Labor: the fightback begins

The Albanese Labor Party’s fight to retain government is under way. Despite doomsayers, a swag of evidence points to a second win – and an increased majority.

The conventional wisdom – if that’s the word – is that Anthony Albanese’s Labor government is in serious decline and will lose its majority in the next election. According to the punditry, the failure of the Voice referendum revealed the government as being preoccupied with issues that were peripheral to most voters.

At first sight, the trajectory of polling looks ominous: a clear trend which now puts Dutton and the Coalition ahead of the government. But this story is not yet over.

In fact, Albanese’s Labor is in a far better position at this stage of the cycle than almost any government in the past 40 years. And it’s usual for first-term governments to get the wobbles and, quite often, to have near-death experiences. But the last one-term government was that of James Scullin, elected in 1929 and defeated in 1932. But that was in the exceptional context of the Great Depression.

If the commentators recovered from their long-term memory loss, they would recall that the Howard government was underwater in the polls for most of its eleven years in office. Their first term was marked by the swift imposition of a savage conservative agenda, most notably in breaking the power of trade unions (culminating with thugs in balaclavas bashing unionists on a waterfront protest) and the privatisation of Telstra. But, despite announcing the introduction of the GST just before beginning the campaign, Howard managed to scrape back.

It was as close to death as any government is likely to get and still survive. Labor won 51% of the popular vote at the 1998 election but its vote was tied up in too many safe seats.

John Howard did not lead a generally popular party. But, like most incumbents most of the time, he survived.

In March 2001 a by-election was held in the Brisbane seat of Ryan, formerly rock-solid for the Liberals. Labor won with a swing of almost 10%.

As John Howard and his increasingly restive colleagues contemplated their political mortality, the result in Ryan was one of two watershed moments. The second was the leaking of a memo to Howard from the Liberal Party’s federal director, Shane Stone, saying the Australian public regarded the government as “mean, tricky and out of touch”.

Facing electoral wipeout, Howard performed a spectacular series of backflips. The petrol excise was slashed. GST compliance was simplified under sustained pressure from small business and others. There were further concessions in that year’s budget.

The turnaround began. Then, Howard opened up a rich new area of political possibilities for a conservative government: bashing asylum seekers.

The Tampa affair ... inhuman but effective

That culminated in two disgraceful episodes: the Tampa affair and the Children Overboard hoax.

In August 2001, the Prime Minister defied international law by refusing to allow a Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, permission to disembark a group of Hazara asylum seekers fleeing persecution and death in Afghanistan.

Howard, now rampant, declared in a speech: “We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

Timing – for the government – could not have been better. It was just a month before the pivotal 9/11 attacks in New York supercharged global concerns about terrorism and permitted the government and its media supporters to brand all asylum seekers as potential or actual terrorists.

A false report that the occupants of had thrown their children overboard to save themselves. The day before writs were issued, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock announced that passengers of a sinking asylum seekers boat had threatened to throw children overboard. This claim was later repeated by other senior government ministers including Defence Minister Peter Reith and Prime Minister Howard.

The claim was utterly false and, before the election was held, ministers knew it was false. But it undoubtedly helped them win. Labor’s primary vote sank to its lowest level since 1934.

A similar pattern followed in the government’s third term. There was a bounce in the polls following the Bali bombings in 2002 but, this time, a general domestic terrorism scare was not possible. When Mark Latham succeeded Simon Crean as Labor leader, the Howard government – for almost a year – hit the low points in the polls that had caused near-panic in previous terms.

But Latham’s shortcomings as a leader, and his belligerent personality became evident during the campaign. A key moment was Latham’s overbearing handshake with Howard outside a radio studio.

The government, once again, clawed its way back into office.

The same broad pattern has been repeated with every government of the past four decades. As time goes on, the clawback at the end gets harder but, until inevitable defeat, the incumbency and its inherent advantages prevail. Of course, it helps if the opposition is poorly led or in disarray.

The electoral history of the Hawke and Keating governments show the usual trend: initial triumph, shockingly poor performances at the next election, a better result at the third and then peril at every poll. The two-party vote at Hawke’s and Keating’s elections shows the trajectory:

Labor came dangerously close to defeat at the 1990 election, despite ongoing division in the Liberal Party. There was less frequent polling then, but the conservatives were well ahead on the primary vote for most of that term. But, despite a better-than-expected campaign by the Liberal leader, Andrew Peacock, the ALP’s pitch to environmentally-concerned progressives paid off. Labor lost badly on its primary vote – 39.4% to the Coalition’s 43.5% – and lost the popular vote. But preferences from the Democrats and others got them over the line. Just.

Labor was able to court the environmental vote with action on the environment because it was in government. Oppositions can deliver nothing but promises.

The best advice for any government at this stage of a parliamentary term is quite simple: DON’T PANIC!

The dangers of panic were in plain view in 2010, during the final few months of the Rudd-Gillard Labor government. Rudd panicked first and dropped a climate policy that had come under withering fire from the opposition under Tony Abbott and the fossil fuel corporations. That was a bad  mistake but not – yet – a fatal one. The government remained highly competitive with the Coalition and recovery was well under way before the whole party panicked, kicked Rudd out as leader and installed Julia Gillard.

There was a fleeting improvement in the polls but the inevitable internal conflict, and a sense in the community that an unelected Prime Minister had been thrust upon them by factional bosses – cost the government its majority. It had to rely on the goodwill of strangers – three independents, two of them rural conservatives – to scrape back into government.

The old cliché is, of course, true: there really is only one poll that counts.

What are the prospects?

Underlying politics throughout the democratic world is the volatile reaction against half a century of neoliberal economics in which the working and middle classes lost ground or barely moved, and the rewards of prosperity went overwhelmingly to the rich. There is now a surge of fury among hundreds of millions of people who believe, with cause, that the economic and political systems are rigged against them. Even migration, that other intractable issue of the decade, is linked. Migrants are easy scapegoats, blamed for taking jobs and houses.

The anger among ordinary voters has boosted parties and politicians of the left and right: anyone proffering solutions, whether practical or spurious, has benefited. This wave of anger has produced Starmer’s Labour in Britain, Trump in America, Bolsonaro and then Lula in Brazil, Milei in Argentina, Meloni in Italy and Albanese’s Labor in Australia.

The pandemic and its aftermath supercharged this trend but did not cause it.

This is the deeper background for the coming cost-of-living election. Which party can make the most convincing pitch as being able – and willing – to repair the damage.

On this question, Labor has a clear advantage. A swag of policies, already implemented or in the pipeline, have increased wages: substantial minimum wage increases, child care worker salaries, protections for gig workers, and winding back some of the industrial relations measures of the past 30 years which have decisively tilted power away from workers and towards employers.

Other measure have included power price subsidies and the promise to do something – not much, but something – about housing.

This is perhaps the Coalition’s most significant vulnerability. They remain solidly identified as the party of WorkChoices and wage suppression. A campaign criticising the government, without offering comprehensive alternatives, is unlikely to be successful.

Peter Dutton has been campaigning hard on immigration, claiming – correctly, as it happens – that the government has lost control of its migrant targets. But this is an arcane and indirect way of exploiting voter concerns about housing and costs. Targeting outsiders is a constant tactic of conservative politicians, but the culture wars are unlikely to work this time as they once did for Howard.

But Australia is not America

Dutton is clearly attracted by the notion of repeating Donald Trump’s victory here, and using similar campaign strategies. One of Trump’s ploys was to link “woke” policies with real voter concerns. A campaign commercial on high rotation used this picture of Kamala Harris with a “she/her” note next to her name.

“Kamala even supports letting biological men complete against our girls in their sports,” the narration says. “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”.

 Dutton has taken up the theme. “I think when I see a government that is more interested in pronouns than they are people, it starts to become a real problem,” he said in a radio interview.

Transgender people are one of the few easy targets left in the sex wars. Gay men and lesbians are now mainstream, so homophobic vitriol backfires. This is not the stuff of election victory and, as Dutton may now be discovering, Australia and the United States are different countries. The culture wars, driven by fear and loathing of difference, are now less likely to be won by conservatives than by progressives. Even a whiff of opposing access to abortion is a vote loser for the Liberals, as they found out in the Queensland state election.

Climate change is not, this time, a top election issue mainly because its reality is all around us and denial is no longer a viable strategy. People in the energy industry are well aware of the need to adapt to survive. And Albanese, having approved yet more goal and gas projects, is far more vulnerable on mining policy from the left than from the right.

But the climate transition is proceeding, Chris Bowen is an effective communicator and the Coalition’s plan – more coal, more gas, then (eventually) nuclear is not a particularly saleable alternative. And few Australians want to see their country humiliated at international climate conferences as it was when the Liberals were in power before.

The Prime Minister’s series of avoidable stuff-ups – the fumble over a census question on sexuality, the house on the coast, the airline upgrades – have undoubtedly cost him popularity. But leader approval ratings have almost no correlation to voter intention, and provided the Labor campaign isn’t littered with more of those distractions, the “gaffes” are irrelevant to the election.

Labor’s fightback has now begun. The government is busily exploiting its incumbency advantage to construct a program of change. This may never be a reformist government in the style of Whitlam, Hawke and Keating, but perhaps it’s too soon to tell. If budgetary constraints survive, a more ambitious and expensive agenda – Medicare, housing, welfare – may eventually appear. It won’t be in time for this election but the opposition’s agenda faces the same fiscal strictures.

Electoral arithmetic

It is effectively impossible for the Coalition to form government, even in minority. To understand why, we must first look at the current crossbench.

There are eighteen of them in a house of 151. That’s 12%. Of those, only four – Bob Katter two disaffected Liberals and one disaffected National – would be reasonably certain to support a Dutton-led minority government. Another one, maybe two (Rebekha Sharkie and Helen Haines) would be very long-odds possibilities. The rest would be likely to support Labor, at least for confidence and supply, but not the Coalition.

Of the four Coalition-friendly crossbenchers, only two – Bob Katter – is likely to be in the next parliament. Russell Broadbent and Ian Goodenough were denied Liberal preselection and became independents for the rest of this term. Goodenough is now likely to stand as an independent against his own party, probably delivering his highly marginal seat to Labor.

The Teal independents all have reasonable expectations of being returned. Since defeating the former Liberals in those six seats, they have massively improved their name recognition, worked assiduously around their electorates and shown their ability to pursue a moderate-progressive agenda in parliament.

Once effective independents are elected, it’s overwhelmingly likely that they will retain those seats, usually for many elections to come. They begin with narrow wins but build consistently on those.

The two best current examples are Andrew Wilkie in Tasmania and Helen Haines (preceded by Cathy McGowan) in Victoria. McGowan was elected to the former regional Liberal seat of Indi in 2013 with a two-candidate-preferred share of 50.3%. Despite a slight dip when Helen Haines took over, that narrow initial margin became much more comfortable (58.9%) at the most recent election.

Andrew Wilkie’s record is even more impressive. He began with 51.2% in 2010 and has now made his Hobart electorate, Clark, the second-safest seat in the country, only beaten by David Littleproud’s Maranoa in western Queensland.

According to Climate 200 founder Simon Holmes A’Court, Teal independents are being heavily supported in several seats the organisation regards as winnable. At the top of the list are Fairfax in Queensland; and Farrer and Bradfield in New South Wales. Others being targeted are Dickson in Queensland, Wannon in Victoria, and Calare and Cowper in New South Wales. All of those seats currently belong to the Liberals or Nationals. Labor is not under any threat.

On current reckonings, the centrist independents stand an excellent chance in the first two seats and may pick up at least one of the others. That would bring the Teal contingent to eight or nine.

In the current parliament, the Coalition has 55 members in the House of Representatives, out of 151. That’s 36%.

To form majority government, the Coalition would need 76 seats, 21 more than it now has. In other words, it would need to increase its representation by 38%.

On current indications it would have only two or three crossbenchers upon whose support it could rely, so the Liberals and Nationals would need to win 18 or 19 new seats and not lose any. But where?

The challenge for the Liberals was difficult after the 2022 election and has been made more so by a bad by-election loss (Aston) and by boundary changes in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia. The figures in the following chart is based on Antony Green’s calculations of notional margins on the new boundaries.

Of the ten most vulnerable seats in the country, six are currently held by Liberals and only two by Labor. Fowler, a normally safe Labor seat in western Sydney, which was lost in 2022 after a botched faction-driven preselection, has a good chance of reverting to Labor, which has belatedly preselected the popular, capable local candidate who was shoved aside last time.

The most obvious threat to Labor is Gilmore, on the NSW south coast. Andrew Constance, a former state minister, narrowly lost last time and has again been preselected by the Liberal Party.

Overall, the greatest threat is to the Liberals, not only from Labor but also from Teals and other independents.

There is no sign here that Peter Dutton’s plan – of writing off his party’s former heartland seats (now held by the Teals) and concentrating on the outer suburbs – is working. Even the slightest swing would see important suburban seats, historically held by the Liberals, go to Labor. These include Deakin (held by frontbencher Michael Sukkar) Menzies (Kevin Andrews’ former seat) in Melbourne; Bennelong (once John Howard’s), in Sydney; Sturt (once Christopher Pyne’s) in Adelaide and Moore, the Liberals’ last redoubt in Perth.

The conventional wisdom is that Labor will lose seats in WA, having done so well last time. Okay, but where?

Even a slight swing would see at least two Liberal seats go to Labor and a third, Forrest (whose sitting member, Nola Marino, is retiring and will take her personal following with her. The new seat, Bullwinkel, is notionally Labor and would make up for the loss of Higgins in Melbourne in the redistribution.

The Greens, having gained an extra three seats in 2022, all in Brisbane, face the probable loss of two, and possibly all three, to the major parties.

On paper, the Greens look relatively secure in two of those seats, and very secure in one. But changes are happening.

In 2022, the Liberal National Party came second in all three; in each case, the Greens’ victory depended on massive flows of Labor preferences of well over 80%. Without those, it would have been a very different result.

Also since the last election, the Greens have pursued a hard-left, high-risk strategy of opportunistic populism. The new member for Griffith, Max Chandler-Mather – is dominant, making headlines for the wrong reasons – blocking housing reform, siding with the thuggish and criminally-infiltrated construction union, taking sides on Gaza and identifying the party with the extreme elements of the pro-Palestinian movement and their attacks on Labor electorate offices.

The political journalist Nikki Savva put it this way in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age:

“The Greens, with Max Chandler-Mather (now dubbed Mad Max inside parliament) as de facto leader, treat housing like they treated climate change – that nothing is better than something or that the fight, whether on Gaza or the CFMEU or housing, is worth more than the solution.”

The new approach has been an electoral disaster. Right around the country, Greens candidates are being punished for the antics of their federal members. The party suffered big swings against then in various elections: local government in Victoria, the ACT Assembly and, most significantly, in the recent Queensland state election. There, the party lost its only seat in the state parliament with a swing against it of 11.4%.

That state electorate, South Brisbane, covers much of the territory of Chandler-Mather’s seat, Griffith. At the 2022 federal election, Chandler-Mather’s first-preference vote rose strongly, by 10.9%. That was enough to put the Greens above Labor in the count, meaning Labor preferences went to them, allowing them to soundly defeat the LNP candidate.

The party’s disastrous state vote represents a comprehensive turnaround, almost entirely attributable to the conduct of the federal party and, specifically, Chandler-Mather himself. Any swing at the coming federal election that’s anywhere near the state result would see the Greens relegated to third place – or worse – in the count, with their preferences going to Labor rather than vice-versa.

All three of the Greens’ Brisbane seats would go to the Labor Party.

Samaras ... 'get real!'

Kos Samaras, Director of Strategy and Analytics at the Redbridge political research group, slammed the Greens’ strategy in posts on Twitter (now X).

“Greens need to wrap their heads around this reality,” he wrote. “Greens voters are NOT Greens activists. Greens voters actually float between Labor and the Greens. They at times also choose to support other progressive minor parties.

“Constantly attacking Labor, in an environment where conservative parties are gaining ground actually pushes progressive voters to Labor, not the Greens.”

Samaras’s research has found the party’s new, hard-left approach has alienated progressive voters in the inner cities but has had some success in the outer suburbs, where that support is electorally irrelevant.

“No point increasing your support in Dandenong where you will never win a state or federal seat,” he wrote. “Losing to Labor in Richmond [in council elections] should at the very least ring some very loud alarm bells. It’s clear that they have done something to their brand that has inflicted a lot of damage.”

The ground game

The outcome of this election, more than most, will be determined by the tough, person-to-person ground game in each vulnerable electorate. That requires a massive organisational capacity, the ability to raise money and to field volunteers to door-knock extensively and relentlessly. It requires the preparation and deployment of campaign material that targets the specific issues of local, as well as national, concern.

Labor has a party machinery that can do that. The Liberals do not.

In three states – New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia – the Liberal machine is in disarray. In New South Wales, they couldn’t even organise themselves well enough to lodge their candidates’ nomination forms in this year’s local government elections. In South Australia, the Labor government, against the odds, has just won a seat from the Liberals at a by-election. In Western Australia, the Liberals aren’t even the official state opposition.

On all this evidence, the most likely outcome of nest year’s election is the return of the Albanese government with an increased majority.