In this article, John Roskam contextualises and disseminates the IPA’s research into Australia’s Declining Standard of Living.
The Coalition has been in power federally for about nine of the last dozen years. If Australia is not on track, then perhaps some of the responsibility for that rests with itself.
The meek may well inherit the earth, but if the polls are right, being meek doesn’t win elections.
So far, the Coalition’s election campaign has been meek, mild, and almost apologetic in tone. While Anthony Albanese practises the mantra of “never apologise, never explain”, Peter Dutton does the honourable thing and admits when he’s made a mistake. Only one of those two strategies appears to be working.
With voting having already started and just over a week to go to polling day, there’s not much time to change things.
Many of the Coalition’s challenges have been months, if not years, in the making. A reluctance to have policy debates has produced a reluctance to have any policies at all.
Dutton has said John Howard is one of his political role models. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Howard spent so much time fighting his own side that when the time came, he knew how to fight the Labor Party. Howard’s four election victories were not an accident. His most effective ministers emerged from the Liberal Party’s conflicts between the “wets” and the “dries”.
Dutton’s shadow ministry isn’t battle-hardened – and it shows. Few of his shadow ministers have ever had to carry an argument either inside the party or outside in the media. An exception is the Coalition’s energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien. Only a small handful of shadow ministers engaged in the public debate on the Indigenous Voice to parliament. Most of the shadow ministry was happy to sit on the sidelines and let others do the work.
Getting people to vote for a political party is not entirely different from advertising soap. In marketing parlance, the task is to “create the problem, then sell the solution”. The Coalition has spent so much time on the first part that it’s forgotten about the second.
The fundamental issue with its campaign strategy is the disconnect between what the Coalition claims is the scale of the problem facing the country and the solutions that it’s offering. A cost-of-living crisis, falling living standards, and a trillion dollars of gross debt would normally prompt, from an opposition, not a tinkering at the edges but an ambitious reform agenda.
Dutton was right when he said that the Coalition was the underdog in the campaign. Underdogs rarely beat the favourite by playing safe.
The average voter could reasonably conclude that the country’s problems can’t be as big as the Coalition says they are if it is promising not to change things too much. Dutton has said if his side wins the election, there will be no overhaul of industrial relations, no changes to the NDIS, and no shifting from the Coalition’s commitment to net zero.
The Coalition’s campaign slogan, “Get Australia back on track”, is problematic. Very few voters will think the era of Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison is anything to hark back to. Some voters will not unreasonably believe Australia hasn’t been “on track” since the heyday of the 1980s and 1990s. They look back fondly to a time when the leaders of the nation’s two major political parties were Howard and Kim Beazley.
The concept of getting Australia “back on track” isn’t entirely meaningless. However, the slogan implies that the Coalition will do much more than it promises.
Getting the country “back on track” is about more than the federal government budget. A country is not just its economy. Higher grocery bills aren’t the only things voters experience. They also see fracturing social cohesion, a failing sense of nationhood, a school education system in decline, universities run by ideologues, daily assaults on freedom of speech and religion, and the dissemination of radical theories of gender.
Last year, the Victorian government released guidelines for public libraries encouraging staff to ask children about their pronouns. It’s a subject the Coalition is terrified of touching. Last week, when Dutton was asked to define what a woman was, he declined.
The Coalition has been in power federally for approximately nine of the last dozen years. If, as it claims, Australia is not on track, then perhaps some of the responsibility for that rests with the Coalition itself.
