Author: gg@gordongregory.net

[Re-published 7 November after glitch on 6th.]

The transition from Boris Johnson to Liz Truss took two months. From Hawke to Keating took exactly 45 minutes. Here’s a reminder.

Minutes of special meeting of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party held Thursday, December 19, 1991

The meeting opened at 6:36 pm with CAROLYN JAKOBSEN in the chair, who specified the meeting was being held under Rule 12(a).

The LEADER announced his resignation. He said he believed that the 1993 election would be a most important one and his leadership gave the best chance for a Labor victory. He wanted to put behind the Party the trauma of the period of the challenge.

He said there were two indisputable facts:

The Australian media wanted  Paul Keating for Prime Minister and the ALP wanted Bob Hawke. He hoped the will of the ALP would prevail. He tendered his resignation and nominated for the position of LEADER.

The RETURNING OFFICER took over the meeting. He called for further nominations.

PAUL KEATING then nominated himself.

The meeting was adjourned to allow preparation of ballot papers.

At 6:50 pm the ballot papers were made available and voting commenced.

At 7.06 pm the returning officer declared he had received 107 ballot papers and the result was:

KEATING 56

HAWKE   51

PAUL KEATING addressed the meeting. He paid tribute to Bob Hawke’s leadership over a decade. It was an electoral record unequalled and we all owed him an enormous debt.

There was a standing acclamation for BOB HAWKE.

[Paul Keating then spoke of Bob Hawke’s achievements.]

BOB HAWKE then addressed the caucus. He congratulated PAUL KEATING and thanked the 51 who had voted for him in the ballot. He pledged complete support to the party and the Government. He would not utter one word to harm Paul or his Government. It had been a privilege to lead the Party for nine years and his reward was to be able to leave Australia a better place.

The meeting closed at 7:21 pm.”

There had been wrangling and heartache for many months. But the final resolution was swift.

Croakey provided extensive coverage of the 2022 election campaign (www.croakey.org/category/elections-and-budgets/). But because they were simply not available, it included very few projections of the result.

Despite this, polling was (as usual) a prominent source of news and discussion generated during the campaign.

The apparent reluctance of  the pundits and pollsters to go public with predictions was presumably the result of their multiple failures in the lead-up to the 2019 election.

It was perhaps due to the absence of precise projections from the ‘professional’ psephologists that  Croakey’s Editor-in-Chief, Melissa Sweet, approached some casual observers of federal politics about their expectations of the results. On Sunday 15 May, one week before the election, I emailed my thoughts.

The net bottom-line of my predictions was that the election would result in a House of Representatives comprising 78 from the ALP, 65 from the Coalition and 8 independents including the six already on the cross-benches.

With the results declared we know that the House of Representatives will now comprise 77 from the ALP, 58 from the Coalition and 16 independents.

Although the  net prediction ended up being close to perfect, it was made up of a number of erroneous predictions which in effect cancelled each other out.

In the lead-up to 21 May my overall summary – given to people who sought one – was that the ALP had not done badly enough in the campaign to offset two strong forces: dislike of  Scott Morrison and his ways; and the general feeling that it was time for someone else to have a go after nine years of the Coalition.

In my view what happened in the campaign was virtually irrelevant to the election result. What did matter were three things which were fixed or determined by the time the election was called:

1. an aggregated and generalised view across the voting population of the current government, this view built up over three years and shaped by the media;
2. personal voters’ perceptions of the leaders of the major political groupings – their likeability, the way they present on television, and what one has heard about them in the media and in the pub;
3. local, electorate-by-electorate issues, including changes in local candidates (eg the retirement of a popular member) and any cut-through of particular local issues (such as aircraft noise in Brisbane).

The hardest of these three to allow for is the third. Keen observation can give one a pretty accurate assessment of the public’s view of the government and of the perception of party leaders. On the other hand, accurate predictions of the impact of local issues requires intelligence from 151 different locations.

Like everyone else, I failed to pick the strength of the greening of metropolitan seats and of the rejection of the Liberal Party in Western Australia.

I considered electorates which everyone knew would determine the result. I picked eight of the 12 electorates that shifted from the Coalition to Labor: Bennelong, Boothby, Chisholm, Higgins,  Pearce, Reid, Robertson and Swan. But in this category I missed Hasluck and Tangney, and was wrong on Braddon, Lindsay, Longman and Nicholls, all of which were retained by the Coalition.

My prognostications were based partly on the false premise that most of the seats that changed hands would do so between the two major party groups. On the back of my envelope, as well as being wrong on those four that were in the event retained by the Coalition, I also thought that three seats would go the other way – from the ALP to the Coalition: Corangamite, Dobell and Gilmore. It might also be that I underestimated a gender phenomenon because all three of them were retained for the ALP by women (Libby Coker, Emma McBride and Fiona Phillips).

In terms of the numbers, my greatest failure was in relation to the community independents. Whereas I thought the number on the cross-benches would increase from 6 to 8, as we now know it is increasing from 6 to 16.

No one could have picked the fact that three seats in Brisbane would go to the Greens. In relation to high-profile seats, I thought that both Bridget Archer and Trent Zimmerman (North Sydney) would hold on due to the profile and credibility associated with their crossing the floor on the religious discrimination Bill. Bridget Archer did, Trent Zimmerman did not. Also I picked Josh Freudenberg to retain his seat, on the basis of how he presents and communicates and a view about his capability and leadership prospects.

I was correct about a number of seats which it was thought might change hands but which did not. These included Bass, Dunkley, Flynn, Hunter, Parramatta and Warringah (this last already being held by an Independent). One of the interesting matters for the future is how easy it will be for strong independent candidates to build a wall or moat around their incumbency.

In such an exercise there are always outliers that it is impossible to predict. This time they included Fowler (where the result was determined before the election by an administrative order), Tangney, Griffith, Ryan and Brisbane. In Tangney Special Minister of State Ben Morton was beaten by Sam Lim with a swing of 11.44% to the ALP.

This exercise in election-watching should remind us that it is not the number of seats that change hands that is important but the balance – the net balance – between flows in two main directions. An election in which three seats change hands can have the same aggregate result as one in which 33 seats change hands, if the 33 are distributed 15 one way and 18 the other.

On the matter of the extent to which an election campaign influences the result, there is much more to be said.

In this year’s federal election campaign there has been justified criticism of journalists’ fondness for gotcha questions. But there is a  broader and more costly crisis in the way that election campaigns are structured and covered by media.

For very good reason there has been much said recently about the role of the media in the election campaign. Special criticism has been directed at the propensity of too many journalists to ask so-called ‘gotcha’ questions. This trivialises discussion of the stance of the parties on policy issues.

However, there is another approach to media coverage of the election campaign that is equally facile and useless, albeit less toxic. This is the construction, through interviews with selected members of the public, of what is believed to be a policy agenda against which the political parties can be judged.

This process is premised on erroneous beliefs about how and when individual voters make decisions about who they will vote for. It provides much of the basis for a mistaken belief that promises made during the campaign play a major role in determining the election result.

Among other things, this process provides a rationale for the supposed existence of a cohort of swinging voters large enough to determine the result, and who will decide in the last days of the campaign who they will support.

The true situation is that the result of the election is determined by the cumulative perception of the majority of voters of events over three years. For the vast bulk of electors this perception is fixed before the circus of the campaign begins and intersects with their normal voting behaviour. In just a small proportion of cases the intersection of habitual voting practice and perception of a party’s performance over three years leads to a change in voting

behaviour. The net result of these changes in two directions – to and from the major parties – determines the outcome.

The stupidity of this system of election coverage and the beliefs that underpin it is illustrated by the ubiquitous use of ‘vox pops’ from ‘interesting electorates’. The commonest question posed in such high street encounters is along the lines of “What do you think are the important issues for voters in this electorate?” In effect this is asking a random individual voter to summarise the policy landscape as if they will cast their vote on the basis of a Party’s performance on each of its elements. Policy issues selected will be based on what has happened over the previous three years, shaped largely by the media into an agenda that is characterised by almost universal agreement on what is on it, even though the position of individual media entities on each element may be different.

Thus it is that the currently accepted policy agenda comprises the cost of living (for which a proxy is the cost of energy in the home), the relationship with China, trust in government processes (and how they might be improved), climate change, job availability and the security of work, the establishment’s treatment of women, and the ongoing impact of Covid 19. Also on the list are issues that no reasonable person, when stopped in the street by a reporter with a microphone, would deny: health, education, the cost of childcare and the war in Europe.

 We are expected to believe that the Coalition’s and the ALP’s position on these “current priorities” will soon determine the vote of the person being interviewed on the street and that they are representative of voters in this key (marginal) electorate. The trouble is that they and everyone else has only one  vote, and in most cases it is rusted on to one of the major political groupings: Liberal, Labor, Green or National.

If the interviewee is an unemployed homeowner or tenant, electricity prices will be important. But so might be management of climate change, continuity of government, the Ukraine, secure borders and the pay of aged care workers. Which to choose as the determinant of their vote?

If the vox pop is for television, the producer of the segment will select for broadcast according to the value of the talent (an interesting face; a bizarre response) and with an eye to political balance for the piece, the program and the media entity.

Not part of the currently accepted policy agenda are reform of the taxation system, improving productivity, social and economic inequality, the Uluru statement, reform of aged care, funding of the NDIS, the concentration of media ownership, the more esoteric matters relating to faith, culture and gender, and ‘national security’.

Just about the only useful question to be put to someone in the street is: “Do you intend to change your vote from the last time?”

If the answer is yes, the reasons are worth identifying. It is probably caused by accumulated feelings of frustration and alienation with their usual preference, a view of the party leaders, or by a change in the personalities in the local contest. It is almost certainly not due to one party’s decision on one of the so-called key issues.

Given these views about the use and purpose of much of the way an election campaign is covered by the media, one obvious conclusion is that it is a poor use of scarce parliamentary resources. It is useful every three years to raise the profile of safe, democratic political processes. But too much of the content of election campaigns is meaningless and too much of the apparent excitement is bogus.