Politics
The Coalition's woes
The Coalition showed political ineptitude in the recent election and is tearing itself apart. Some people reasonably believe that what’s bad for the Coalition is good for Australia, but we need a party representing the values the Liberal Party once expressed.
Part 1 – How the Coalition got it so wrong
Writing in Inside Story – How to misread a referendum – Peter Brent explains how the Coalition allowed itself to be misled into a false confidence, because it interpreted defeat of the Voice as a strong indicator of support for the Coalition.
This much has already been picked up by political commentators, but Brent adds to our understanding by looking at the relationship between referendum defeats and subsequent election results (finding there isn’t one) and more generally about the part played by simplistic generalizations about voters’ preferences. Those assumptions take the form of bundling a set of issues deemed “left” or “progressive”, and assuming they are all strongly correlated. If I reject the Voice, I reject Welcome to Country, I believe in cultural assimilation, I’m in favour of incarcerating kids who break the law …
This assumed bundling shows a patronizing attitude towards voters, as if they are incapable of distinguishing between issues. Assuming correlations between people’s beliefs is about as logically fallacious as you can get: it’s known as the fundamental attribution error.
But then the Coalition never were ones for evidence-based policy. There is a delicious irony in seeing them allow their contempt of evidence-based policy screw up their own campaign.
Part 2 – and how the Coalition is still getting it wrong
So far, apart from racist dog-whistling, there has generally been strong public acceptance in the post-White Australia era of eliminating “race” (whatever that means), from our criteria for immigration. Political concerns around immigration have been mainly about its level, rather than its composition.
In recent times businesses and centre-right political movements that have generally been in favour of high immigration have been tending to hold back their support for a “big Australia’. Writing about changing political attitudes – Has high immigration fallen out of favour in Australia? – Gareth Hutchens notes that the influential right-wing think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, once a strong supporter of high immigration, has changed its attitude.
That’s not all Hutchens notices, however. Not only is the IPA criticizing the Albanese government for our high level of net migration, but in an opinion piece for the Murdoch media it has noted that “the vast bulk of these new arrivals are from developing nations, where English isn't a first language nor Christianity a majority religion”, and that “a cynic could think the political class is seeking to destroy Australian culture”. Logically both statements are correct, but their racist message is clear. It is at a much more audible pitch than dog whistling.
The IPA has always been firmly on the right of the political spectrum, but this language takes it into territory occupied by One Nation, cranks, conspiracy theorists, and neo-Nazis.
Hutchens concludes his article asking “have the political winds shifted?”
Fortunately, although we can never be free from racism, there is no evidence that Australians are rejecting multiculturalism or our colour-blind immigration policy. Hutchens may have better concluded his article with the question “is someone trying to shift the political winds?”, but that may not have made it past ABC’s editors.
It’s a fair guess that the provocative language that Hutchens quotes is from those who are trying to stop the Liberal Party from drifting to the “woke” centre. It aligns with the policies of those who front up on The other side podcast, who criticise Dutton for having not put himself before the electorate pushing his Trumpist lines more assertively. It comes at the same time as the Western Australian and South Australian state branches of the Liberal Party, the two most poorly performing state branches, have called on the party to abandon net zero.
Trouble for Ley
Liberal MP Dan Tehan has thrown his hat into the stirrer’s ring with an outrageous statement on Radio National, asserting that because Hamas is a terrorist organization (pretty well undisputed), anything Israel does is morally and legally justified. Such a statement is surely not directed at the Australia electorate, who every night see on their screens children dying of hunger, and the consequences of the IDF’s indiscriminate bombing. It’s almost certainly a staking out of his ideological position in the Coalition caucus, establishing his hard right credentials.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald – Hanson tests Coalition resolve on net zero – Paul Sakkal notes that Pauline Hanson has joined the fray, trying to muster support from Coalition Senators for her motion calling for the government to drop net zero. In defiance of Ley two Coalition Senators – Alex Antic and Matt Canavan – supported Hanson’s motion.
This does not bode well for the Liberal Party, or for Australia. It is hard enough for Sussan Ley to deal with the push by Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack to abandon net zero, but at least she can distance herself and the her party’s few remaining moderates, from the National Party. These other provocations, however, come from her own party and from the IPA.
It is tempting to see these disturbances as the last gasps from old men and women on the wrong side of history, but that is not the case. Tim Wilson and James Patterson, two hard-right Liberal parliamentarians with strong influence in the IPA, are articulate and politically savvy, and the IPA has significant media and financial resources at its call.
There are many ways this could play out. One possibility is that when the opportunity comes – a poor result in a by-election or in a state election, or an even worse opinion poll – Ley becomes the scapegoat and they take over the party, fashioning it into an uncompromising replica of Trump’s Republican Party. Or if Ley and her colleagues hold out, the dissenters could join with One Nation, Palmer, and Family First to form a strong party on the far right, waiting for the next election to destroy the remnants of the federal Liberal Party and present themselves as the country’s saviours.
Either way it would bring to Australia the hard, polarized and uncompromising politics that is wreaking damage in America and is weakening Europe’s unity and commitment to democracy.
It is probably time for Ley, and others who claim to represent the centre right, to abandon the Liberal Party and to form a new political gathering.
How they sheltered Joe Biden
We shouldn’t coddle presidents and prime ministers.
On the ABC’s Saturday Extra, in a session about the way Biden’s decline was hidden, Nick Bryant interviews Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, co-authors of Original sin: President Biden’s decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.
It’s a story about how a team, loyal to Biden, did everything they could not only to hide Biden’s decline from the public, but also to reassure him of his capacity to carry on with his job and to run again.
We all know the consequences.
We may believe this to be a particularly American story. The American presidency is an institution established in 1788 (the date the Constitution was ratified), and the closest governance model they had was the court of England’s George III. The whole symbolic environment of the White House is regal. As Richard Neustadt says in his successive publications of Presidential Power, once appointed president the individual is taken into another world, detached from the political world he or she had previously inhabited. This world is defined by an extraordinary level of security, and a high level of support from politically loyal staff.
As we have seen with Trump’s ascendancy, America’s governance systems have failed. It calls itself a republic, but it is more like an elected monarchy.
We may say in Australia that we’re not like that. We’re still the only country in the world where we managed to lose a prime minister surfing because there was no security detail keeping an eye on him. Stories abound of prime ministers Curtin and Gorton slipping away from their security minders.
The PM's Lodge is a little less pretentious than the White House
But over the following years we have built stronger security fences around our prime ministers and ministers, and the number of ministerial staff has grown. Although the Lodge is a far less imperial structure than the White House, and the prime minister has to turn up to Parliament in a way that the President doesn’t have to turn up to Congress, there is still something approaching the same isolation as in America.
Neustadt makes the strong point that some presidents become entranced by this cocooned world, while others recognize it for what it is, and do what they can to maintain contact with the world outside. Some appoint only sycophantic loyalists to their staff, while others select staff who aren’t afraid to let the president know when programs are failing.
We have some of the same tendency of prime ministers and ministers to allow themselves to be surrounded with praetorian guards of loyalists. It’s not that they necessarily demand to be so surrounded – they’re usually more politically sensible. Rather it’s on the supply side, because there is always a stream of wannabe vassals who seek to get close to the centres of power.
It takes a strong prime minister or minister to see the world outside the security fence. An independent public service, not afraid of giving “frank and fearless” advice, and not afraid of warning ministers when they plan to break the law, helps.