How the Australian Liberals and Nationals won an ‘unwinnable’ election - Polidicks

https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/226043/5ceb3bce-3c73-453c-b242-7cbbce022767/5AD50F43-65E0-415C-8DCD-8A502F52CB1E.jpeg Scott Morrison has earnt a permanent place as a Liberal Party legend — returning the Government in what was meant to be an unwinnable election for the Coalition. Mr Morrison smashed the doctrine that disunity will lead to electoral death. Despite three prime ministers in two terms of government, the Queensland swing to back the Coalition and swings in Tasmania and WA showed that ultimately jobs and fear of change are too dominant. The Prime Minister made the campaign all about economic management and himself — out-campaigning Labor by running a brutal and stunning campaign demolishing Labor's big-target policy agenda. Mr Morrison made the campaign a referendum on him and Bill Shorten, and downplayed the Liberal brand — cultivating a new Scott Morrison image and promising to be a steady pair of hands on the economy. He told a packed crowd of Liberal supporters in Sydney he had always believed in miracles. "And tonight we've been delivered another one," he said. The 'new' Morrison Labor took a big risk campaigning on big changes to tax loop holes including franking credits and negative gearing, allowing Mr Morrison to spend every day of the campaign casting doubt on the way Labor would remake the country. The marketing metamorphosis of Mr Morrison, from the tough-on-borders hard head to the daggy suburban dad next door, was an important and strategic pivot for a party with a diminished frontbench and deep ideological schisms in its ranks. His message was sharp, piercing and he never deviated from the one central claim — that Labor was a high-taxing risk to the economy and Mr Shorten would take money "from your pocket". By contrast, Labor drifted from message to message — it started on health, moved to wages and staggered into climate change. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/226043/9d181527-546c-4a0b-a8e2-a41e308356b1/361B2C82-5115-499B-965B-44002CA2BEAC.jpeg Crazy brave ploy backfired Labor took considerable policy risks in this campaign, making itself the big target with a suite of policies which had identifiable and quantifiable losers. It was crazy brave, breaking the orthodoxy that oppositions should slide into government without taking big policy risks. Compare it to the last change of government, to Labor in 2007 when Kevin Rudd campaigned on an agenda of being a younger John Howard and matching the Coalition's tax cuts. Labor took a gamble by taking this approach, but in the end the public made the judgement that the risk was too big. Australians have reinforced the 1993 precedent — some say curse — that has encouraged oppositions to play it safe and steer away from bold big ideas. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-19/federal-election-result-morrison-turn-labor-strategy-into-weapon/11116468 https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2019/results TL;DR there’s speculation that the Labor Party platform proposed too many changes, and as people have a natural tendency to fear change (and the uncertainty it can bring), many voters were frightened away from Labor and towards the Liberals and Nationals. And it certainly doesn’t help Labor’s case when you consider that Australia has actually been doing reasonably fine under the Coalition government.

how in the hell does one even sell 'tough on borders' on a fucking island nation.

By building a wall and making it Alcatraz 2.0. No one gets in, no one gets out.

Many asylum seekers and immigrants used to pay dodgy people smugglers to take them to Australia by boat. I won’t deny that there was an anti-immigration aspect to being ‘tough’ on Australia’s maritime borders, but many hundreds of people often drowned by trying to make that journey. Fortunately, it’s stopped over the last few years.

Well, once you consider that the Australian media is so highly centralised (more than any other 'free' first world nation) to the point that it's nearly comparable to the state media of a dictatorship, and that the media is a mouthpiece for the Coalition. It begins to make a whole lot of sense. I got one of the local papers delivered the other day, the entire front page was literally an ad for the LNP showing Dutton saying 'funding delivered for a car park' or something. The back page was another ad for the LNP attacking the Labor Party.

This is Murdoch. It hasn't been bi-partisan for a long time.

I think blaming the media is a bit of a cop-out and ignores weaknesses in the Labor campaign. News Corp has indeed demonstrated some pro-Coalition bias in the past, but they hardly have anything close to a monopoly on Australia’s media. Fairfax or whatever they are called today almost effectively offset News Corp, especially as Fairfax publish some of Australia’s more-respected newspapers. And then of course there’s ABC News, which is a giant and well-respected in Australian media, and does a good job in attempting to be impartial. When ABC News asked Penny Wong, Tanya Plibersek and Anthony Albanese last night about why Labor lost the election which they should have won, all three of them kept on pointing the finger at everyone else; the ‘scare campaign’ run by the Coalition (as if Labor were innocent of this, which they are not), Clive Palmer and Pauline Hanson, and ‘the media’. But it wasn’t until ABC News spoke to a former Labor MLC from NSW that I first heard a Labor member admit that perhaps Labor stuffed on their policy platform, especially around proposed tax changes. Labor really needs to learn from their shortcomings in this election, and do a much better job at the next election.

"His message was sharp, piercing and he never deviated from the one central claim — that Labor was a high-taxing risk to the economy and Mr Shorten would take money "from your pocket". By contrast, Labor drifted from message to message — it started on health, moved to wages and staggered into climate change. " addressing multiple issues is bad now

Labor was too ambitious with their proposed tax changes. It opened the door to the liberal party being able to run attack ads that understandably frightened people, especially older retirees who had set aside investments to offset their pensions and were worried about losing their franking credits and negative gearing from their property investments. The fact that the coalition lied about the extent to which that the tax changes would actually affect people didn't help, but the labor party left themselves open by trying to move too much policy too fast in a time when things weren't too bad, economically speaking (at least for people rich and old enough to have financial security). If they had waited a year or so from now, when the effects of the current economic slump actually starts to affect the average joe, they would've been able to point at the coalition's lack of solid policies on things like energy and healthcare as the cause of crashing house prices and high electricity bills, but as it stands things are going well enough now that people were more afraid of the risk of change than they were of maintaining the status quo.

No, the issue was perhaps that Labor tried to address too many different issues, and many of their policy proposals had identifiable - and quantifiable - winners and losers. Especially with their proposed tax reforms, where tax changes are never an easy sell. Any reasonable person could look at Labor’s platform and see that it would cause a whole lot of disruption. Disruption is not necessarily a bad thing, but as I have stated, too much change can create uncertainty, and people naturally hate uncertainty. So voters looked to the Coalition, who promised to carry on ‘business as usual’, and it must have been enticing. There were fewer variables with a re-elected Coalition government. But the things that would change under the Coalition were popular policies - tax cuts throughout the board (whereas Labor sought to end or reduce a number of tax concessions), a return to federal budget surplus (granted, Labor promised a surplus as well), and increased spending on infrastructure. Maybe Bill Shorten would have become the Prime Minister in waiting, if Labor campaigned on a somewhat narrower platform. Perhaps if they kept all their policies on health, education and climate change, but dumped their controversial tax reforms, then the headlines today might be different.

Yea, the point people need to understand I think is that in order to pass these ambitious and controversial policies, it's sometimes necessary to firstly get your foot in the door with a more moderate proposal and then gradually push for more and more ambitious policies. Biden winning the primary isn't a death-knell for progressive politics in the states, what would likely happen if he won the presidency is that the progressive wing of the democrats would put pressure on the centrist democrats to implement more progressive legislation, and that gradual change might actually be more effective in the long run because the population has time to get used to it and see it's effectiveness firsthand instead of getting freaked out by what they see as radical changes.

On a side note, I miss watching the landslide elections on TV seeing the photos of incumbent MP's photos getting put into a shredder one by one. That used to be so satisfying.