Monday Forum - Australia's voted!

I'm still absorbing the election results. What do you think it all means?

As always, feel free to go in any direction (or topic) you want!

Update 21 May 2019

Since discussion is very quiet here, I thought that I would share with you a few short observations on the election. I was going to hold this off pending discussion, but since things are so quiet I will proceed.

When I wrote in February just before the election was called I suggested that there was likely to be a very substantial Labor victory. While things were tightening at the end, I still thought that a Labor victory.was pretty certain. I was not alone in that view. As an analyst, I did place some weight on the polls because they are one reasonably objective measurement, although I have always been aware of the importance of regional variation. In this case, I would have been better off relying on my more subjective feelings based on qualitative material.

Although it's not been discussed, I think that the polls did affect the results. I know that they had some impact on my vote. Expecting a Labor win but concerned that the Coalition parties might be decimated, I did not see this as healthy, I actually voted Liberal in the House of Representatives for the first and probably only time in my life. There, that's a confession. I'm probably not alone.

Over the election, I listened or read the media commentary and reporting. I also followed the social media feeds, if in a somewhat eclectic fashion. I say eclectic because you have my Facebook friends, the various Facebook groups or pages I like  plus the 208 or so people or news outlets I follow on Twitter. And then you have all the retweets and FB repeats. In this you do have a bias towards particular areas and causes including, not surprisingly, a strong New England cohort. But it is much broader than that.

I suppose that the first thing I would say here is that this was a nasty campaign across a number of dimensions. I am not talking so much about negative campaigning by major parties, but the personal attacks that appeared on line. It also had a real bubble feel in that people were clearly talking like to like, assuming that their views were self-evidently right in moral terms. In so doing, they became more convinced, as well as distracted from what might be happening outside their bubble.

I will use the New England campaign to illustrate. Among the candidates I especially followed Adam Blakester (Independent) and Yvonne Langenberg (Labor). I did see some material from Barnaby Joyce (National Party) but wasn't especially following him because I was interested in his competitors and the impact they might have.

The material from Adam or Yvonne or  Rob Oakeshott (Independent, Cowper),  Fiona Leviny (Independent Page) or Nanette Radeck (Katter's Australian Party) was generally issue and campaign focused. And, yes, I did have a particular focus on independents and minor parties. The nastiness I saw came especially from supporters surrounding the campaigns.

 It was perhaps most virulent in New England. Apart from being wearing, I thought that it was distracting.  At one point former member Tony Windsor tweeted; "Gina has opened the cheque book in New England ...The adulterer and Clive Palmer dominating TV ads ...the Independent @adamblakester with a much lower budget but the best ads ...honest , ethical  and integrity his theme." I tweeted in reply: "Tony, this is over the top." Tony replied: "The standard you walk past is the standard you accept Jim . Family values , sanctity of marriage etc , you recall all that nonsense Jim or have you forgotten . If that’s what floats your boat then you have a chance to vote for it".

I was annoyed with myself because I know the back story. including the bitterness between Mr Joyce and Mr Windsor. A little earlier, they had traded tweets threatening legal action against each other. I wanted Mr Windsor to cool it because the attacks on Mr Joyce from he and others were draining the oxygen out of Mr Blakester's campaign. I should have phrased it better, instead adding my own kerosene to the fire.in the end, Mr Joyce had a very clear victory, in part because of the reaction of people to the negative campaigning.   

 It's not easy mounting an independent or small party campaign because of the time it takes to build supporting infrastructure. This election was made more complicated because of the multiplicity of parties on the centre right and right.

I followed  school teacher Nanette Radeck's campaign in Herbert over several months  I was interested in her because she had been drawn into politics because she supported self-government for North Queensland. It was clear that she had charisma and was running a solid campaign, if below the radar because of the obsession with One Nation and Clive Palmer. She got no external media coverage until late in the campaign when she was suddenly picked up in the polling.

Nanette had no chance of winning Herbert because of the multiplicity of parties splitting the vote. The six right, centre right minor party candidates in Herbert scored some 28.5 per cent of the vote, but preferences from One Nation and the United Australia Party delivered the seat to the Liberal National Party. On the votes, Nanette could not have won, but the number of candidates made it much harder for her.

One thing about the vote is the way it revealed a gradient from the inner city areas through outer city and regional. The existence of the gradient cam as no surprise, although it was a little larger than I expected. This was a particular problem for Labor. It was caught along several dimensions. It had to balance the need to defend electorates from the Greens. It was caught between the views .of its progressive wing and its traditional working class base. It was also suffering from the need to sell a complex set of policies in a centralised way provided limited room for localisation or local focus.

I think Yvonne's campaign in New England suffered from. One example was the move of the APVMA (Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicine Authority) headquarters to Armidale, something which had become a major external issue, playing into the narrative against Mr Joyce. She hoped that it would be retained, but could not provide any guarantee or offer an alternative development option. I suspect that the need for a university campus might be a second example.

One side effect of all this has been the sudden campaign by senior Labor frontbencher .Joel Fitgibbon for Labor to increase its focus on the regions and on its core working class base.

Mr Fitgibbon had a nasty shock this election when his ultra safe Labor coal mining and agricultural seat of Hunter suddenly swung against him. He will hold the seat, but he saw his vote decline by 14.1 per cent, with the One Nation candidate scoring 21.8 per cent.

This has become a longer note than I intended, but I want to finish with a brief note on the National Party results. Prior to the election there was a fair bit of commentary about the tensions between the Nationals and Liberal Party over issues such as coal mining. There were also problems with water and the Murray Darling Basin and apparent leadership tensions within the Party The return of the independents and the rise of the minor parties were much discussed as threats. There was almost an expectation that the Nationals might be reduced to a rump.          .

.In the end, the Nationals held all their seats. I think that there a number of reasons for this, including failures in the independent campaigns, something I might come back to later. For the moment, I just wonder if the greater freedom of National party members to campaign on local issues might not be one of the reasons for the Party's apparent success.