The election’s uncomfortable truths

Aaron Patrick
May 20, 2019
AFR

Australians are more cautious and conservative than city elites realise.

Scott Morrison’s victory did more than secure his place in political history.

The upset demonstrated an uncomfortable truth for many in the Australian elite about the nature of their society.

The distinct options given to voters, and the definitive choice they made, revealed the innate conservatism of the Australian middle and working classes.

The election result has demonstrated that Australia is not a society that desires big, interventionist government in the same manner as Sweden, France or even Britain. The national mood desires lower taxes, a smaller state and strong borders.

Defying his political heritage in Labor’s free-market wing, Bill Shorten adopted an almost-ideal progressive agenda championed by The Australian Institute, academia, social media activists, public service unions, GetUp!, the Guardian and prominent economic columnists at Nine’s big papers.

Morrison has made the conservative working classes the Coalition’s base, a shift impossible under Turnbull.

Shorten proposed higher taxes, larger government and surrendering cheap energy from Australia’s huge reserves of coal and gas.

The Prime Minister won over millions of voters and humiliated Bill Shorten’s Labor Party in an upset nobody saw coming.

Morrison stood in opposition. His policies, led by tax cuts across the income spectrum, were ridiculed for a lack of boldness. But the policeman and councillor’s son deliberately didn’t promise to change Australia, but to leave it mostly the same, and a little wealthier.

Prosperous and aspirational, Australians no longer believe unions or governments are necessary to protect their wages. They don’t believe industries should be subsidised by governments, except for perhaps defence manufacturers.

They do not fear healthcare underpinned by the private sector, nor covering part of their medical costs. They do not believe there is a childcare crisis, although they would like more sexual equality.

They do not regard franking credits as a favour bestowed by government, but recognition of taxes paid by self-supporting investors.

They believe in climate change, but aren’t certain closing coal and gas power stations will make electricity cheaper.

Powerful repudiation
Peter Dutton’s starring role in anti-Coalition advertising made his re-election in Queensland the most-powerful repudiation of the GetUp-Australia Institute policy agenda by the middle and working classes.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton thanks supporters on election night. AAP

Morrison was ridiculed by pundits for ingratiating himself with voters through folksy behaviour, as though populist politics should be beneath a prime minister.

The electoral response vindicated Morrison’s campaign style and interpretation of Australians’ desires. Of the 133 seats where clear data is available, there was a swing to the Coalition in 85, a remarkable achievement that belies the narrow Liberal-National parliamentary victory. Only in Victoria, Shorten’s home state, did more seats swing to Labor than the Coalition.

Under Malcolm Turnbull, who some Liberal Party members derisively referred to as a “leftist experiment” on Saturday night, the Liberal-National Party couldn’t win the welfare-dependent outer-Brisbane seat of Longman ten months ago.

On Saturday, Morrison brought Longman into the government with a 3.9 per cent swing. Longman is a long way from the coal fields of central Queensland, where Labor’s equivocation about the Adani project cost it seats around Gladstone, Rockhampton and Townsville.

Brilliant but flawed
Longman illustrated how Morrison’s ascension has nudged his party to the right, winning over blue-collar voters who might otherwise have gravitated to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and other fringe parties.

Morrison has made the conservative working classes the Coalition’s base, a shift that would have been impossible under the brilliant-but-flawed Turnbull.

The shift was subtle enough to protect every inner-city Liberal seat bar Warringah, where the perception Tony Abbott is a climate change sceptic overwhelmed his illustrious record of civic service.

Within the Liberal Party, two decent, capable MPs illustrate the electoral ascent of the conservatives over the centrists.

In the professional heartland of North Sydney, gay progressive Trent Zimmerman’s majority went backwards 4.7 per cent in a wealthy seat that would have painfully felt Labor’s 49 per cent top marginal tax rate.

Liberal Trent Zimmerman suffered a 5 per cent swing against him in North Sydney. James Brickwood

In the outer suburban and rural wilds of Hume, between Sydney and Canberra, Christian Angus Taylor increased his majority 1.6 per cent against an internet smear campaign directed at his previous business interests.

Zimmerman was a champion of Turnbull’s plan to make electricity retailers responsible for lowering emissions of greenhouse gases known as the National Energy Guarantee.

A HiLux voter
Taylor is partially dismantling the policy as energy minister. He was one of the primary critics of Labor’s refusal to cost a plan to generate half of all electricity from wind, solar and other renewable sources by 2030.

On Saturday, a solid, heavily tattooed man approached Taylor at a polling booth. The ex-McKinsey management consultant and Rhodes Scholar braced himself for criticism from a Labor voter.

Instead, the man asked for a how-to-vote card. He told Taylor he had seen an ad in his Facebook feed about Taylor’s love of his Toyota HiLux ute, and Labor’s plan for electric vehicles, and wanted to vote Liberal.

On climate change, Taylor’s election day success demonstrates the confronting reality, for many dedicated advocates, that the transition to renewable energy hasn’t been enthusiastically embraced outside of progressive enclaves.

“The Coalition doesn’t have a climate policy,” ABC broadcaster Fran Kelly declared a week ago.

Numerous surveys have found that climate change policy is a priority for voters, urban and rural, including the Australian Futures Project’s Perfect Candidate.

As it turned out, voters in Queensland, where the election was decided, felt the Labor Party was more concerned about global warming than working-class jobs.

National climate debate
When economist Brian Fisher raised concerns about the cost of Labor’s renewal target, he was subjected to a smear campaign and his house egged after activist and mining heir Simon Holmes a Court published his home address online.

Yet Queensland and Western Australia’s rejection of Labor on Saturday suggests that the strong moral case for climate action needs to be accompanied by an honest explanation of how society will manage and pay for the complicated industrial transition.

There hasn’t been a thorough national debate about the economic benefits and costs of phasing out coal and gas, two of Australia’s biggest exports. The Labor leadership, emersed in its own media culture, seems to have overestimated the primacy of climate policy in swing seats.

A prodigious political fundraiser, Taylor’s Hume Forum helped pay for campaigns of other Liberal conservatives, including Michael Sukkar in Victoria and Andrew Hastie in Western Australia. He also gave money to Liberal candidates in Herbert, Lindsay and Braddon, three seats won from Labor.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor donated to several successful Liberal campaigns. Alex Ellinghausen

With Tony Abbott removed from formal politics, Dutton, Taylor, Sukkar and Hastie are now the leaders of conservatism in the Liberal Party. They will seek to extend the boundary of Liberal electoral control further into the urban fringe, where anti-immigrant populism from Mark Latham and others fills the vacuum created by Labor’s leftward drift.

If Tanya Plibersek is elected Labor leader, their ambition will be easier to fulfil. The affection for the progressive member for Sydney among media elites won’t help Labor in the disenfranchised backblocks of the economy.

Even though he is from the same left faction as Plibersek, Anthony Albanese would be a more formidable opponent for conservative Liberals.

Albanese is a consistent and loud supporter of the Adani coal mine, and carries a working-class authenticity that Shorten tried but could never attain.

Albanese versus Morrison would be an closely matched fight for the hearts of cautious and conservative Australians, whom the 2019 election demonstrated are now the dominant political force in this society.