Sunday, July 29, 2018

Super election – Labor cuts through Turnbull Hype and Bluster



The argument — put within the ALP itself — that if Labor could not hold Longman, it would lose the federal election, has been answered.

And that leaves big questions for the LNP and the Turnbull Government over their hold on a swag of marginal seats throughout Queensland.

While the swings were not enormous in historic terms for by-elections, the results will put a stop to the political consolidation that the Prime Minister has finally been achieving in the past few months.

And the Government will certainly not be able to claim the results as an endorsement of its company tax cuts strategy.

The LNP has three Queensland seats on margins of 1 per cent or less — Capricornia, Forde, and Flynn — and a further four seats on slim margins — Petrie (1.6 per cent), Dickson (2 per cent), Dawson (3.3 per cent) and Bonner (3.4 per cent).

Dickson is the seat of LNP powerbroker and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton. It shares a boundary with Longman.


There will be renewed focus both on Malcolm Turnbull's lack of appeal in the north, and on the LNP's electioneering abilities.

Drilling down into the numbers from Tasmania and Queensland produces very different pictures of the mood of the nation.

The complexity of the trends in Longman was always going to make it the most fascinating seat to watch on the night.
 
The trends in Longman showed a big collapse in the LNP primary vote, which plunged 10 per cent, and the fact that Labor's primary vote was over 40 per cent — much stronger than the ALP had been expecting.

It seemed to be settling at a split of around 35 per cent to 65 per cent in favour of the LNP.


Labor has secured a major victory over the Turnbull government in a marathon political contest across five byelections, gaining ground in key seats in a show of strength ahead of the next general election.

Labor held its four electorates while the Coalition failed to regain one of its old strongholds, in an outcome that dashed government hopes of turning the tables on its rivals.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten used the victory to intensify pressure on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull by claiming the outcome in two key battlegrounds, Braddon in Tasmania and Longman in Queensland, was a message from voters on issues like Medicare and school funding.

Declaring victory in "four from four" electorates, Mr Shorten assumed victory in Longman and Braddon and said he expected the same in two electorates in Western Australia.

"Tonight is another signpost into the destination that matters for Australians - a Labor government after the next general election," Mr Shorten told supporters in Longman.

This result is ominous for the Turnbull government.

What it shows is Labor’s campaign machine is stronger on the ground, has the resources to run a very long contest and still have financial firepower at the end; and also possesses a message with sufficient political resonance to connect with the disaffection rife in the Australian community, particularly in Queensland.

This latter point about zeitgeist is particularly important. If you can’t connect with voter alienation in the current political climate, and find your own way to speak to it, you will not win elections.

Politics in Australia was once about appealing to the swinging centre, the people who determined the outcome of elections. With major party hegemony on the wane, and the landscape littered with disruptors, modern campaigning is now about precision narrowcasting: base activation of the rusted-ons overlayed with a precision courtship to those rusted-off.

It requires something more focused and thought through than Peter Dutton determining at five minutes to midnight that it’s time to fire up the moral panic about migration and see if that peels 3% off Pauline Hanson’s vote in Longman.

It requires an ongoing conversation. It might even require some emotional intelligence.

Given the national polls for the first six months of this year have showed the major party contest tightening and Turnbull enjoying a recovery in his approval ratings, the wake-up call from Queensland will send a chill through the government.

Surely the take home message from Saturday night is that different parts of Australia might need different messages – that the Coalition’s core election pitch might need a bit of work.

The dramatic fall in the LNP vote in Longman, as well as the other defeats, has prompted debate about whether the Coalition should drop its plan to cut the corporate tax rate.

Labor campaigned heavily against the cuts and Mr Shorten repeatedly argued his party would spend on health and education instead of giving tax breaks to "the big end of town".

Today Mr Turnbull said the Government remained committed to ensuring that Australia had a competitive company tax rate.

Mr Shorten signalled Labor would maintain its intense push against the company tax cuts.

"I've always thought that giving away billions of dollars of taxpayer money back to the big banks and the multi-nationals is a shocking idea," he said.

"We have opposed it and we continue to oppose it."

Incoming Labor President Wayne Swan attributed the party's strong win in Longman to the Government's approach to company tax.

"This is an emphatic rejection of Malcolm Turnbull's policies of trickledown economics, which basically boil down to huge tax cuts for large corporations and high-income individuals and wage stagnation for everybody else," Mr Swan said.


"The price of those tax cuts is cuts to health and education."

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