William Prescott is a researcher at Bright Blue.
After less than three years in office, Australia’s Labor Government is floundering amidst a lack of direction, cost-of-living pressures and falling popularity. Despite this, Australia’s opposition – the Liberal/National Coalition – has not yet done enough to reclaim power. If the Tories wish to turn around their fortunes this parliamentary term, they should look to the Australian Coalition’s experience as a cautionary tale.
Just like British Labour at July’s general election, voters hardly returned the Australian Labor Party (ALP) to office with any great enthusiasm at the May 2022 federal election. The ALP’s share of the primary vote, 32.6 per cent, was the smallest for a winning party in almost a century.
Instead, the election marked a firm rebuke for the former Coalition Government and its deeply unpopular leader, Scott Morrison. Reflecting this, six formerly safe inner-city Coalition seats, including those once held by former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, were lost not to Labor but to a grouping of independents collectively known as the ‘teals’. A further two were lost to the Greens.
Although it experienced a brief political honeymoon, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Government, much like his UK counterpart, soon ran into problems.
First, Albanese was seriously damaged by October’s failed Voice referendum which would have created a constitutionally-entrenched indigenous advisory body to the Australian Parliament. Not only was the 60/40 referendum defeat politically humiliating, but the “enormous amount” of Government time spent on the campaign irritated voters “increasingly preoccupied with their mortgages and other bills.” As one Australian commentator put it, the Voice debacle “knocked the stuffing out” of the Labor Government.
At the same time, Albanese struggled to turn around the country’s economic fortunes. At just 1 per cent in the 12 months to June, Australia’s GDP growth rate represents the “lowest annual growth outside of a recession since the mid-1980s”. Inflation is only now returning to the Reserve Bank’s 2-3 per cent annual target range, meaning that Australian borrowers should not expect dramatic interest rate cuts in the near term. The Government also made little progress in tackling the nation’s housing crisis — its signature housing bill remains deadlocked in the Senate and is unlikely to come close to realising the Government’s ambition to build 1.2 million new homes over five years — an ambition eerily similar to that of the UK Labour Party.
Compounding the Government’s difficulties, Albanese’s personal judgment, like Sir Keir Starmer’s, has increasingly been called into question. Purchasing a $A4.3 million (£2.2 million) beach house during a housing crisis is not a good look, and neither is allegedly requesting free Qantas flight upgrades on multiple occasions.
Naturally, these failures have created opportunities for the Coalition and its leader, Peter Dutton. Staring down internal opposition from moderates, Dutton was politically vindicated when his vehement opposition helped to kill the Voice. Beyond the Voice, Dutton has mercilessly attacked Labor for failures on migration issues, including a ministerial directive that inadvertently allowed a convicted child sex offender to avoid deportation.
Despite all this, it is still unlikely that Dutton will reclaim the Prime Ministership for the Coalition at next year’s federal election. Although one major pollster now has the Coalition narrowly (51/49 per cent) leading Labor on the two-party-preferred vote — the most important gauge of voter intentions under Australia’s preferential voting system — others still have Labor ahead.
There are several reasons for this.
First, while Dutton is an effective negative campaigner, he is far less successful at putting forward constructive policies of his own. The Coalition’s most significant policy announcement to date is a pledge to build seven nuclear power plants. This was meant to demonstrate his willingness to tackle climate while addressing real voter worries about the financial costs of shifting to renewable energy. However, as such nuclear reactors would take decades to bring online — Australia currently has no established nuclear power industry — this would likely necessitate maintaining Australia’s coal-fired power stations for over a decade longer than currently planned wing. It is also going to be very expensive.
Consequently, the policy has not helped Dutton at all with voters.
According to one poll taken shortly after the plan’s announcement, voters preferred Labor’s renewables policy to Coalition’s nuclear policy by 43 per cent to 33 per cent. Indeed, the announcement may even have helped to improve Labor’s polling position. Given the ongoing cost-of-living pressures and broader political climate, this is impressive.
More concerningly, and connected to the first problem, Dutton’s path to regaining a parliamentary majority remains effectively blocked by the teal independents, whose voters he continues to alienate. Much like the Liberal Democrats’ appeal to voters in dozens of relatively prosperous former British Conservative heartlands at July’s election, teal voters tend to be economically conservative but socially liberal. Thus, as I argued just after the referendum, while Dutton’s decision to oppose the Voice referendum wounded the Labor Party, it also put him at odds with teal voters — all teal-held seats defied the national trend to vote ‘yes’.
Support for tougher action on environmental issues was another key factor in the teals’ success at the 2022 Australian Federal election. Pledging to abandon Australia’s emission reduction targets and an ill-conceived nuclear strategy will only further complicate Dutton’s teal problem.
If the Tories wish to regain power at the next UK general election, they must not repeat the Australian Coalition’s mistakes.
While British Conservatives may draw comfort from the new Labour Government’s problems, the Australian experience shows that regaining power requires more than just taking hardline stances and capitalising on your opponent’s self-inflicted wounds. Unless they can win back support from moderates as well as from the right, the Tories, like the Australian Liberals, should expect to remain stuck in the wilderness.
