It has to be this time, right? Australians have been given the date of May 21 to cast judgment on nearly nine years of Coalition government. The polls say Anthony Albanese will be our 31st prime minister, but the polls were wrong in predicting the same for Bill Shorten in 2019. Victory for the ScoMo, Barnaby, Josh and Pete team would push out conservative rule to 12 years, and add to a series of failed milestones in the fight to save the planet from irreversible heating. Mark Sawyer looks at the election issues that matter.
At last, the date has been named. Australians go to the polls on May 21, and will render their verdict on a nine-year-old Coalition government that has been led by Scott Morrison for nearly five years.
The question is: how strong is the mood for change? The polls have Labor in front, but the polls said similar in 2019, leaving a lot of unopened champagne bottles at election parties around the nation. Conservative parties have a 2:1 winning ratio over Labor in the previous 46 elections, so it would be foolhardy to bet against the innate caution of the Australian voter.
There is no doubt the political landscape has changed dramatically since 2019, as much as in any three-year period since 9/11 at least. Nobody knew the word Covid in May 2019, and pandemics were faraway bogeys with names such as SARS. Nobody could know that a Coalition government would throw away its aversion to deficits and remortgage the house to save as many businesses and households as possible (even if JobSeeker wasted as much as it saved). Which leads us to the big issues:
It’s the economy, stupid (it always is)
The economy is an election issue because it always is. Delivering the Budget, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said: ‘’Our economy is leading the world.’’ It doesn’t feel that way to a lot of Australians.
We are told that at 4%, the unemployment rate is the lowest since 1974. But that’s just one measure.
Meanwhile inflation, another ‘70s bogey, is raging. A generation has grown up not knowing 20% hikes on some supermarket items. Petrol topped $2 a litre after the Ukraine disaster.
In response, Frydenberg has cut the petrol excise in half for six months, to 22.1c. More on that later.
Covid turned the small-government argument on its head. Spending is now at 27.2% of GDP compared to 25.9% at the height of the global financial crisis (GFC). But economists warn that spending will overheat the economy, stoke inflation and force up interest rates, whacking home-buyers. Young people are being smashed in the housing market and may be frozen out forever unless drastic changes are made.
Wages have stagnated. Frydenberg says they will recover. Such breezy promises have been proved wrong time and time again. It doesn’t engender much faith in the assurance that wages will outstrip inflation. As MWM pointed out, the Low and Middle Income Tax Offset (LAMITO) ends on June 30, which means that millions of Australians will be paying more tax, not less as claimed.
No matter the unemployment rate, low-income earners still struggle. Remember how Sunday penalties for casual workers were clawed back? The stage three tax cuts that benefit high income earners are due in 2024-25 and will become the baby of the next government. The Coalition backs the cuts as economically rational, but critics denounce them as unfair to low-income earners.
A nation that ran down its manufacturing capability for 40 years has been reminded that such items as personal protective equipment might just be something we can do here.
Climate change: this ain’t 2019. But it ain’t 2030 either.
A lot of Australians believed 2019 would be the climate-change election. But Queenslanders told the rest of the nation that Adani’s Carmichael coal mine was wanted (and Bob Brown’s climate convoy was not). The resource states (Queensland and Western Australia) saved the Morrison government.
It should be easy to see climate as the only issue that matters. Australia has been denounced as a ‘’holdout’’ on emissions reduction by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, yet the Russian invasion of Ukraine has helped push up the price of iron ore and coal. Australian exports of these commodities will add $30 billion to the budget for six months. (A billion here and a billion there and soon you’re talking about real money, as a US senator sort-of said.)
The tortuous process to net zero emissions goes on. On Friday the Liddell power station in the Hunter Valley closed one of its four turbines, the equivalent of taking 400,000 cars off the road. Tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and Canadian asset manager Brookfield put in a bid for AGL, Australia’s largest energy generator, with the aim of closing it down.
Rooftop solar panels are going crazy. But Australia’s greenhouse emissions target is on the nose internationally. At COP26 at Glasgow, Australia copped flak.
Climate change was not a topic of much discussion in the Budget. The Coalition’s mantra, as repeated by Frydenberg, remains: ‘’Technology not taxes.’’
For many voters, the government’s response to the fires and the floods, after being that ‘’holdout’’ on climate action, will be enough. But how many minds have changed since 2019? Tony Abbott was an election loser in 2019. But the night he was defeated, he said: ‘’When climate change is a moral issue we do quite badly but when it’s an economic issue we do very well.’’ The Coalition will be banking on that, again.
Scott Morrison: the character test
Morrison is called an autocrat and a bully on his own side. He has a ‘’women problem’’. The names of Grace Tame, Brittany Higgins, Christian Porter, in different and unproved ways, will always be associated with him. He is despised by his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull. French President Macron ‘’knows’’ he lies. Morrison was missing in action during the 2019 bushfires. He dared not let the media accompany him to meetings with northern NSW flood victims in 2022. Even the preselection battle that made him the Liberal candidate for Cook in 2007 is still the subject of damaging (and unproven) allegations. He adorns the side of garbage bins, saying BIN HIM.
And there’s that ‘’women problem’’, something that is being skilfully exploited by the ‘’climate independents’’, almost all female, challenging Liberals in affluent electorates. ‘’I don’t hold a hose, mate’’ may be Morrison’s epitaph.
Anthony Albanese: the electability test
Labor can’t lose, right? ‘’Child care, aged care, Medicare – because Labor cares.’’ It’s a strong line. But the ALP’s healthy poll numbers bely weaknesses. Labor’s primary vote was historically low in 2019. It commanded the support of only one in three voters. A big preference flow, mainly from the Greens, inflated Labor’s seat tally.
Albanese has been around a long time but he has not established an easy rapport with the public. Since Whitlam, Labor’s election winners have been messiah types: Hawke, Keating, even Rudd and Gillard. Albanese? Not quite. Women already out-vote men on the progressive side, which limits the scope for gains.
Anyway, can we really believe the polls? A lot of people never speak to a pollster. Morrison relied on ‘’the quiet Australians’’. Some of them might be a bit noisier now.
The big bad world
Military spending – do we need those submarines? (And tanks). Well … there’s a war going on in Ukraine. Australia is sending Bushmaster armoured vehicles to Ukraine on C17 Globemaster transport planes – and claims to be sending 70,000 tonnes of coal.
If peace doesn’t come soon, there will be demands for a bigger refugee intake. The Morrison government is taking in an extra 16,500 Afghans over four years. There will have to be more from a country where 9 million people face starvation. Then there is the spectre of climate refugees – the island states inundated because of climate change.
No matter how you see China’s role in the world, it is Australia’s biggest trading partner. Never before has our biggest trading partner been a strategic rival too.
The security establishment tells us China is bent on turning the Pacific into its own lake. The Solomon Islands government has agreed to a security deal with China, prompting calls for Australia to enact its own Monroe Doctrine to keep potentially hostile powers out of our backyard. China’s ‘’peaceful rise’’ has entered a less peaceable phase. Taiwan’s future is as uncertain as it has been since the anti-communist rulers fled the mainland in 1949. Security establishments have sounded the alarm, and their political masters (or minions) are shovelling money towards bases, submarines, tanks, boots on the ground.
The AUKUS deal for nuclear-powered submarines has been backed by Labor. It’s not likely to be a vote changer, but who knows? What if a crossbench of say, eight climate independents, a Green and Andrew Wilkie, tell an aspiring minority Albanese government to scrap the deal and spend the dough on climate mitigation if he wants their support on confidence motions?
Covid, health policy and aged care
‘’The NDIS [National Disability Insurance Scheme] will always be fully funded,’’ pledged Frydenberg. Some commitment: the cost is calculated to blow out from $34 billion to $70 billion in 10 years. It is forecast to outstrip the defence budget.
Medicare is a world-beater. It can bring prohibitively expensive drugs to people suffering rare life-threatening conditions, saving or at least extending lives. ‘’Bulk-billing rates are at a record high,’’ Frydenberg said in his Budget speech.
The Covid response was understandably a hit-and-miss affair. A lot of things could have been done differently, but a lot was done right.
One upshot was that Covid shone the spotlight on the plight of residents of aged-care homes. Conditions are abject. Pay rates for carers are miserable. Labor promises a new deal.
Albanese would spend $2.5 billion on improvements including better food, and mandating a registered nurse at care homes at all times. The pledge received a positive response from the Health Services Union and the Australian College of Nursing. Mike Baird, CEO of Hammondcare, one of the nation’s biggest aged-care providers, talked up the policy.
But the Coalition’s Simon Birmingham hammered the plan for lack of detail and practicality. ‘’Sweeping promises, but no details on what they’ll cost and who will pay.’’ Morrison won’t promise to match the Fair Work Commission’s recommendation that the pay for aged-care nurses be raised from $22 to $27.50.
If Labor can deliver, this could be a game-changer for vulnerable people in the best traditions of the party and along the lines of the NDIS.
But will money ever be enough? Aged care workers have left the system in droves, deterred by the low pay and the punishing workload. Seventeen thousand staff are needed every year. Low unemployment discourages people entering an arduous profession. There is no alternative to a migrant workforce.
Our aged parents used to be looked after by their families. In the days of large families, the task often fell on the unmarried daughter. The only way care homes will get better will be if every Australian under 50 has to spend a day at one every year, and experience the ghost of Christmas future.
Are we really on a winning streak?
Back to Josh’s boast that we are experiencing the lowest unemployment rate since 1974.
Now 1974 is not thought of as a golden year. Streaking was a thing, giving sporting spectators unwelcome displays of ugly bearded men displaying their inglorious naked form. And inflation was raging around the Western world as the price of oil quadrupled after the Yom Kippur (Arab-Israeli) War.
As for the labour market in Australia, 1974 is chalk and cheese compared with today. Women’s participation rate was much lower, unions covered more than half the workforce, many kids left school at 15, university participation was a fraction of what it is today. Changes since 1974 in the way unemployment is defined (you’re not unemployed if you have as little as one hour of paid work a week) renders boasts about a 48-year low in the jobless rate meaningless.
Watch out for the wedge
The topics mentioned above are by no means the only election issues. If Labor wins, we can expect plans to put the Indigenous Voice from the Heart to a referendum. Its passage would enshrine a First Nations voice in the constitution. Indigenous issues are rarely election deciders, if ever, but they are among the most vital work the nation can take on.
Labor wants to deliver universal childcare, but staffing will present challenges there too. And there’s the prospect (thrilling to some, scary to others) of minority government. The climate independents’ campaigns are not vanity projects; there is big money behind them. And then there’s the unexpected.
Australians are adept at talking more ”compassionate” than they vote. Look at the 2019 ”climate election”, but also, the housing affordability crisis and the shortage of social housing. Everyone agrees we should do something. But any policy to increase the density of our big cities, known as urban consolidation, is a vote-loser. Ditto for anything that threatens house prices. In 2019 Labor found its policy on negative gearing under fire from retirees and even a climate independent. Only last month, on election night in South Australia, a woman told the ABC she switched her vote to Labor because of the Liberal government’s promotion of what she called infill development.
The government’s move on the petrol excise tells us a lot about the raw politics it is prepared to employ. The cut runs out in six months, well after the election. The next government gets something of a hand grenade. It can pocket the dough (which is used on road building and maintenance), and make motorists cranky. Or extend the rebate, and take away some of the incentive for motorists to consider upgrading to the more expensive, but kinder to the environment, electric vehicle. Labor likes electric cars. It’s a fiendishly clever wedge.
But then that’s the Coalition: masters of politics. Don’t be fooled by the chaos surrounding preselections or the general feeling of rot. The Coalition has won seven of the past nine elections. Whether it’s ‘’a fistful of dollars’’, or ‘’we will decide who comes to this country’’, or ‘’who do you trust to keep interest rates down’’, or ‘’stop the boats’’, Australian conservatives are jungle fighters.
Morrison is down but he’s not out.
Mark Sawyer is a journalist with extensive experience in print and digital media in Sydney, Melbourne and rural Australia.