Back in that happy 17-day period last year when Australia was chugging along nicely without a government, we ran a piece on The Punch speculating that whichever party ended up winning the federal election would probably lose the next one.
The thinking went that the victorious party and prime minister would end up so co-opted and compromised by the various deals required to form government that they would not look like much of a government at all, with their authority diminished as they pandered to disparate MPs within their fragile alliance.
Part of the problem comes from the timidity of modern politics. The saying goes that politics was the art of the possible. These days it often looks like the art of the impossible.
With the well-documented rise of focus groups and the testing of slogans, messages and policies by internal pollsters and other readers of the tea leaves, instinct counts for less than it did in politics. Keating was right when he said that, these days, politicians won’t get out of bed in the morning unless they’ve got focus group research telling them to do so.
So much of politics is now driven by the desire to rule out negatives rather than expound positives. The media has contributed to that - “Prime Minister, can you rule out X?” - as has the enthusiasm in modern politics for negative campaigning in which parties spend more time bagging their opponents than spelling out their own vision.
Think back to the election campaign and both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott spent much of their time on the run from their former selves. On the day the election was called, Tony Abbott was signing a gimmicky pledge saying that WorkChoices was “dead, buried, cremated” and that an Abbott Coalition Government would not be moving to free up our industrial laws. Who knows what would have happened had Abbott formed a minority government, and changed economic circumstances or pressure from a well-organised business-led campaign meant that he had to revisit the issue and find some wiggle room to adjust the existing laws.
Gillard’s now-infamous pledge that a carbon tax would not be introduced under a Gillard Labor Government was a similar example of a political leader trying to neutralise an issue which had cost her party support. After the debacle of the Emissions Trading Scheme, which Kevin Rudd shelved after initially declaring it a vital response to the greatest moral challenge of our time, Julia Gillard wanted to distance herself from the issue during last year’s campaign. In doing so she crafted a form of words which may haunt her to her political grave.
Writing yesterday on news.com.au under the pithy headline Gillard’s Three Strikes, national political editor Malcolm Farr presented a bleak assessment of the PM’s current problems, as underscored by this week’s shocking Newspoll.
The three problem areas Farr identified were the internal disquiet of MPs over her gung-ho advocacy of a carbon price (or more accurately, a carbon tax) without any detailed policy back-up, the political power and policy influence of the Greens which threatens Labor MPs in inner-city seats, and the tolerance of Green MPs whose public comments have embarrassed the Government.
Each of these issues has fed into the collapse in Labor’s primary vote and Gillard’s approval rating as Prime Minister. The turnaround in both categories has been staggering, and without precedent. Until this week the lowest primary vote the party had registered was 31 per cent under Paul Keating ahead of his 1996 thumping; Julia Gillard has gone one point lower than that.
The shorthand version of why this has happened is that the Greens now look like they’re calling the shots. Not only are they influencing policy, they’re being cocky about it, as evidenced by Christine Milne’s totally cavalier and indifferent blatherings about how petrol should be included in a carbon tax.
Her comments have been seriously damaging for the ALP. This is the party which is meant to represent normal low-wage families in the burbs who have a couple of cars and a couple of kids and spend their lives running between work and the supermarket and weekend school footy. Right now it looks like they’re dancing to the tune of a handful of inner-city trendies who ride bikes with wicker baskets on the front and only ever shop organically at the local farmers market.
What Gillard needs now more than anything is to tell the Greens to back off, that there will be no more joint press conferences in the prime ministerial courtyard, that the next time one of them shoots their mouth off they will be repudiated with genuine vigour.
Newspoll showed that voters with a tendency towards the Greens are more emboldened than ever before. This is because the party can now demonstrate that it’s actually influencing policy. Its primary vote stands at a very solid 15 per cent.
What this also means is that 85 per cent of Australians would not vote for them. There’s a strong view within Labor that the party is focussed far too heavily on the 15 per cent than the 85 per cent.
The best thing Gillard could do right now is to start a policy fight with the Greens – go and visit Olympic Dam perhaps and come out behind BHP’s push to expand its uranium exports – just to remind them and the voters that she’s the Prime Minister and is running the show. It’s not like Bob Brown is going to pack his bags and go and sit with Tony Abbott. On the current polling the alliance between Gillard and Brown is paving the way for an Abbott Government anyway.
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