A bloke many voters have trouble naming, who is pledging not to build a major infrastructure project, who is up against a first-term government with good fiscal credentials, has won the Victorian election. What’s more, he leads a Labor Party that manages to turn its union links into a positive in a campaign that runs rings around the Coalition, and wins despite less than one-third of voters thinking they can trust his word. All sorts of reasons have been given for the Napthine government being turfed out after just one term: inertia under Ted Baillieu; the chaos of the Geoff Shaw period; the impact of the federal budget; local issues like a pay dispute involving ambulance staff. Others will say simply that the only rule is “keep yourself tidy and have a good message” and that the Baillieu-Napthine governments have done neither. But the bottom line is that the state election turned the psychology of federal politics on its head, as well as force all politicians to reflect on the “givens” of the political discourse. Until the last couple of weeks, the ALP had settled in for six years in the wilderness of federal opposition. Tony Abbott and his colleagues came to office presuming they would have a minimum of two terms to implement any tough reforms before enjoying a more loving relationship with the electorate, simply because no federal government in living memory has got less than two terms in office. Victorians’ decision to turf out the Coalition after just one term has changed all that. Bill Shorten is now a man in a hurry. Tony Abbott is a man who may run out of time. Not that you get any sense that the Prime Minister is seeing it that way yet. The mantra of maintaining one dogged direction – conceding nothing, broking no change – is still the Abbott modus operandi, despite the fact everyone knows the government has to completely recast its budget policy, and that it will at some point soon have to recast its ministry. A BUDGET IN TATTERS Around half the policies in the May budget will never see the light of day and will have to be recast or replaced. Economic conditions mean that the Coalition’s boasts that it could fix the budget faster than Labor are in tatters. The budget bottom line deteriorates by the day. The Victorian result suggests you don’t need any great vision, or leader’s charisma, to win an election. You just need a jaded electorate where browned-off voters can’t think of a persuasive enough reason to give an uninspiring government another chance. The Victorian result suggests that promoting your disciplined fiscal policy isn’t necessarily a winner; that big roads projects don’t seal the deal; and neither does union bashing. People want to have services – and a government – that works. Yet Abbott government ministers were so busy insisting the Victorian election result had nothing to do with its own unpopularity, that all these signals appeared to have been missed. There was a grumbling concession that Victorian Labor had performed better on the campaign trail than a very well-financed Coalition machine. (The Coalition spent $600,000 in the Labor-held outer Melbourne seat of Yan Yean alone.) But the thought that the state election result may be a much bigger portent that something very different is happening in the electorate – and that the current political strategy of the federal Coalition as well as its policy settings may have to be rethought – does not appear to have struck the Prime Minister, even if his colleagues are increasingly alarmed. We go into the last week of Parliament with no cunning plan in sight for delivering the clean finish to the year the Prime Minister keeps promising his troops. afr/p/national/politics/victorian_election_should_serve_EUm60Yc8Rk1us920iUMs5K
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 02:48:01 +0000
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