State Liberals are in a lousy state, as Hillary Bray writes:
The latest Roy Morgan poll on state voting intentions came and went
last week with scarcely an acknowledgement from the press. Maybe
this is not surprising as the hacks focus on the main game – the
federal election this year – and the fact that state politics have
become so predictable and ho-hum.

The polls showed that in all states except Tasmania the Liberal and
National Parties are worse off than they were at the last
elections. In nearly all cases, strong Labor positions are
becoming stronger. The details are all at the Roy Morgan website.

Polls are always interesting and these show something that all
political pundits need to take note of: Labor has shored up state
politics so effectively that there may be just no way back for the
Liberals. In short, without major surgery and a rebirth, the
Liberal Party is dead in Australia.

Why? Two reasons: firstly, Labor has been better at framing
and then owning the big issues that matter to voters; and secondly,
Labor has understood the importance of leadership and the impact that
the leader has on the voters’ minds.

Big Issues

In many ways the success of John Howard federally is an apparition;
something that occurred against the trend to cloud reality.
Crikey columnist Owen Outsider some months ago observed that there is a
long-term trend towards the ALP in Australia. Have another look at – Long term trends in two-party-preferred voting

Owen pointed to the fact – and it is a fact – that all the state and
territory governments look like staying Labor for quite a while.
He also quite reasonably explains John Howard’s success, against the
trend, in terms of voters just being sick of Labor in 1996 and 1998,
and then Howard gleefully (and skilfully) grabbing national security as
the key issue in 2001.

But my friend errs to think that there is some sort of ideological shift to the left in Australia.

Electors are not ideologically pre-disposed towards Labor. There
may historically be a slight tendency to vote Labor, but there is
plenty of evidence that Labor cannot count on some sort of shift to the
left in national psyche. For example, Dennis Shanahan, writing
for the Weekend Australian just before the 1998 election, penned an
article titled “Howard’s Young Fogeys”. Shanahan pointed out that
at the 1996 election, 18-24 year olds voted 38 per cent for the
Coalition and 47 per cent for Labor, while a Newspoll at the time of
his article gave 40 per cent to the Coalition and only 38 per cent to
Labor. Shanahan had this to say:

“Call it patriotism, a community ethos or just plain pragmatism, but
Australia’s first-time voters, after a generation of Labor governments,
are becoming more conservative.” (Weekend Australian, 11-12 July 1998,
p. 21.)

But that was six years ago. Now these same voters have swung back
to Labor federally, where they have been at state level for the past
decade.

The key word in Shanahan’s quote is “pragmatism” not
“conservative”. Voters, and particularly the new generations
following the boomers, are becoming more pragmatic and it is
self-interest, not ideology, that increasingly determines political
outcomes. Put simply, Labor at state level has been better at
framing the issues and providing the answers for the broad band of
median (or swinging) voters who tend to identify not with the party
policy themes, but rather see elections in terms of problems that need
to be solved by the candidates.

This, also, has been John Howard’s success. It is not politics of the party, it is politics of the realist.

The scenario is one of the individual voter acting pragmatically and
selfishly, not inclined to think ideologically, but rather choosing
amongst the parties for the one they believe can fix current
problems. This growing group of swinging voters is prepared to
believe that almost any problem is important and are susceptible to
priming and framing by the parties who compete amongst each other to be
the best “fixer”.

Twenty years ago it dawned on Labor that they had to reverse their
reputation as poor economic managers and they have worked diligently to
neutralise that traditionally conservative issue. It is doubtful
if there is a voter in the land who now thinks Labor is going to
bankrupt their state.

So where has it left the Liberals? Nowhere. What issues at
state level do the Liberals now own? All the biggies reside with
Labor – health, education, social services – and now they have annexed
economic management. Even law and order is no longer the sole
domain of the conservatives – witness recent tough stands from Carr,
Gallop and Rann.

Labor has actually worked at shoring up these issues in the voters’
minds, priming the electorate, framing the debate in their terms, and
elevating the issues that matter ahead of Liberal ideology. The
Liberals have been left floundering, waiting for divine right to
deliver them government.

Labor are now the fixers. Labor is the party that listens and
understands. Labor has jettisoned ideology and, along with the
voters, embraced pragmatism. The Liberals, on the other hand,
have relied on their born-to-rule mentality. They have hoped –
expected – that voters by some celestial blessing would eventually see
the light.

They’re going to be waiting a long time. Until the Liberals wake
up to reality and decide to learn what makes the voters tick we won’t
begin to see some real contests in state elections.

Sure, things aren’t all rosy for state Labor. Mistakes are made
and services not delivered: Carr has problems with public
transport, Gallop and Rann with the power industry, Beattie with
ministerial honesty and Bracks with health. But the really
worrying thing for the state Liberal Parties is that the public are not
embracing them as an alternative. It seems that voters have given
up on the Liberals as a creditable alternative government, no matter
what Labor does wrong.

Questions of leadership

Everyone from Phillip Adams to Pauline Hanson knows that politics in
Australia is becoming more and more presidential. Perhaps it
always has been. It is impossible to think of a great era in
government from either side without it being linked to a great leader.

So why do the Liberals keep dishing up this insipid bunch of losers
that pass for state leaders? Let’s look at the states, one by one.

NSW: John Brogden is considered, even by Crikey (see
sealed section 20 April) as the only half decent leader the Libs have
in any of the states. But the polls don’t give him a look-in and
Bob Carr, no matter what strife befalls him, seems bullet proof in
government. The Morgan Poll shows that the Brogden Liberals have
made no inroads into the Labor election result from March 2003.
The best Liberal leader in the country can only mark time.

WA: Poor old Colin Barnett can’t take a trick. Not
only does Premier Geoff Gallop hold a handy lead in the polls, but he
has the Liberal deputy leader, Dan Sullivan, white-anting him from
behind. Gallop should be on the political ropes with royal commission
findings on police corruption and a power crisis, but the Morgan poll
reveals Labor has stretched it’s lead over the Liberals by seven
percentage points over their already impressive result in the 2001
election.

SA: Rob Kerin used to be premier. Those days must
seem a long, long time ago. Since the February 2002 election
Premier Mike Rann has moved his party’s primary support from a knife
edge 36.3 per cent to a comfortable 49.5 per cent, while Kerin has
watched his slip from 40 per cent to 32.5 per cent. When will the
SA Libs realise the voters just won’t buy Kerin any more? Maybe
the recently elevated Duncan McFetridge is the man? Who knows or
cares down south. It seems the voters don’t.

Tasmania: Liberal leader Rene Hidding was given the
biggest free kick a struggling opposition could hope for: a
popular premier resigns for health reasons. What would Brogden or
Barnett give for that! But has it made a difference for
Hidding? Scarcely. Sure, Labor’s primary support has
dropped a fraction from the heady days of Jim Bacon’s supremacy at the
2002 poll, down from 52.3 per cent to 49.0 per cent, but Hidding’s
Liberals have not improved either, dropping from 26.9 per cent to 26.0
per cent. The only shining light for the Tassie Libs seems to be
Peter Gutwein, a rebel who at least understands that change is the only
thing that will save his party.

Queensland: Can Peter Beattie really do no wrong?
According to the polls, that’s what it looks like. Labor scored a
thumping 47.0 to 35.5 per cent win on the primaries at the February
election, and that has now blown out to a 53-33 margin. The
National’s Lawrence Springborg cut the pathetic Liberals adrift after
the election in a cut-the-nose-off-to-spite-the-face hissy fit, but
unless and until the conservatives come together in the deep north,
Labor is in for life.

Victoria: Steve Bracks may have come to power by accident,
but once there he has worked hard to stay in the big office.
Liberal leader Robert Doyle is making absolutely no impact. A
Newspoll earlier this year had him on 21 per cent against Bracks’s 57
per cent as preferred premier, the second lowest ranking in the country
(just above the hopeless Rene Hidding). The Morgan poll shows
that Labor has gone from 47.9 per cent of the primary vote at the
November 2002 election to whopping 52 per cent now, while Doyle is
pretty much going nowhere at 33.9 per cent.

Positions vacant

All the state Liberal parties must find decent leaders, not this
present crop of yesterday’s men. That won’t be enough on it’s
own, but it would be start. Then they need to take a leaf out of
Labor’s book and actually work at winning back the voters. This
can’t be an overnight thing: there is no messiah fix for the
Liberals.

The Liberals need to grasp, as Labor has done, that the median voters
don’t care about broad policy themes and positions, they care about
themselves and they want their problems fixed.

When was the last time Labor listened to the union movement?
Labor has successfully pinched the value of individualism from under
the Liberals’ nose, but have kept it very quiet. (Shhh; we don’t
want them to notice.) Labor knows that the real scenario is one
of the individual voter acting pragmatically and selfishly, not
inclined to think ideologically, but rather choosing amongst the
parties for the one they believe can fix the problems that matter to
them. Labor keeps up the “comrade” image for the benefit of the
true believers, but acts quite differently in delivering government.

And it works. At the moment, it is Labor with the answers.
The voters are comfortable; they have peaked over the fence to the
Liberal side but they don’t like what they see.

Born to rule won’t work anymore. It is dead, dead and gone.
The state Liberals are playing catch-up, and not very well at
that. They must redefine their message – and get someone who can
sell it.

Owen Outsider responds to Hillary

There is nothing Owen likes more than someone noticing his articles,
let alone quoting them, so he was tickled pink when Hillary referred to
his piece “Long term trends in two-party-preferred voting” in her
recent entry on the sad state of the state Liberals. Owen is not sure
that Hillary has entirely nailed the causes of the Liberal problems,
but there is no doubt this is part of the answer.

However, there is one thing that Owen just cannot let slip past without
comment – the reference to Dennis Shanahan’s pathetic piece on the
voting behaviour of young people.

Shanahan announced, on the basis of one opinion poll, that there had
been a seismic shift on the votes of 18-24 year olds. Around the same
time Tony Abbott put out an even more intellectualy lazy (or frankly
dishonest) piece about why young people loved John Howard.

But what was the evidence they were basing this on? Almost nothing.
True the Liberal vote had climbed slightly according to the poll,
and the Labor vote had fallen sharply. But the thing is, this was one
poll. Morgan polls taken around the same time showed no such trend (if
I remember correctly, and alas I do not have it in my files, they
actually showed a trend the other way). The next Newspoll did not
confirm the trend.

Naturally Abbott jumped on this, announcing that young voters loved
Howard because “like him they never had a sex, drugs and rock’n roll
phase”. At the time I observed that it would be interesting to compare
the number of 18-24 year olds who had had sex outside marriage, had
sampled illegal drugs and owned a Killing Heidi CD with the numbers who
voted Liberal, thought Howard was a good prime minister and had ever
attended a meeting of the Young Liberals. I felt safe in the belief
that Abbott would lose out on all three.

Why Shanahan staked his reputation on such flimsy evidence I have no
idea. But check out the data from Newspoll on what actually happened at
the 98 election among the 18-24 year olds. Libs 31, Labor 52, other 17.
I have a suspician that the “other” contained rather more Greens and
Democrats than One Nation, and after preferences the ALP was somewhere
over 60%.

Does this mean that Hillary is wrong? Not necessarily. The reasons
young people are backing the ALP, could be exactly as she says –
although the reason they are disproportionately likely to favour the
Greens and Democrats does not fit her theory, as currently espoused.

My real point takes us back to my original article – to see a trend in
voting behaviour it is important to look over a long period of time,
rather than at an individual election, let alone a single opinion poll.
Blips happen all the time, and its all to easy to exaggerate their
significance. The overall trend (confirmed at the Queensland state
election, the only one held since I wrote my piece) is towards the ALP.
Whether this is because the electorate is moving at glacial speed to
the left, or better positioning by the bruvers, or bit of both,
requires a lot of research to establish. One poll, and two foolish
articles, are not the basis on which the question can be settled.

Hillary Bray can be contacted at hillarybray@crikey.com.au