Julia Gillard: day two

Australian politics has entered uncharted waters after yesterday’s brutally efficient leadership coup, but the consensus view is that Julia Gillard is favourite to lead Labor to a victory which might have been beyond Kevin Rudd. One naysayer is Peter Brent of Mumble, a man who has been known to get things right from time to time. Brent’s assessment, published in The Australian yesterday, is that the odds now slightly favour the Coalition, whereas Labor under Rudd would most likely have increased its majority. I think he has it the wrong way around.

Certainly there is a view abroad – Mark Bahnisch of Larvatus Prodeo being one proponent – that changing leaders, particularly when in government, is inherently destabilising and destructive. The New South Wales state government’s game of musical chairs is usually offered as a cautionary tale. However, it is a mistake to compare the federal government with one whose problems are underlying, terminal and, most crucially, age-related. Through Morris Iemma, Nathan Rees and Kristina Keneally, NSW Labor’s primary vote has been super-glued to 30 per cent in the polls, for the simple reason that the leadership hasn’t been the problem.

It was a different story entirely with Kevin Rudd, who led a first-term government with a strong economic record that ought to be well ahead. The main problem lay with a leader whose credibility in the eyes of voters had been irreparably damaged by the celebrated series of policy backdowns followed by the government advertising fiasco. As is now well known, such problems were mirrored within the party. Stunning as events of recent days have been, there has been no mystery about their underlying cause: when Rudd’s poll lead evaporated, so did his authority in the party. All that remained to be answered was whether the party still felt he could struggle through to an election win, allowing the matter to be dealt with less bruisingly after the event.

Key to the decision that he couldn’t was internal polling which reportedly showed Labor headed for a net loss of 18 seats. Purported details of such polling were provided by a party insider to Andrew Bolt, and they tell a believeable story. Included are Labor seats on less than 5 per cent and Coalition seats on less than 1.5 per cent – about 40 all told. The broad picture is of Labor facing swings of 4 per cent in New South Wales and Queensland and as much as 8 per cent in South Australia, but no change in Victoria or Tasmania. In Western Australia, Hasluck would be lost, but no swing can be determined as Brand and Perth weren’t included in the poll. Also said to be a lost cause for Labor was Darwin-based Solomon.

Twenty-one seats in all were identified as Labor losses against three gains, which coming off 88 seats notionally held by Labor would leave them five seats short of a majority. This would involve an overall swing of about 3.5 per cent and a Labor two-party vote of about 49 per cent, slightly below the trend of published polling. Taken together, the evidence pointed to a worrying but by no means irretrievable situation for the government. What proved fatal to Rudd was a lack of confidence, based on recent performance, in his capacity to turn the ship around.

With regard to the likely electoral consequences, Peter van Onselen in The Australian pretty much bangs the nail on the head as far as I’m concerned, as does Niki Savva at The Drum. This from Lenore Taylor the Sydney Morning Herald also caught my eye:

Tony Abbott put a brave face on Labor’s last-ditch leadership change but privately the Coalition was desperately disappointed that it would not face an election against Kevin Rudd.

And it was utterly dismayed the mining industry had – as one source put it – ”succumbed to [Gillard’s] guile” by agreeing to her offer of a negotiating truce in the mining super profits tax war and to take the industry advertisements attacking the government off the air.

The Coalition has gone out on a limb in support of the mining industry and the prospect of a deal between the miners and the government has left it edgy.

Some developments from the upheaval:

• In what would be red-letter news on any other day, Lindsay Tanner made the shock announcement he would quit politics at the next election, making Greens candidate Adam Bandt a short-priced favourite to take his seat of Melbourne. VexNews reports “talk” that Tanner hopes to be succeeded in the seat by academic, commentator and occasional broadcaster Waleed Aly, who would seem just the thing to defuse the threat of the Greens, and Socialist Left warlord Andrew Giles, who wouldn’t.

• Shortly before the spill, VexNews reported that if Rudd went, so might two Queensland marginal seat MPs: Chris Trevor in Flynn and Jon Sullivan in Longman. Trevor said yesterday that Gillard would “always have my full support”, but Emma Chalmers of the Courier-Mail reports from Labor sources that he was contemplating quitting. Chalmers also quotes Sullivan expressing disappointment at the result, but going no further than that.

• According to The Australian’s Jack the Insider, “Liberal Party polling tells (Abbott) that he is starting this contest against Gillard from a long way behind. Kevin Rudd may have had his nose in front but the polling tells Abbott that Gillard would win the next election by the length of the straight.”

And while I’m here, here’s a piece I wrote for Crikey last week on the electoral state-of-play in South Australia. It might be showing its age in some respects.

South Australia was Labor’s forgotten triumph of the 2007 election, replicating on a smaller and less spectacular scale the decisive tectonic shift in Queensland.

The statewide two-party swing to Labor of 6.8% was only slightly below Queensland’s 7.5%, which was borne out in the proportion of seat gains: three out of 11 in South Australia, nine out of 29 in Queensland.

Labor’s resurgence put an end to a slump which dated back to 1987, the last time they had won a majority of the South Australian two-party vote, and 1990, when they last won a majority of seats.

Before that the state had been a source of strength for Labor in the post-war era, notwithstanding that a dubious electoral boundaries regime kept them out of office for much of that time at state level.

This was partly because the state party branch was spared the worst of the 1954-55 split, but also because of the large blue-collar workforce required to service an economy based largely on manufacturing and industry.

The difficulties experienced by these sectors meant the state was hit hard by the economic upheavals of the 1980s, which together with the damage done to Labor by the 1991 State Bank collapse led to a fundamental electoral shift in the Liberals’ favour.

At federal level this was manifested in a series of grim federal election results that reduced Labor to two seats out of 12 in 1996, to which only one seat was added in later terms of the Howard Government.

With one seat having been abolished in 2004, Labor’s doubling of their representation at the 2007 election gave them a bare majority of six seats out of 11, and left the Liberals without a safe seat in Adelaide.

The two Liberal hold-outs in the city were Christopher Pyne’s seat of Sturt and Andrew Southcott’s seat of Boothby, which cover the traditional party strongholds of the east and inner south.

In a tale that will become increasingly familiar as this series proceeds, speculation about the coming election was long focused on the Liberals’ chances of retaining these existing seats, but such talk faded as the new year began and disappeared with Labor’s poll collapse over the past two months.

Labor’s main strength in South Australia lies in the coastal plain north of the city centre, which makes a safe Labor seat of Port Adelaide and marginals of four others which are leavened with more conservative areas beyond.

The electorate of Adelaide covers inner suburbs both north and south of the city, which are respectively strong and weak for Labor, and the growing inner-city apartment population in between, which has proved highly volatile in its electoral habits of late.

In a rare sighting of the “doctors’ wives” effect, Labor’s Kate Ellis bucked the trend of the 2004 election to win Adelaide from Liberal incumbent Trish Worth, and she emerged from the 2007 election with what seemed like a secure 8.5% margin.

However, the Liberals are talking of internal polling showing them “closing the gap”, after staggering swings were recorded in the electorate at the March state election (at which Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith lost the state seat of Adelaide with a swing of 14.4%).

To the west of Adelaide is coastal Hindmarsh, which combines Labor-voting inner city areas with prosperous and conservative Glenelg in the south. Labor’s Steve Georganas won by the narrowest of margins when popular Liberal member Chris Gallus retired in 2004, before picking up a relatively modest swing in 2007.

North-east of the city centre is Makin, home to newer suburbs in the hills along with the eastern part of Salisbury on the plain. Makin is the only seat in the state which has form as a bellwether, being held by Labor from its creation in 1984 until 1996, Liberal through the Howard years and Labor’s Tony Zappia since 2007.

Further north is Wakefield, which offers even starker contrasts: deep red Elizabeth in the south, rapidly growing Gawler just past the city’s northern limits (where change is favouring Labor, if the state election is anything to go by) and conservative rural and wine-growing areas beyond.

Wakefield was a safe Liberal country seat until it absorbed Elizabeth at the redistribution before the 2004 election. Liberal candidate David Fawcett unexpectedly retained it for the Liberals on that occasion, but his narrow margin was eliminated by Labor’s Nick Champion in 2007 (Fawcett now stands poised to enter the Senate).

The only seat in Adelaide which conforms neatly with the mortgage belt marginal seat stereotype is Kingston, covering the city’s outer southern coastal suburbs. Labor’s Amanda Rishworth recovered this seat for Labor in 2007 after it was lost in 2004, interest rates having had a lot to do with it on each occasion.

The diversity that characterises the other marginals is significant, as it leaves their members as susceptible to rebellions in party heartlands as to the normally more decisive ebb and flow of the mortgage-payer vote.

This is where the mining tax could cause problems for Labor, as many blue-collar workers perceive a connection between the mining boom and the industrial and manufacturing sectors which employ them.

While South Australia is rarely given a guernsey as a “mining state”, BHP Billiton’s massive Olympic Dam project single-handedly allows the industry to punch above its weight, as it is associated in the public mind with the state shaking off its “rust belt” reputation from the 1990s.

Uncomfortably for Labor, BHP Billiton says the tax will jeopardise a $20 billion expansion to the project which is currently under consideration, a process that will certainly not be completed before the election.
Premier Mike Rann captured attention last week when he claimed any decision to stall the project would cost Labor four or even five seats.

For all that, the Liberals have big hurdles to clear if South Australia is to produce any of the seats it needs to overhaul Labor’s majority.

The problem is a lack of low-hanging fruit — even the most marginal of Labor’s six seats, Kingston, sits on an imposing margin of 4.4%.

Furthermore, the March state election suggests Labor has a trump card in the form of a ruthlessly efficient marginal seat campaign machine, which helped Mike Rann hang on to office with just 37.5% of the primary and 48.4% of the two-party vote.

The only seats in the state which swung to Labor were the two most marginal, Light and Mawson (respectively in Wakefield and Kingston federally), and the critical eastern suburbs seats of Hartley and Newland likewise held firm against a torrid tide. Elsewhere, Labor suffered double-digit swings nearly everywhere they could afford to.

Federal Labor will be hoping to achieve similar successes in working-class areas with a campaign to focus minds on industrial relations, thereby shoring up valuable support in Makin and Wakefield in particular.
Beyond Adelaide, the state’s three non-metropolitan seats are of limited electoral interest, notwithstanding the vague threat the Democrats and now the Greens have posed in Mayo, where Jamie Briggs struggled over the line in the September 2008 by-election that followed Alexander Downer’s resignation.

That leaves Barker in the state’s east, which covers rural territory which has never been of interest to Labor, and the outback electorate of Grey, which has transformed over the past two decades from safe Labor to safe Liberal — testament to the decline of the “iron triangle” cities of Whyalla, Port August and Port Pirie, and reflecting the experience of Kalgoorlie west of the border.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics. View all posts by William Bowe