The great conservative undead: don’t write off Dutton

by Mark Sawyer | May 27, 2022 | Government

Anthony Albanese will enjoy a deserved honeymoon and the crossbench will revel in the adulation that a political novelty attracts. But we can never underestimate the capacity of conservative forces to regroup, writes Mark Sawyer.

Grab the smelling salts, or a double whisky. The idea that the conservatives can’t come back from here, and quicker than anyone thinks, is wrong, wrong, wrong.

And every time they come back, it’s in a more conservative guise than before. The timeline looks like this: Fraser, Howard, Abbott. Peter Dutton’s name is mud in progressive Australia, but it would be crazy to say he could never become prime minister.

Yes, the Morrison government has been smashed. Specifically, the Liberals. But the Coalition will hold at least 58 seats in the 151-seat House of Representatives. That’s already more than Labor won on its way into opposition in 2013 and 1996, and Labor was competitive at the follow-up elections. More than that, only a few thousand more votes in a few seats would have brought Labor back into government after only one term in opposition in both cases.  

The gossamer thread that the election result has woven around the nation: the rise of the boy from public housing, the influx of independent women, could fray sooner than we think, and from within.

The pundits’ graveyard

November 24, 2007: How many people cheering Kevin Rudd and his Iced Vovos could have imagined that 33 months later that he would no longer be prime minister and that Tony Abbott would be negotiating with two crossbenchers on taking the job? And how many people would have imagined that in another three years Abbott would have banished the Labor government altogether: two prime ministers burnt and the hopes of millions of progressive voters extinguished in a scant six years?

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Predictions by journalists, academics and hangers-on about the fate of political parties are about as reliable as their election calls. 

After the Fraser government’s huge victory in 1977, the cover of The Bulletin, Australia’s leading news magazine, asked: ‘’Is Labor finished?’’ The same magazine later asked of John Howard: ‘’Why does this man bother?’’

Yet Howard became Australia’s second longest serving PM, winning for the Liberals three years after newspapers wrote off the Liberals for losing five straight elections. Yes, plenty of pundits thought the conservatives were finished in 1993. They have ruled for 20 of the ensuing 29 years. 

Even the more whimsical bouts of crystal-ball gazing came to little. On the first day of 1973, four weeks after Labor had returned to power under Gough Whitlam, The Age ran an article that imagined its front page 10 years on. It foresaw that, on January 1, 1983, Andrew Peacock would be the PM, having defeated Whitlam in 1978.

Howard was often called, not yesterday’s man, but the day before yesterday’s man. The idea that Peter Dutton can’t remake himself into an appealing figure to Australians, assuming the Labor government struggles, is fanciful. For a start, he seems to keep his religious views to himself.

Pressure points are plentiful

From climate policy to health to foreign aid, there are plenty of pressure points awaiting Labor in its relationship with the new crossbench. On ‘’unauthorised arrivals’’, or boats people, the battle lines are clear. Operation Sovereign Borders is a bipartisan policy – for the major parties. But the Teals’ Monique Ryan has hammered the policy. She’s not alone in that group.

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On his second day, Deputy PM Richard Marles warned the people smugglers that nothing will change. But those media-savvy Teals and Greens won’t hesitate to whip up public sympathy against a ‘’heartless, callous’’ Labor government if the boat arrivals resume and asylum seekers are sent offshore for processing – to Nauru or anywhere the Australian government can cut a deal. The Biloela family is a good news story for Labor. A stream of boats is not. 

Already the point has been made that Labor’s biggest casualty on election night was its Home Affairs spokeswoman. Of course Kristina Keneally was a bad fit in the multicultural electorate of Fowler. But the continuing narrative about her dismal fate will concern the fact that Keneally had carriage of Labor’s me-too border protection policy. That will make a great continuing Twitter thread for the independents and of course the Greens. What happened to KK will happen to you too, Labor MPs will be warned.

The revival of the ‘’medevac’’ policy of transferring sick asylum seekers from offshore detention centres to Australia for treatment would be an early scalp for the Teals. The bill passed when the Morrison government lost its majority after the 2018 Wentworth by-election. The new independent MP, Kerryn Phelps, led the charge for the bill, but she lost the seat at the 2019 election and the re-elected Morrison government repealed the bill. Its revival would be a great symbolic prize for Wentworth’s new independent MP, Allegra Spender, but perhaps a bugbear for Labor.

Dutton: is Mr ‘Right’ the right person?

The massive debt inherited from the Morrison government (and to be fair, the Covid crisis) will demand attention at the same time spending pressures are building and inflation is raging. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has disrupted the world economy and China is challenging the West. Labor has pledged a big increase in defence spending and a massive commitment to childcare and aged care. 

Ditto the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Its cost is tipped to pass Medicare in a decade. The NDIS itself expects the scheme’s annual cost to double from $30bn this year to $60bn by 2030. What came to being as a commitment to a more caring society is also becoming a big commitment to the taxpayer. Yet Labor voted against the Morrison government’s attempt to bring in independent assessors.

In the short term, Labor’s 43% emissions reduction target will face pressure from the cross-bench. But Australia’s coffers rely on polluting commodities (iron ore, oil, gas and liquefied natural gas) that we have to eliminate in the long term. Something will have to give.

Meanwhile, it might only take the Coalition adopting a new climate target to get back into the game. Other ”barnacles” could be cleared away if Dutton takes a pragmatic approach. Liberal senator Andrew Bragg has rightly deplored the party’s courting of fringe elements: the emphasis on ‘’religious freedom’’ and the divisive campaign over trans people among a suite of nasties.

The outrages against decency that Dutton has committed are being ventilated across the media. But a pragmatic politician can remake himself. Paul Keating, the progressive hero of today, is not the Paul Keating who bemoaned the growing numbers of women in the workforce and voted against gay law reform.

Dutton, who must know he’ll get only one campaign for the top job, may decide that winning is more important than pleasing the far right. And winning is something he does. He has been re-elected in his seat of Dickson seven times since he entered Parliament by knocking off Labor star Cheryl Kernot in 2001. GetUp threw everything at him in 2019, to no effect.

The good news for Labor

The good news for Labor as it grapples with the tiniest of parliamentary majorities is that while the independents will make a lot of noise, on numbers they are still a speck on the political landscape. 

Yes, one-third of Australians shunned the major parties on May 21. But the biggest share of that went to the Greens. The Australian Electoral Commission tally gives independents 5.33%. That’s higher than the support for the parties of Clive Palmer (4.07%) and Pauline Hanson (4.89%), but not a lot higher. The media attention given to Australia’s wealthiest electorates flatters to deceive. Election 22 wasn’t the ”Tealwash” that one prominent journalist termed it.

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The Teals won with the help of Labor voters. Some of those votes will go ‘’home’’ if Labor is threatened with defeat in 2025 (a similar phenomenon occurred in 1993).

 And for all the envious comparisons our political class frequently makes with New Zealand’s Mixed Member Proportional system, which generally bakes in minority rule, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour now rules as a majority government.

The first re-election campaign of a Teal independent provided a mini social laboratory. Zali Steggall took 45.19%, a primary vote increase of 1.73 percentage points. Even the two-party preferred swing of 3.44% looks modest for a well-funded incumbent with a huge pool of volunteers. That’s before we consider Steggall’s Liberal opponent Katherine Deves, who attracted sustained negative attention on a national scale. 

And while the successes of Teal candidates in Goldstein, Kooyong, Mackellar, North Sydney and Wentworth drew the attention, the results for those cross-benchers seeking re-election were mixed.

Helen Haines, not strictly speaking a Teal but representing the seat where the movement was born, added an impressive 8.59 percentage points in Indi for a two-party preferred swing in her favour of 7.41%. Andrew Wilkie fell 4.47 percentage points in Clark and weathered a negative 2PP swing of 1.72%. (Wilkie’s massive 2PP score of 70.40% is a product of being virtually everybody else’s second choice). Rebekha Sharkie (strictly speaking, Centre Alliance) lost 2.11 percentage points in Mayo. A crash in Liberal support gave her a 2PP swing of 7.47%. Bob Katter, who stands apart from that group, added 1.04 percentage points in Kennedy but saw a no-change result against the Liberals two-party preferred. While we’re there, Greens leader Adam Bandt gained 1.90 percentage points in Melbourne (and will be joined by at three new Greens MPs in Queensland).

Such an up and down scorecard could never stop those cheering the expanded cross-bench from indulging a little hubris. We have heard a lot during this election wash-up that there are no longer any safe seats, that MPs can no longer take their electorates for granted. But on the Monday after the election a Griffith University academic told ABC Radio National:

‘’This is not a fad, that’s the key point. These Teals aren’t going to be wiped out in the 2025 election. I think these people are here to stay.’’ 

Maybe. Or another one for the pundits’ graveyard. Nobody should write off Dutton.

Mark Sawyer is a journalist with extensive experience in print and digital media in Sydney, Melbourne and rural Australia.

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