“The voters always get it right” was a regular refrain of former prime minister John Howard. He used it to bat away suggestions that election results could somehow be accidental, such as federal Labor’s victory in the 1993 Fightback! election, his own re-election with less than half the popular vote in 1998 when promising to introduce a GST, or the unexpected defeat of the Kennett Government in Victoria in 1999.
One of Howard’s strengths as a politician was his innate respect for the collective wisdom of the voters. It’s the primary reason he didn’t get bent out of shape by defeat in 2007, both at a general election and in his own seat, and helps explain why he’s provided none of the embittered theatrics and revisionist commentary of other past PMs.
Australian voters are not only smart, they’re often smarter than people such as us who write about politics. Writing about politics, especially amid the stage-management of an election campaign, is a bit like pressing your face up against a tapestry. You can become so immersed in the minutiae that you lose a sense of context and fail to appreciate the broader issues which are exercising the public mind.
To this end, Wednesday’s forum at the Rooty Hill RSL was something of a watershed for Australian politics, in that it returned the power to ask questions and demand answers to the public. There was nothing slick or polished about it at all. It was a genuine conversation where voters were afforded a chance to follow up their question if the subject had been dodged.
The forum also showed how there is a gap between the questions journalists ask, and the way they ask them, and the questions voters ask and the way they ask them.
It also showed that there is a gap between the importance which voters are placing on some key issues in this campaign, and the importance they have been afforded by the political parties.
Easily the biggest of these was the manner in which Kevin Rudd was replaced as prime minister by Julia Gillard. Both politicians and journalists know that politics is a blood sport and are probably somewhat inured to the events of June 24, despite their unprecedented and brutal quality. The public is clearly still confused and offended by the fact that their elected prime minister, whether they liked him or not, was knocked off by the factions. And it’s elitist nonsense to say that this confusion stems from their misunderstanding of the parliamentary system – namely that in Australia it’s not the public which directly elects the prime minister but the Caucus or Party Room through the leadership ballot. Technically that is true, but Australians believe, understandably enough, that they went to the election in 2007 and voted for (or against) their local Labor candidate, they were by implication endorsing or rejecting Kevin Rudd as PM.
The question on this issue to Julia Gillard at Wednesday’s debate gave her the most awkward moment of the night, and signalled the beginning of a fairly tense hour where she often sounded defensive. Tony Abbott’s ability to capitalise on the issue was undermined somewhat by the cuteness of his distinction about how it matters more that a PM such as Rudd gets knifed than a dime-a-dozen Opposition Leader such as Malcolm Turnbull. But despite his trademark circumlocution on the issue, it was still one he was happy to rabbit on about, and which Gillard was desperate to avoid.
Because politicians and the people who write about them think bastardry and back-stabbing are the stuff of politics, we have all underestimated the extent to which this issue continues to resonate with the community.
The second feature of the forum which probably surprised the political class was the extent to which voters were spitting venom about state issues. Both Labor and the Coalition are obviously aware that voters in NSW and Queensland are unhappy with what’s called the Labor “brand”, to use that gimmicky marketing term. But the utter derision which met all talk of NSW Labor at Rooty Hill on Wednesday suggested that maybe politicians from both sides and journalists across the media have underestimated it.
The timing of the state-based aspect of the evening could not have been much worse for Julia Gillard. The (Victorian) Prime Minister had that same day announced the $2.1 billion western Sydney rail project – something which, on paper, should have been met with spontaneous dancing in the streets in Labor’s heartland. The problem is that Sydney voters – particularly lower-income voters in areas where infrastructure has not kept up with urban sprawl – are now trained to have an immediate Pavlovian response any time the words “transport blueprint” exit the gob of anybody in the ALP. Years of bitter experience have taught them that such commitments are not worth the paper they’re written on by extravagantly-paid consultants. The one thing you should give Sydney’s Anthony Albanese credit for is bravery, of the crazy-brave kind, in knowingly visiting the very policy area which has become synonymous with dithering, inaction and deceit at the state level.
The third thing which became clear at Rooty Hill was the extent to which voters are wise to ethereal concepts such as Julia Gillard’s citizens forum on climate change and the ETS as being talkfests which are aimed more at buying political time than making a hard decision. In an excellent column in this newspaper this week Graham Richardson traced the problems with Labor’s campaign to the moment that citizens panel was announced by Julia Gillard. Richo’s gut-instinct assessment of this turning point was borne out by some of the arm-folding and eye-rolling which we saw at Rooty Hill on this issue, versus Abbott’s simple line about general elections being the most democratic way to let the nation rule on policy.
It is hard to know the extent to which Wednesday’s forum shifted votes, if at all. But it certainly shone such a very bright light on the problems for Labor in western Sydney. So much so that, if I were the member for Lindsay David Bradbury, I would have been shouting that the television that I didn’t want my Foxtel after all, and gone and put a record on.
To conclude as I began with a Howard line – some years ago Howard told a dinner for a bunch of us from The Daily Telegraph, all of whom were sagely opining that Australia was set to become a republic at the then-looming referendum, that we were all 100 per cent wrong and that Australia would be voting no. His reasoning was based on a voxpop in that day’s Tele of the Parramatta Eels cheerleaders, a majority of whom were opposed to the constitutional change because they didn’t understand the model, thought it gave too much power to politicians, or would cost too much. Howard said at the time: “If the Parramatta Eels cheerleaders are voting no to the republic Australia is voting no to the republic.”
You would be getting ahead of yourself to afford the same talismanic quality to the crowd at Rooty Hill the other night. But it was a pretty confronting insight into Labor’s problems out west, which in the absence of an eleventh-hour reversal in voter sentiment, will have to be offset by holding seats or picking some up elsewhere on Saturday week.
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