam for the job (although Whitlam would probably not have brought on a contest against a figure more popular within the party in the first place).

To be fair, Labor has become such an ideology-free zone that the danger of selecting new-age dreamers or closet Marxists has long receded. Now, it’s the Liberals who are plagued by a form of this problem. Their frequent selection of extremists – one of whom compared homosexuality to bestiality – for unbeatable Senate positions warrants more attention than it has received to date.

A reality check should be inserted at this point. Federal Labor lost office in 2013 with essentially the same structure as it had when it won office in 2007. Parties that lose government nearly always undertake navel-gazing exercises about their structures, but there is no evidence that those whose votes decide elections are particularly fussed or even interested in such matters. It’s hardly the stuff of Monday morning chats at the water cooler.

There are two qualifications to this generalisation. First, any revelations of extensive union/criminal links uncovered by the current royal commission would be an electoral minus for Labor. But it needs to be remembered that right-wing ideologues persistently project their own anti-union views on the electorate. Notwithstanding the record low levels of unionisation in the workforce, polls usually indicate substantial appreciation of the overall role played by unions.

The second qualification concerns the link between structure and the candidates being selected. Given the shallow pool from which Labor selects, with the predominance of party and union officials and MPs’ staffers, there is the danger that the parliamentary membership is insufficiently representative of the society it seeks to govern. Whether this is a genuine electoral liability, or mostly just a useful throwaway line for Labor’s conservative opponents, is a moot point.

What a decent preselection process might be expected to elicit, among other things, is adequate information about the character of those seeking a parliamentary career. The present system has failed to do so, as evidenced by the examples of Craig Thomson, Peter Slipper and Bullock at federal level and assorted others at state level. When decisions are based on factional deals and branch stacks, this seems unavoidable.

With so many endorsements effectively predetermined on a factional basis, especially on the Labor side, is it any wonder that today’s MPs seem unpersuasive to the broader electorate, having had no need for such skills in securing their initial preselection? Crunching the numbers at a Chinese restaurant in Sussex Street is not quite the same thing as convincing an uncommitted voter of one’s fitness to govern.

In 1952, Gough Whitlam was seeking Labor endorsement for the seat of Werriwa. Local branch members played a critical role in a preselection that was a genuine contest rather than a factional fix. Direct, individual contact with these members was the only path to victory, which is how Gough found himself chopping wood and helping with other backyard chores while he attempted to persuade them of his superiority as a candidate. He succeeded well enough to take up a seat in federal parliament later that year.

How much wood did Bill Shorten chop for his preselection? •

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AT SOME point in every election campaign, an utterly predictable question will be asked of the prime minister and the opposition leader. If you aren’t re-elected (or elected) as prime minister, will you undertake to serve a full term in parliament? This is hardly Walkley Award–winning stuff, but it is rolled out in keen anticipation of the post-election “gotcha” moment when a defeated prime minister (who will have predictably denied such an intention) pulls the plug and quits parliament.

As someone else once said, occasionally we have to be able to trust leaders to lie to us. This is one such point in the political cycle. Among the prime ministers defeated since the second world war, it is difficult to think of any of the “stayers” who added anything to the body politic by remaining; and it is impossible to conclude that any of the “quitters” did other than the right thing in resigning from parliament.

Perhaps Ben Chifley is the exception. After he was defeated in 1949, he stayed on as opposition leader, lost the 1951 election and was still leader at the time of his death later that year. He might well have managed a better election result in 1951 than any of those Labor frontbenchers who would have replaced him as leader, and he was certainly able to exert some control over the warring forces that would ultimately split the party. But, after long service as treasurer and prime minister, he was surely entitled to step down to a well-earned retirement.

Robert Menzies was the only postwar prime minister to leave the Lodge entirely on his own terms, ejected neither by the people nor by his party. (Harold Holt escaped both fates by falling into the “died in office” category.) After resigning as prime minister in January 1966, Menzies announced his resignation from parliament as well. It is doubtful whether any journalist would have dared ask Menzies the “full term” question back at the 1963 election: it would not have been a good career move.

Like Kevin Rudd under Julia Gillard, John Gorton stayed in cabinet after his defeat by William McMahon (indeed, he was deputy leader), but the necessary discipline eluded him and he was eventually sacked for breaching cabinet solidarity. He then lingered on for more than four years as a backbencher, eventually stepping down at the 1975 election. While McMahon bungled through the remaining months of Coalition government, it’s possible that Gorton clung to a hope of reinstatement as leader. But once this fantasy ended, it is hard to see why he bothered running for his seat again in 1972 and 1974.

McMahon lingered even longer than Gorton, remaining in parliament for nearly ten years after his defeat at the 1972 election. He may have thought he played an elder statesman role, but it is doubtful if anyone shared this view.

Whitlam followed Chifley’s example and stayed on as opposition leader after the 1975 defeat: a bad move for both Whitlam (whose dreams of a comeback were totally unrealistic) and the caucus who re-elected him, whose members, letting their hearts rule their heads, felt they owed him so much and were determined not to let Rupert Murdoch dictate their decision. The 1977 loss, which effectively repeated the magnitude of the 1975 defeat, saw Gough finally bow out of parliament, and may also have cost Labor the 1980 election.

Malcolm Fraser wasted no time in quitting parliament after losing office in 1983, heading off for a productive post-parliamentary life and serving as the nearest thing to best practice in this regard. Bob Hawke followed suit after being rolled by Paul Keating, as did Keating after being rolled by the electorate. Howard, beaten nationally and in his seat, saved his constituents a by-election.

Rudd’s career path needs no elaboration: his failure to leave parliament in 2010 was clearly linked to an ultimately vindicated belief that he could mount a comeback. Gillard’s decision to leave parliament when that came to pass was dignified and correct.

It is clearly time for Rudd to follow suit: there is certainly no elder statesman role beckoning for him, and his continued presence is a reminder of a past that Labor needs to lay to rest. Parliamentary seats should be filled by those eager to serve their constituents and make their way in parliament, with a front-bench job a legitimate ambition for many. The electors in Rudd’s seat are entitled to no less. Fears of the loss of the seat in a by-election are of no relevance given the new government’s majority. In any event, Labor managed to retain Anna Bligh’s state seat (an area that forms part of Rudd’s electorate) after she quit parliament following a much more comprehensive defeat than occurred federally.

Lacking a House of Lords to which to consign former prime ministers, Australia is best served when they leave parliament with dispatch. It’s time, Kevin. •

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RECENT interview meltdowns by election candidates must make some voters wonder how people like this can secure preselection – or even consider putting themselves forward for public office – and whether this kind of ineptitude is a recent or longstanding phenomenon. A case certainly exists for parliamentarians to be representative of the community at large, but whether that extends to members who can only remember one point out of six, or who think Islam is a country, must be doubtful.

This is an age-old problem, more easily exposed by modern media. The situation differs between major and minor parties, while independents, by definition, are not obliged to submit to any preselection process.

Obviously, minor parties can struggle to field candidates in as many seats as the majors and, with victory virtually impossible, fierce preselection battles are unlikely. Who would want to be the Greens candidate in outback Queensland? But at least the Greens have been around long enough to be able to produce a group of candidates who are usually scandal-free (leaving to one side a state member for Fremantle whose soap opera unfolded after election), who embrace a mostly coherent (albeit contestable) ideology and who can string a few words together without major embarrassment. Drawing support from the better-educated strata of society does have the odd benefit.

For the newly created minor parties, life is very different: just ask Bob Katter or Clive Palmer. These parties are essentially “grievance” groups, attracting support among voters alienated from the existing party system. Given the record of Labor and the Coalition, this is a valid political position, and it is not suggested that everyone supporting Katter or Palmer is psychologically frail. But it is invariably the case that such groups will attract some citizens with curious worldviews whose grasp on reality may be marginal. The new parties can only hope that these characters haven’t slipped through the net and become candidates.

But therein lies a problem: often, there is no net. With time being of the essence, parties like Palmer’s, Katter’s and the revamped One Nation lack the luxury of anything resembling due diligence in preselection. If a nutter emerges, these parties can only hope that it occurs before nominations close, allowing for withdrawal and replacement. And how does a candidate follow the party line when much of the detail is being made up on the run?

In some seats, the preferred solution is the selection of a “name” candidate, often a sporting identity. This path can be fraught with danger, as sport has an uneven record as a training ground for political activity. For a new party, though, the benefit of name recognition is probably worth the risk.

BY CONTRAST, the major parties have been around for so long that it is reasonable to ask how they can occasionally get it so wrong and preselect people who can’t be let anywhere near a camera or a microphone. Often, in unwinnable seats held by the other side, it is more a case of conscription than preselection, with some long-serving party member “volunteering” to go over the top for the team, helping ensure the regular core vote in the electorate and not jeopardising support for the Senate ticket. While this process may attract the ambitious (building up brownie points to secure support in a winnable seat later), this is the exception rather than the norm. Most of these party foot-soldiers do a solid job without attracting the interest of anyone except the local media. The disendorsement of the Labor candidate for Kennedy (for describing Tony Abbott as a racist) is very much an exception, although modern social media do open up the possibility of scrutiny of the views of a wider range of candidates than in the past – a development worth watching.

In winnable seats, it is clear that the major parties undertake nothing resembling the due diligence imposed on other sections of the community in making vital decisions. This was demonstrated by the preselections in Fisher (Coalition) and Dobell (Labor) for the 2010 election. In each case, the known “form” of the sitting member was ignored by those choosing the candidates. The sins of which Slipper and Thomson were accused were somewhat worse than making asses of themselves in an interview, and both ended up as independents in the forty-third parliament, effectively disenfranchising their constituents. Apologies from those responsible for the preselections have not been forthcoming.

If the major parties are prepared to overlook dubious behaviour in selecting candidates, then choosing inarticulate bunglers seems almost a minor offence. The common theme, however, is that party processes and practices are not directed at selecting the “best” candidate who meets a commonly agreed set of criteria. Such a (non-exhaustive) list might include an interest in public policy, some history of positive community involvement, public speaking skills and media ability, and an intolerance of corruption.

Labor’s reliance on the factional system (and associated branch-stacking) in preselections is well known. The system has produced a mixed bag of candidates over the years, and no one could pretend that the best man or woman always wins. Kevin Rudd’s recent intervention in the safe seat of Hotham, purging the Labor candidate for a public loss of temper over a decade ago (when he was in his early twenties), may represent the birth of new standards, although if applied retrospectively they could cut a swathe through parliamentary ranks – starting with Rudd himself.

On occasions, a party will win an “unwinnable” seat, resulting in the election of an accidental member who was never endorsed with victory in mind and who might not have survived had preselection been contested. The 2007 federal election saw such a case in Queensland; that (one-term) Labor member’s most memorable contribution in office was to link the global financial crisis to the wrath of the Almighty.

The Liberal Party’s preselection activities don’t attract the media attention that Labor’s do, but when controversial contests emerge it is usually clear that merit was not the decisive factor. In the case of Jaymes Diaz, the candidate in very marginal Greenway, who could remember only one of the six points in his party’s border security policy, media reports tell a story of ethnically based branch-stacking. Diaz wanted the job, and he had the numbers to get it. In other instances, ideology is a primary motivation, usually to the detriment of more moderate, sometimes more talented, Liberals. For the Senate, where candidates attract minimal attention and where a position high on the ticket ensures electoral invulnerability, a trend to the fringes has been evident, with one Liberal senator linking homosexuality to bestiality.

And, speaking of the Senate, if voters think some of the people they’ve seen recently on their screens may not represent the best and the brightest, it would be best not to think too much about some upper house candidates. For decades now, running for the Senate has been a cheap version of therapy for some of the unhinged and disconnected in society, and stories of ballot papers the size of tea towels suggest that the trend is as strong as ever. Whether as independents or as part of single-interest pseudo-parties, some of these candidates could keep journalists in train-wreck copy for weeks. •

The post Why preselections go wrong appeared first on Inside Story.

In a detailed analysis of one such contest – the Higgins by-election in 2009 – Rob Hoffman and Brian Costar conclude that “in the absence of an ALP candidate, certain types of Labor voters will not vote Green regardless of the often-asserted ideological compatibility of the two parties.” At one level, this finding has very few electoral consequences. Unlike in Higgins, anti-Greens Labor voters will usually have a Labor candidate on the ballot, and will be able to vote accordingly. And, in Senate contests, all but the most energetic anti-Greens Labor voter will take refuge in above-the-line voting, where Labor can usually be relied on to rank the Greens above the coalition.

But at another level, problems arise if these voters see a too-close relationship between Labor and the Greens as a reason to reassess their core commitment to the ALP. If they drift to a conservative party as their first preference, then Labor is in trouble. However, in this context, one needs to look closely at the evidence.

On the other side of politics, the attitude of Liberal voters to the Nationals (and vice versa) receives little or no attention. Because the two parties are long-term coalition partners, there’s an assumption that supporters of each will automatically preference the other. But the available evidence paints a more complex picture.

Historically, the two conservative parties have had a sometimes difficult relationship, varying from state to state. This longer-term instability is easy to forget in an era that has seen the parties merge in Queensland and coexist harmoniously – more or less – elsewhere, especially at the federal level. Significantly, three-cornered contests, where the two conservative parties oppose each other, are now much more the exception than the rule, and usually only occur where no sitting Liberal or Nationals member is contesting the relevant seat.

The 2010 federal election saw a small number of such contests, with the results affording an opportunity to examine preference flows between the coalition partners (assisted by Australian Electoral Commission data, which is superior to that provided by state authorities for their elections). In seven seats, both the Liberals and the Nationals fielded candidates, and in six of these the eventual contest was between a conservative and Labor. In the other seat, O’Connor (in Western Australia), the final contest was between the sitting Liberal, Wilson Tuckey, and the Nationals’ Tony Crook, with the latter prevailing after securing 84 per cent of Labor preferences.

In the remaining six seats, a clear pattern was evident. In the four seats where Nationals preferences were distributed (Durack, Forrest and Pearce – all in Western Australia – and Throsby in New South Wales), the highest share managed by the Liberals was 80 per cent of the Nationals vote in Throsby, followed by 77 per cent in Durack and Pearce, and 73 per cent in Forrest. Averaged, this level of support is less than what the Greens deliver to Labor when they preference that party. It is perhaps understandable that the weak flows occurred in Western Australia, a state where there has been long-term conflict between the Liberal and National (formerly Country) parties, and where coalition relationships rarely qualify for the adjective “amicable.”

In two NSW seats, Richmond and Riverina, Liberal preferences were distributed in seats where the effective contest was Labor versus the Nationals. In each case, 89 per cent of the Liberal vote went to the Nationals, a figure consistent with what the Democratic Labor Party delivered to the coalition between 1955 and 1974. Put more bluntly, more than one in five Nationals voters prefer Labor to the Liberals. On this evidence, the Liberals are considerably more effective at disciplining preferences than are the Nationals.

Apart from long-term historical motivations, it is feasible that such Nationals voters have been disappointed by their party’s marginalisation within the coalition. The dominance of powerful leaders like John McEwen and Doug Anthony is long past, and when did the party last win a policy battle with the Liberals? Indeed, when did it last have distinctive policies over which to wage a battle? Independent candidates have successfully exploited such themes – at state and federal levels – in defeating Nationals candidates in the past decade or so.

A larger number of three-cornered contests would allow for more confident conclusions. But even this limited evidence provides a cautionary warning against assuming complete ideological affinity among the supporters of notional allies.

HOW is this interplay of preferences likely to unfold for the Coalition on 7 September? Although nominations don’t close until 15 August, we have a reasonable idea of the field in those seats where there will be three-cornered contests between the Liberals, the Nationals and Labor.

All three parties are contesting O’Connor. If Labor preferences the Nats again, we would expect them to win. But with the longstanding and controversial Liberal former MP, Wilson Tuckey, out of the picture, the Liberals may do better. The local popularity of the candidates could well play a key role.

In Mallee, the Labor vote was under 20 per cent last time (when no Liberal ran). Assuming the Liberal candidate this time can do better than that, Labor preferences could be decisive. A cautionary note: as Antony Green points out, in 1993 Labor voters ignored the how-to-vote card sufficiently to see the Nats beat the Libs. (Liberal voters in the seat of Melbourne might be equally fickle this time around!)

In Durack, another retirement means that the Nationals and the Liberals are both in the field, but we would expect the Liberals to lead easily on first preferences, Labor to scrape into second place, and Nationals preferences to see Liberal home.

A Liberal and a National are in the field in Throsby, but the seat is safe Labor, so the fact that the Nationals’ candidate is Angry Anderson offers the only element of analytical interest…

Finally, Forrest, Richmond and Riverina, scenes of three-cornered contests in the recent past, will be contested by only one of the Coalition parties (Lib, Nat and Nat respectively). •

The post Is the enemy of my friend always my enemy? appeared first on Inside Story.

THE ideological crusade begun by the Kennett government in the 1990s is now complete: as the parliamentary year drew to a close, the Victorian government legislated to abolish elected staff and student positions on the governing bodies of tertiary institutions.

In the Coalition’s earlier assault on representative governance, university councils were cut in size. Staff and student numbers were dramatically reduced, specified positions for state MPs were discontinued, and Trades Hall nominees (where such had existed) were abolished. Most significantly, positions for alumni elected by alumni were eliminated – a move that would provoke something close to war if attempted in many other Western universities.

What the discontinued categories had in common was their independence of chancellors and vice-chancellors. With their own support bases, they didn’t need to follow the party line in order to secure re-election or reappointment. There is no such danger in the arrangements now introduced by the Victorian government. Soon, every council member will owe his or her position to nomination by the university leadership or by the government: the chance of a maverick or critic emerging in the ranks can confidently be assessed as nil. The inescapable conclusion is that those supporting narrower council memberships are simply not interested in a diversity of views, preferring a phoney consensus (“no votes, please”) apparently beloved of corporate boardrooms but out of place in universities. Nor are they interested in hearing from elected internal members who may be capable of offering informed counter-perspectives on contentious issues.

Equally alarming is the tedious emphasis on financial and commercial expertise as the dominant membership criterion, with no corresponding emphasis on educational expertise. This ideological position is now so embedded that it passes almost without comment. It would be interesting to discover how many of the failed “cowboy” schemes of recent years (campuses in odd overseas locations, for example) were supported by business members of university councils and opposed by staff and student members; don’t expect funding for that research project.

Even if all the business members of councils were the epitome of wisdom and virtue (a long shot in Australia), their over-representation is still inappropriate in institutions that receive most of their funding from the public purse. These institutions are spending taxpayers’ money and their governance arrangements should reflect the diversity of that taxpaying community.

I served as an elected staff member on two tertiary governing bodies for a total of nearly thirteen years in the 1980s and 1990s. My major concern, shared by colleagues, was that many external members seemed to lack sympathy for academic values and were intolerant of dissent (the “how can you disagree with your vice-chancellor?” line). This problem came into sharp relief in the Monash plagiarism scandal of 2002, in which the vice-chancellor ultimately resigned – but only after a campaign by staff and students, concerned external parties and even the Murdoch media. The business-dominated council’s initial response was to deny the magnitude of the problem and dig in behind the vice-chancellor. A staff member on council later related his impression to me that business members just couldn’t see what the problem was with the vice-chancellor’s plagiarism – what was the big deal? The risk of indifference (or even hostility) to scholarly values is at the heart of concerns about narrowly constructed councils.

Another conclusion from my time on councils was that staff and student members were more likely to insist on due process than were external business members – a not unimportant governance issue. This impression is hardly inconsistent with revelations about Australian business practices in recent decades.

It has been alleged that the Victorian changes stemmed from Victorian chancellors’ representations to government, with some suggestion that the chancellors were concerned about the leaking of confidential material by staff and student members. Given the size of such a sledgehammer, the alleged nut lacks credibility: the real motivation is more likely to be ideological. Interestingly, the University of Melbourne’s chancellor has come out against the changes.

The Victorian measures highlight an anomaly in the structure of Australian higher education. While the states retain legislative control over governance arrangements for universities, these same governments contribute little or nothing to the funding of universities. It is regrettable that the Whitlam government was not able to effect a transfer of state legislative powers over governance when it took over funding responsibility in 1973. This might not have guaranteed perfect governance arrangements, but it would have provided national consistency and at least ensured that the government paying the piper was calling the tune.

This legislation should put to rest any lingering idea that Ted Baillieu is a descendant of the Deakin/Hamer tradition within the Victorian Liberal Party. When premier, Rupert Hamer rejected a recommendation that staff representation on the (then) Public Service Board be abolished. As with environment and planning policies, and education cutbacks, Baillieu is the son of Jeff Kennett, not the grandson of Rupert Hamer. •

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THE second volume of Jenny Hocking’s biography of Gough Whitlam has attracted considerable attention for its exposure of the role of High Court justice Anthony Mason in advising John Kerr as he contemplated dismissing the Whitlam government. But there has been a surprising lack of comment about two other revelations in the biography, both based on the records of a much less controversial governor-general, Paul Hasluck.

Hasluck was governor-general from 1969 to 1974, having moved straight to Yarralumla after a parliamentary career that included the senior portfolios of defence and external affairs. In politics, Hasluck’s had been a conservative and old-world persona; it was widely contended that his failure to embrace full-blooded politicking and self-promotion had cost him the Liberal Party leadership (and hence the prime ministership) when John Gorton prevailed in 1968.

Sandwiched between that vice-regal busybody (and prolific diarist) Richard Casey and the ultimate interventionist Kerr, Hasluck has been seen by many as a non-event as governor-general. His public utterances were usually uncontroversial and his only views on the vice-regal office were offered in his Queale Lecture in Adelaide in 1972. There, in a barely disguised critique of Casey, Hasluck observed that a governor-general would “stray beyond his functions if he took sides in any argument between his advisers or preferred one minister to another, or tried to interfere in the domestic arguments of any political party.” This was precisely what Casey had done in relation to the McEwen–McMahon feud in the Coalition government and through his excessive involvement in party affairs after the disappearance of prime minister Harold Holt. The rest of Hasluck’s address revealed a viceroy endorsing the job description famously summarised by Walter Bagehot in the nineteenth century: “the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn.”

When his Queale lecture was republished in 1979, Hasluck added the revelation that during his time as governor-general he had kept handwritten notes “after any conversation on questions of substance.” Under the thirty-year rule Hasluck’s biographer, Robert Porter, lacked access to these notes. But in her quest for material about Whitlam over a decade later, Hocking read the notes, and her findings are very interesting indeed.

The first revelation concerns an informal conversation between Hasluck and the governor of Western Australia at the time, Douglas Kendrew, who confided his involvement in detailed planning to rid Australia of the Whitlam government with the help of the non-Labor states. Given that Western Australia had a Labor government at the time (August 1973), this alleged plot would seem to have been as logistically challenging as it was outrageous. But according to Hocking, Kendrew planned to deal with the awkward problem of the complexion of the WA government by contriving to have supply rejected in the upper house, whereupon the premier, John Tonkin, would seek a “double dissolution.” Kendrew would decline the advice and use the “royal warrant” to install opposition leader Charles Court as premier.

While English vice-regal appointees like Kendrew were not necessarily selected for their keen constitutional insights, could he really have been ignorant of the fact that the Western Australian constitution made no provision for such democratic excesses as double dissolutions? As a professional historian, Hasluck would almost certainly have known. He describes the discussion as occurring over drinks, so a traditional explanation might account for the problems of detail on Kendrew’s part.

If we accept that Hasluck could not have invented such a bizarre story, Hocking’s revelation is astounding. Essentially, the governor of a state was conspiring with the opposition leader to bring down an elected state government with a view to advancing a convoluted plot to overthrow an elected federal government. Surely, this alleged plot warrants further examination, possibly by some Perth-based scholar able to dig deeper.

Hocking’s second revelation from the Hasluck papers is less spectacular, but nonetheless interesting. In her account of the 1974 double dissolution election, she cites Hasluck as having previously advised Whitlam that the theme of a “fair go” would “be the most favourable basis for the government to run a double dissolution campaign.” For a governor-general so committed to non-involvement in party affairs, this would seem an unusual intervention. Was this “encouragement” à la Bagehot? Only a detailed examination of Hasluck’s papers can clarify whether it was atypical behaviour or whether candid political advice was part of the role as he practised it.

Given the frankness of Hasluck’s account of his discussion with Kendrew, we might anticipate other interesting revelations from his encounters with a vast range of public figures, including the three prime ministers with whom he interacted as governor-general. It would be a considerable irony if this most private of politicians has left behind an unanticipated treasure trove for the interested researcher. •

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RECENT unflattering comparisons between Julia Gillard’s prime ministership and that of William McMahon are especially timely given that 2012 marks the fortieth anniversary of McMahon’s defeat by Gough Whitlam, which led to the first change of national government in twenty-three years.

Momentous as Labor’s 1972 victory was, the result – to use that well-worn phrase – was “a close-run thing.” Labor secured 49.6 per cent of the primary vote and 52.7 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote for a lower house majority of nine (sixty-seven to fifty-eight). To employ the common post-election formula, had several thousand Labor voters in five close electorates stuck with the conservative Coalition, there would have been no Whitlam government.

Of course, in terms of electoral justice, such an outcome would have been outrageous. In 1969, with 49.8 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, the Coalition had been returned with a majority of seven, yet here was Labor barely any better off in 1972 with nearly 3 per cent more of the two-party vote. No wonder electoral reform was such a high priority for Whitlam Labor.

Part of the explanation for the narrowness of Labor’s win lies in the oft-forgotten fact that the party lost seats as well as won them in 1972. Indeed, two states (Western Australia and South Australia) recorded two-party swings against Labor (with the loss of two seats in the former and one in the latter), while in Victoria the overall 5.5 per cent swing to Labor couldn’t save Bendigo MP David Kennedy from defeat on the issue of abortion – a rare example of an MP losing a seat owing solely to a single issue. Without these gains for the Coalition, Labor would have governed with a seventy-one to fifty-four majority.

Labor had probably over-achieved in South Australia in 1969, and the gain of the seat of Sturt possibly surprised it as much as it did the Liberals. Sturt’s return to the conservative fold in 1972 in the context of a drop of 1.5 per cent in Labor’s state two-party-preferred vote was no huge shock.

The case of Western Australia was more interesting. Labor’s gains in 1969 had included a surprise victory in the conservative stronghold of Forrest. The sitting member, external affairs minister Gordon Freeth, was unpopular among conservative elements – especially the Democratic Labor Party (whose preferences were critical in ensuring Coalition majorities in close seats) – because of his politically naive suggestion that the presence of Soviet naval vessels in the Indian Ocean need not be great cause for alarm: not a great career move for someone whose seat’s western boundary was the ocean in question. All other things being equal, with a candidate other than Freeth, it was a reasonable expectation that Forrest would return to the conservatives in 1972.

But all other things were not equal: for the Coalition, they were better than equal. In March 1971, the state election saw the largely unexpected victory of Labor by the narrowest of margins. John Tonkin’s government survived by the Speaker’s vote and the good health of its marginal seat MPs. But long before the 1972 federal election it appeared out of its depth and ineffectual, as befitted the accidental administration it was. Although the jargon was not then in vogue, state Labor was damaging the Labor “brand” and the voters took it out on federal Labor in December 1972. The party lost 4.3 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote and, with it, the seats of Forrest and Stirling.

This theme resonated thirty-eight years later when Julia Gillard faced the voters in 2010. Rancid state governments in New South Wales and Queensland almost certainly dragged down the Labor vote in those states and possibly constituted the difference between majority and minority government. This assessment is tempered by the observation that those voters were also casting judgement on an incumbent government, whereas Whitlam had been in opposition. One presumes that John Tonkin fell off the Whitlam Christmas card list.

Even the 1983 election, won in a landslide by Bob Hawke, could not produce a pro-Labor swing in all states. The national swing of 3.6 per cent was not reflected in Tasmania, where the politics of forests saw a two-party-preferred loss of 3.5 per cent, denying Hawke a clean sweep: all five Tasmanian seats stayed with the Liberals. Rudd-led Labor was the first of the “modern” federal Labor governments to win government with positive swings in all six states.

The 1972 election included one feature of enduring relevance. Only two states failed to produce a majority two-party-preferred vote for Labor: Queensland and Western Australia. In the fifteen federal elections since, Labor has achieved such a majority only three times in Western Australia and twice in Queensland, which clearly qualifies in social science terms as a “pattern.” Indeed, the trend was in evidence before 1972, suggesting that state political culture is a very real concept, affected by long-term factors rather than by the transient issues beloved of many political journalists.

While state Labor parties in Queensland and Western Australia have managed to customise electorally attractive “products” in modern times (sometimes reinforced by dubious alliances with local business interests), the terrain remains largely barren for federal Labor. Yet future national majorities for the party will continue to be based on electoral appeal outside the two largest states.

The narrowness (in terms of seats) of McMahon’s loss prompts the question of whether any policy initiative might have saved him. While Whitlam’s victory was decisive, the magnitude of the win did not reflect the mastery which he had established over his opponent. After twenty-three years, while there was excitement in some quarters, there was still palpable apprehension in others about a change of government.

By 1972, the controversial practice of conscripting young men for national service was serving no obvious purpose. Australian troops were no longer in Vietnam, military professionals generally abhor the draft, and there was no evidence that the policy was a vote-winner. Wavering Coalition-voting parents, concerned about losing their sons for two years for no apparent good reason, may have stuck with McMahon had he jettisoned this policy liability. The twenty-year-old sons, of course, had no say, with the voting age being twenty-one at the time.

As to the Gillard–McMahon contest for worse prime minister, I take refuge in the famous words attributed to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, responding in the 1950s to a question about the effects of the French Revolution: “It’s too early to tell.” •

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THE federal government’s prolonged dismal performance in the polls has generated the notion that Labor is in “crisis,” with former party numbers man Graham Richardson and Labor insider Troy Bramston among the most prominent subscribers to this view. Their comments, and those of many other Labor supporters in online forums and the media, can leave the impression that if only someone would do something, ticking all the boxes on a party-reform checklist, then all will be well and Labor could resume its rightful place as the sole political party on the left/progressive side of politics. Get rid of Gillard, careerist opportunists, branch-stacking and factions, empower the grass roots membership… and normal transmission can be resumed.

Certainly, the list of Labor sins – of commission and omission – is long, and might give some support to such an approach. But to focus on Labor’s internal dynamics is to ignore the changed environment of Australian politics.

There is no necessary correlation between a lively and vibrant ALP branch membership and success in government. Indeed, had Labor branches been as powerful during the Hawke–Keating era as is now seen to be desirable, then (for better or worse) several of that government’s “reforms” could not have been implemented, being largely opposed by rank-and-file members. It might be argued that the time for a principled discussion about the role of the branch member was then, but it is amazing how electoral success had the effect of postponing such navel-gazing. It is far from self-evident that the Gillard government is any more or less at odds with Labor values (whatever they are) than were the Hawke and Keating governments. Indeed, in terms of taking on the big end of town, it is probably fair to rank Gillard above Hawke.

In assessing Labor’s electoral standing, too little attention is given to the demise of its unionised blue-collar base, that section of the workforce that could be relied upon to vote Labor no matter what. In the bad years of 1966 and 1975, federal Labor could secure respectively 40 per cent and 43 per cent of the primary vote – figures that Gillard Labor would kill for. By the time Keating lost in 1996, the primary vote was under 39 per cent. It has been mostly downhill since.

This loss of an ideologically committed, “rusted-on” element does not stop Labor winning elections, but it does mean that a larger proportion of its vote is conditional, liable to be withdrawn once people start to have doubts about the competence of Labor in government, or when it fails to present as a credible opposition. Hence, when the losses come they are larger, more devastating, as NSW Labor can attest. Put simply, the core has shrunk – not just because of a conscious reaction by individuals aggrieved at the party’s perceived loss of principle, but also because of the disappearance of those sections of manufacturing industry that delivered Labor-voting unionists in large numbers. Optimistic speculation that Labor would develop a replacement support base in the newer industries has proved fanciful. Boilermakers were always a better bet than IT nerds.

With this shrunken core, Labor’s reaction to the emergence of the Greens is an important issue. Not unlike those ancients who supported the divine right of kings, some Labor figures convey the impression that Labor is entitled to a monopoly of the left/progressive vote, as if the Greens represent some form of aberration. If only Labor gets its act together, the Greens will conveniently disappear. In support of this thesis, Labor’s survival over 120 years is wheeled out: interesting and not completely irrelevant, but far from compelling. Perhaps, as Paul Kelly has suggested, the miracle is that the show has lasted as long as it has.

My suspicion is that the Greens are not going away, no matter what Labor does, since there is now a core Green support element, bolstered by those progressives guaranteed to be disillusioned by Labor at any given time (especially when the party is dealing with the pragmatic necessities of governing). The Greens articulate an environmentally informed social and economic critique, which, while unlikely to garner majority support, will continue to appeal to a solid minority, especially (but not exclusively) among the young. Given the propensity of many voters (still) to vote the same way all their lives, the importance of a first vote being a Green vote should not be overlooked.

In olden times, Labor could accommodate youthful idealism through the presence of a prominent and (often) articulate left faction that provided forums for ideas and outlets for energy, plus the occasional hero (Jim Cairns). Prior to the triumph of neo-liberalism, those on the Labor left could cling to some faint hope for meaningful progressive economic and social change. Clearly, such days are gone: it would be a curious sort of young progressive idealist who instinctively saw Labor as her natural home.

There is another important aspect to the Greens’ emergence. We are told ad infinitum that choice is a defining concept for today’s young. In such a setting, it is difficult for Labor to contend that it should have a monopoly on the progressive side of politics. For young voters consuming political products, having a choice is natural, and Labor may just have to get used to it. After all, the conservative cause is not represented by just one party, and conservative voters have two ways of supporting the Liberal–National Coalition (leaving to one side how impotent the latter has become in any policy sense).

Based on current polls, even if all Green supporters switched to Labor tomorrow, the Labor government would still be soundly defeated in a federal election. In a preferential voting system, Labor can win with Green preferences, but its current problem is not people voting Green instead of Labor; it is people voting for the Coalition. Unless Labor can make up ground on that front, it will be able to work out its relationship with the Greens from the luxury of opposition. •

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ONE of the most significant points in the November 2010 Victorian election came when the Liberal Party decided to preference Labor ahead of the Greens in the lower house, effectively killing off the latter’s hopes of winning up to four inner-city seats. Liberal preferences had been critical in the Greens’ victory in the seat of Melbourne at the federal election, a point often overlooked in the minor party’s post-election triumphalism.

The preferences decision was seen as a boost for the leadership credentials of opposition leader Ted Baillieu, allowing him to virtually eliminate the possibility of a hung parliament/minority government and hence refocus the election as a straight contest between an ageing unpopular government and the opposition. It had the virtue of ideological consistency in a context where federal and state conservatives were assailing the Greens as anti-growth and anti-development and a threat to mainstream values, even to the Australian way of life. By contrast, the opposition’s main charge against Labor (a familiar one in the now ideology-free zone of state politics) was that it had failed to deliver services and was incompetent.

While some conservatives opposed the change, preferring the strategic advantage of damaging Labor by helping to elect rival progressives, the Liberals’ decision meant they were no longer vulnerable to the charge of assisting a party that, according to some of the more florid conservative rhetoric of the time, was a threat to civilisation. But preferences are ultimately decided by voters, not political parties, even if most people usually do follow the how-to-vote card, especially with “above the line” options in federal and state upper house contests. The Liberals’ decision affords an opportunity to assess the response of party voters in the lower house seats concerned, especially compared with the 2006 state election when the party preferenced the Greens over Labor. Some comparison with preference flow in the federal seat of Melbourne in 2010 is also possible.

The dominance of the two-party system has meant we have little evidence of the preference behaviour of Labor and Coalition voters other than in three-cornered contests where a fairly solid Liberal–National flow each way is the norm. The working assumption has probably been that Labor voters overwhelmingly “prefer” the Greens to the Coalition, although this assumption was questioned by Rob Hoffman and Brian Costar in their analysis of the 2009 Higgins by-election, in which Labor failed to field a candidate.

In the Victorian election, the contest between Labor and the Greens took place in four inner-suburban seats (Melbourne, Brunswick, Northcote and Richmond), with Labor topping the poll in each, Greens second and Liberals third. In all but Northcote, Labor would have lost had the Liberals preferenced the Greens and the preference flows had been similar to those secured in 2006.

In 2006, Liberal preferences in the four seats had favoured the Greens over Labor by a very consistent margin in each seat: 74 per cent in Melbourne, 75 per cent in Brunswick and 76 per cent in Richmond. In Northcote, where Labor secured an outright majority, preference flow to the Greens was estimated at 76 per cent.

It should be noted that these numbers are not “pure” since they include, at point of final distribution, the lower preferences of minor parties and independents who preferred the Liberal Party to Labor or the Greens. (Unfortunately, unlike the Australian Electoral Commission, the Victorian Electoral Commission does not produce a “two-candidate-preferred preference flow.”) But the same point is true of the 2010 figures, allowing for essentially valid comparisons.

Liberal voters in the four seats revealed themselves as less likely to follow the card in 2010 than had been the case in 2006. The percentages observing the party line and putting Labor ahead of the Greens were: 66 per cent in Melbourne; 66 per cent in Brunswick; 71 per cent in Northcote and 64 per cent in Richmond.

A number of explanations suggest themselves. According to the first, the Green-preferencing Liberals took a strategic decision aimed at damaging Labor through the election of candidates to Labor’s left. A second theory would see some Liberal voters in these seats as mild environmentalists not sold on the “Greens as threat to civilisation” thesis. It is also possible, although untestable, that the relevant Green candidates were seen as superior individuals who attracted a personal-based preference.

Thanks to the AEC’s two-candidate-preferred preference flow, a precise figure is available for the percentage of Liberal voters who followed the card and preferenced the Greens over Labor in the seat of Melbourne (which includes much of the territory in the four state seats under discussion) in 2010. At 80 per cent, this was impressive and comparable to the share regularly secured by Labor when it wins seats with Green preferences.

It is instructive to compare this outcome with Hoffman and Costar’s tentative conclusions about that proportion of the (old) Labor vote which, if forced to choose, prefers the Liberals to the Greens. An obvious difference is that such Labor voters, theoretically positioned between Liberals and Greens on a left–right axis, are choosing a proximate option in either case. By contrast, Liberal supporters who prefer the Greens to Labor are leapfrogging the proximate option (Labor) for the ostensibly more radical Greens.

It appears that a proportion of Liberal voters simply regard Labor as the “real enemy” and seek to damage it, unconvinced that the Greens are as threatening as conservative demonology suggests, or perhaps of the view that the end of civilisation is unlikely to be triggered merely by the Greens’ winning a few seats.

All this is of more than passing interest to Greens Melbourne federal MP Adam Bandt, who probably cannot survive without Liberal preferences: loss of Liberal support would see him as a “oncer” – unless Labor polls so badly as to come third. •

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SOME COMMENTATORS see the Greens victory in last Saturday’s Fremantle state by-election as an ominous sign for a Labor Party juggling the conflicting demands of its inner urban and outer suburban support bases. This may be so, but several caveats need to be borne in mind.

In its candidate selection, Western Australian Labor seemed to exceed even the usual level of ineptitude the party brings to the task. Conventionally, a local government–based candidate represents good value, even if party membership is bestowed at the eleventh hour. In this case, however, the mayor in question not only lacked an obvious progressive political identity, but struggled to repudiate allegations that his pedigree was, in fact, anti-Labor. Piled onto this was his mayoral identification with pro-development elements in the local area: anathema to Labor’s substantial anti-development base in a seat such as Fremantle, and manna from heaven for the Greens.

Just as there are now some state and federal seats where the electoral contest is effectively between the Coalition (usually the National Party) and high-profile (usually conservative) independents, there is a clutch of seats where the contest is effectively moving towards Labor versus Greens. Fremantle follows the federal seat of Cunningham, where a “safe” Labor seat was lost to the Greens in 2002. Interestingly, Labor was in opposition in both instances, and party optimists will point out that Cunningham reverted to Labor status at the ensuing federal election.

Leaving aside by-election idiosyncrasies and dubious candidate selection, what are the broader implications for the Labor versus Greens struggle? Clearly, there is a political dynamic at play here that, when simplified, pits an educated, environmentally conscious element, whose votes alternate between Labor and the Greens, against a pro-jobs, pro-development constituency whose votes alternate between Labor and Liberal.

In inner suburban seats like Fremantle, this is a no-contest. Unlike the Greens, though, Labor has to assemble a state or national majority in order to govern. Hence, a strategy that can deliver seats like Fremantle may prove counter-productive in marginal outer suburban seats where voters may resent being lectured by inner urban elites about sacrificing their four-wheel drives and plasma TVs for some greater good.

At the federal level, Labor’s task is complicated because it’s in government, confronting the inevitable policy compromises which are poison to its green-tinged supporters. By opting for a more graduated, measured approach on climate change, Labor runs the obvious risk of driving its hardcore environmentalist supporters into the embrace of Green candidates supporting environmental purity (although no such stampede has yet been detected in national polling). And, while these votes probably return as second preferences in outer suburban lower house seats, the scenario is more complex in multi-member upper house contests and in inner suburban lower house seats.

In the Senate, disgruntled Labor supporters can help elect Greens senators, a phenomenon which has been evident for some time now. From a Labor point of view, this is regrettable, but Greens senators are at least (broadly) ideologically onside and (1975 notwithstanding) senators don’t decide who governs.

In the 2007 federal election, there was one seat, Melbourne, where the ultimate contest (after preferences) was between Labor and the Greens. In another four seats, Labor polled less than 50 per cent of first preferences and the Greens polled over 10 per cent. In each case, the Liberal primary vote was under 40 per cent, but only in the seat of Sydney was it low enough for the Greens to almost finish second.

In the 2006 Victorian election, the two-party preferred contest was between Labor and the Greens in three lower house seats. Each could be viewed as vulnerable if there is sufficient disillusionment with a (now) long-term Labor government, especially with development issues potentially aiding the Greens’ cause. In two of the three cases, the margins were close, and one suspects that the sitting members (both ministers) may have taken more than a passing interest in the Fremantle outcome.

In 2007, there were two such seats in New South Wales, but, come the 2011 state election, losses to the Greens will probably be the least of Labor’s worries.

Ironically, Labor’s fate in this scenario is to a great extent in the hands of its Liberal opponents. Obviously, the absence of a Liberal candidate in Fremantle was by-election specific, and unlikely to be replicated at any general election. While high strategy might justify a non-contest, arguments about party morale and boosting the upper house vote usually prevail. Hence, the Liberals need candidates who are either pretty awful and/or run dead, thus finishing third and allowing their preferences to defeat Labor. That said, it remains the case that a proportion of Liberal voters will not follow a card which preferences the Greens over Labor, being more concerned about policy and ideology than with the strategic value of dividing the progressive side of politics.

In summary, local factors seem to have been decisive in the Fremantle result and the federal implications seem limited. But for a couple of ministers in Victoria the outcome may have served to remind them of their parlous hold on their Green-trending electorates. •

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