Dog Days: Australia After the Boom (Redback) (17 page)

THE TIMIDITY OF POLITICAL PROFESSIONALS

One large change in political culture has been the rise of professionalism in the careers of leaders and the approach of parties to winning elections. Another is the decline in mass membership parties with strong roots in the community and consistent ideological themes that are widely recognised. These are closely related developments: the decline of the latter has left a vacuum that has been filled by the former, and the advance of professionalism has reduced the appeal to citizens of participation in political parties. The problems and the need for reform are more acute in Labor than in the Coalition.

Parties have become increasingly sophisticated in identifying the marginal and the uncommitted voter, and more focused in election campaigns on appealing to them. The focus is increasingly on the specific and local and mundane and narrow and immediate rather than the grand themes of politics. Policies are distilled to slogans. The focus on the uncommitted encourages caution. This has made election campaigns themselves uninteresting to most citizens who are generally interested in policy and politics.

The truth of the democratic electorate, identified by Cicero more than 2000 years ago, is that voters are more likely to support someone who tells them what they want to hear. Professional polling and politics has confirmed this truth and identified more precisely what it is that voters say they desire. In the short term, at least, leaders are rewarded electorally by repeating back to uncommitted voters the things they have said that they want to hear.

All of these tendencies have been present since the late 1970s, and they expanded in the 1980s when the systematic use of polling with focus groups became important in structuring the positions of political parties and guiding election campaigns. They have become more influential over time, as parties have grown both more expert in the use of the data and more reliant on it.

I have my doubts about the policy effects and also the long-term political value of focus groups and highly professional polling. The messages from focus groups told the Labor Party to abandon the ETS, and then to abandon the prime minister whose electoral fortunes diminished when he accepted this advice. I doubt this was even sound short-term politics.

But these are lonely doubts. For the moment, the focus group and opinion poll loom large in Australian policymaking. For the moment, reform in the public interest cannot prosper unless its proponents change what people want to hear. Leaders of the major political parties, and especially the prime minister, are in the best position to change what people want to hear.

The focus groups and the polling never endorsed the sweeping policy changes of the Reform Era. They are unlikely ever to endorse the policies required for adjustment to the end of the China resources boom. At first sight, this change in Australian political culture seems to be decisively against a new Reform Era.

And yet the previous Reform Era was not blocked by the early rise of the new political professionalism. I was present at a briefing of Prime Minister Hawke by the Labor Party’s highly reputed and successful pollster after the 1984 election. (I presume that I had been asked to be present at this particular meeting so that I would learn about the problems that I had created for the prime minister.) The government had won the election comfortably, but had lost ground after a dogged scare campaign by the leader of the Opposition against various measures to tax income that had previously slipped through the net and to tighten eligibility for social security.

‘We have got away with this one,’ the pollster said, ‘but we can’t risk any more economic reform.’

The pollster kept thinking about this episode, and later advised that bold reform might even be rewarded by the electorate if accompanied by careful public explanation.

There is no doubt that in the Great Complacency, changes in political and media culture reward leaders who emphasise the negative and tailor their messages to murmurings from the uncommitted middle ground. This has been brilliantly productive from Opposition, in 2007 and with increased force in 2010 and 2013.

And yet, my view is that even in the twenty-first century, political parties and their leaders in government have much more autonomy in policy than the professional wisdom of the political specialists advising them allows. There is immense power in incumbency both when a government is new and when it is old, which can be used to pursue reform in the public interest.

Once the electorate has endorsed a new government and leader, it changes its mind only for a large reason. While conventional wisdom says that a government wears out its welcome simply with the passing of time, there is no empirical basis for this observation. Six Australian governments have won three successive elections (Hughes–Bruce; Lyons–Menzies; Menzies and successors; Fraser; Hawke–Keating; and Howard). Five of the six have won a fourth election. Of the five that have won four elections, 60 per cent have won a fifth.

The most reliable destroyer of the advantages of incumbency is economic dislocation: only once since we have been able to measure this in the modern way has a government won re-election after a recession. And seen in historical perspective, that sole victory, of Keating in 1993, looks like a postponement of retribution until the Liberal Party found an acceptable programme.

The departure of the electoral dynastic founder greatly weakens the advantages of incumbency. The standing of a prime minister is not easily transferred to a successor within the same party – no successor in office other than Bruce in the 1920s has won more than one election as prime minister. But incumbency with the dynastic founder cannot last forever: sooner or later a leader dies (Lyons, Curtin), finds something more rewarding to do (Barton, Fisher), repudiates or loses the support of colleagues (Hughes Two, Hawke, Rudd One), or decides that he has had enough (Menzies Two). A new leader might as well put the power of incumbency to good use while she has it.

Only once in the thirty-nine federal elections of the past hundred years has government passed from one party to another at an election without a recession or change of prime minister. History will get around to asking deeper questions about the achievement of Kevin Rudd in 2007, when a dynastic founder – John Howard – was toppled for the first time without a recession. Was the challenger unusually attractive to the electorate at the time? Or was the new political culture teaching us that things have changed and incumbency no longer means as much?

When prime ministers with standing in the electorate take strong positions on economic reform in the public interest, they carry a considerable proportion of the electorate with them. An outstanding example is the response to the Whitlam Labor government’s 25 per cent across-the-board tariff cut in July 1973. The standing of the prime minister was high in his first year of office. The electorate was strongly supportive of the established policy of high protection, Labor Party supporters more so than others. The tariff cut was dropped on the community without explanation or warning, and yet it received immediate majority support, higher among supporters of the government.

It is the initial reaction of the electorate that is instructive. The persistent criticism from the Opposition and campaigns from private interests who stood to lose began to bite deeply, but only when unemployment rose a year later and the reputation of the government for competence was waning for other reasons.

Non-Labor governments have had the greater longevity. There have been five long-term (three or more terms) non-Labor governments and only one long-term Labor government. This reflects an electoral advantage in conservatism, in the sense of defending the status quo and resisting change. As Machiavelli explained to the Medici princes, reform excites the passions of all who will be hurt by it, but the enthusiasm of no beneficiaries. It is conservatism in the sense of resisting change that is important, rather than in the sense of supporting wealth and capital. Here, the contemporary Labor Party is at least as conservative as the Coalition – although to the extent that Labor conservatism reflects a defence of the traditional role of trade unions in the political order rather than a defence of Australian egalitarianism, it has other electoral disadvantages.

In any case, not doing much is not the answer when business as usual is likely to see a conservative government presiding over economic dislocation. This is the dilemma of the Abbott Coalition government.

KEEPING BAD PROMISES CAN DAMAGE GOOD GOVERNMENT

Tony Abbott as Opposition leader gave the honouring of election promises an unprecedented priority in his criticism of Prime Minister Gillard over the ‘carbon tax’. In truth, there is a complex relationship between leaders’ standing and the extent to which they honour election commitments.

Both the Whitlam and Hawke governments had to deal with huge changes in circumstances from those that had seemed to face them immediately before they took office. Whitlam was elected on an elaborate programme to expand public services of various kinds. As the global post-war boom came to an abrupt end and Australia’s terms of trade fell sharply from late 1973, Whitlam continued to deliver on his promises. This counted for little in the electorate. The government was judged harshly for its failure to meet expectations on full employment.

Hawke took into government the lesson of the Whitlam experience: a determination to meet election commitments after circumstances have changed is economically damaging and politically unwise. Following advice from the Treasury that the budget deficit would be far larger than had been revealed to the public, Hawke immediately set out to cut spending and strengthen revenue in order to make way for a considerably trimmed-down version of Labor’s election promises. The voters demonstrated over several elections that they valued the larger and broader commitments to rising employment and economic growth more highly than the truncations of expenditure.

There are counter-examples. The Fraser Coalition government promised a large income tax cut in the 1977 election campaign and put it aside after the election. This was an important factor in corroding the government’s standing.

In 1993, the Opposition leader, John Hewson, promised to introduce a goods and services tax, part of which would be used to fund a cut in income tax. The Keating Labor government responded by promising to match the income tax cut without the goods and services tax. But neither the treasurer, John Dawkins, nor the government recovered from the partial withdrawal of these promised cuts after Labor was re-elected.

Prime Minister Gillard’s statement before the 2010 election that there would be no ‘carbon tax’ under a government that she led was lethally damaging in the hands of an effective Opposition leader.

Prime Minister John Howard’s distinction between ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ promises – made in explaining budget cuts after the 1996 election – was much derided at the time, but a way out of the dilemma that arises when election commitments don’t add up to a reasonable response to realities as they reveal themselves in office.

The Abbott Coalition government has been elected with an unusually severe problem of reconciling election commitments with the realities of its time in government. The promise to retain compensation for the ETS, but to repeal the scheme that provides the revenue for this, has repeated the 1993 Keating tactic on matching an opponent’s promises on tax cuts.

The expedient of distinguishing between ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ elements is not so readily available to Prime Minister Abbott, who, like Whitlam before him, has made a great deal of his commitment to keep all promises to the electorate. The highest-profile promises, and therefore the hardest to put aside as ‘non-core’, happen to be those that – at best – will make Australia’s adjustment more difficult. These include the repeal of the mining tax and ETS, the preservation of the income tax loophole related to the private use of company motor vehicles, and the world’s most generous parental-leave scheme. Strong commitments were also made during the election campaign to avoid cuts to any of the major commonwealth programmes: pensions, defence, health and education. At least the commitment to increase defence spending greatly had no timetable attached to it. Most difficult of all for the government will be the high profile given to assurances that economic growth will be greater under a Coalition government and that this will ease pressure on the budget. As Whitlam discovered, the electorate ends up valuing general promises of prosperity more highly than the minutiae of taxation and expenditure.

The Abbott government’s postponement until its tenth year of expectations of a surplus has delayed the day of reckoning for its budget contradictions. However, it also removes what had been an important source of budget discipline under the Labor government. All of this means that an effective Opposition leader who emphasises the negative will have plenty to exploit as the gap widens between expectations and emerging realities.

Abbott is the third prime minister of Australia since the Salad Days gave way to Dog Days in 2011. Without strong and early policy action, starting with a transformation of expectations about what the economy can and cannot deliver, the accumulation of economic problems is likely to overwhelm his prime ministership. His task is harder in the political culture of the early twenty-first century.

If he chooses to take strong and early action, he will be able to draw upon an electoral dynastic founder’s huge political advantages of incumbency. An effective leader offering strong policy responses that are broadly seen to be equitable is rewarded by the electorate.

Beyond the general advantages of incumbency, the current prime minister has support for the time being from major private interests and from News Corp. The private interests are encouraged that they have a prime minister who agrees with them. Abbott’s personal links with News Corp personnel provide him with a reliable praetorian guard, ready to disembowel critics, right or wrong. The support of private interests will be tested, however, as a reform programme designed to deal with Australia’s problems must disappoint them. News Corp support will be tested by the limited appeal to media consumers of a positive and complex campaign encouraging restraint in the public interest, and by the competing commercial attractions of simple and negative messages.