Games Politicians Play: Liberal, Labor, Insiders, Outsiders

After Malcolm Turnbull became prime minister last year the veteran commentator Laurie Oakes wrote of his predecessor: “The man is unpopular. Australians were glad to see him removed … he still does not understand why he lost the prime ministership in the first place … How deluded is that?” In April, as the issue of border protection sailed into the phony election campaign like an unwelcome people-smugglers’ boat, Oakes wrote: “The only saving grace for the opposition is that Turnbull is no Abbott.”

It was a rare admission by a member of the press gallery that Tony Abbott is the superior campaigner on core issues that win votes. As Oakes rightly observed, the resurgence of the asylum-seeker issue thanks to Papua New Guinea’s decision to close the Manus Island detention centre “was a gift” for the Prime Minister. It is “a battleground that overwhelmingly favours the Coalition” and is “deadly territory for Labor”.

The trouble is that Turnbull has been unable to make any political capital out of an issue that should make Labor unelectable. No one doubts that Turnbull will stick to the government’s border protection policy. The trouble for the government is that voters also think Labor will stick to the government’s border protection policy. Turnbull needs to convince voters they cannot trust Labor to protect the nation’s borders. So far, he has failed to do so.

A week later, Oakes wrote that Coalition MPs must be worried about how Turnbull would fare in a tough campaign, “stumbling, stuffing up, kicking own goals”. Even Niki Savva, the Prime Minister’s most devoted defender, was forced to admit that he had “clearly made his own eminently avoidable mistakes” which “he couldn’t afford to repeat”.

Even after two Labor candidates likened offshore detention—which the vast majority of Australians, and the Labor Party, support—to Nazism, Turnbull was unable to use Labor’s division to put a dent in the extremely unpopular Opposition leader.

So despite Labor showing a critical weakness in a key issue for Western Sydney, it was Shorten who was declared the winner of the first people’s forum debate—held in the Windsor RSL in north-western Sydney on May 13. Similarly, Turnbull has been unable to use Labor’s weakness to turn around Newspoll, where Labor has led since April 5.

There is more to this than just political ineptitude. The Prime Minister, who lauded himself on the day he took office as a “great communicator”, has drowned in a sea of words, or as his detractors put it, waffle. An absence of brevity and incisiveness has fed a perception of prime ministerial indecisiveness that has eroded Turnbull’s popular standing and could become a critical weakness in the campaign. Yet his predecessor, who coined cut-through three-word slogans, was derided as a fool.

If it seems as if Turnbull and Abbott speak different languages it is because they do. They address different audiences on opposite sides of the cultural fault line that shapes today’s political landscape. We live in a nation divided between insiders and outsiders. What is significant is that the divide runs not between political parties but within them. It divides Labor as much as the Liberals and can be found in the US, the UK, and most other Western democracies.

The touchstone issues are immigration, globalisation, free trade, the free movement of labour and capital, with their impact on culture, religion, the family, jobs and wealth creation. On one side the issues are gay marriage, abortion rights (in the US), a republic (in Australia), minority rights. On the other, the concern is protecting jobs, borders, a way of life, and the threat is foreign workers, radical Islam and multiculturalism. And for both sides, in different ways, taxes, who pays them, on what, and how they are spent.

The divide can be characterised in many ways: establishment versus hoi polloi, educated elites versus the great unwashed, insiders versus outsiders, winners versus losers. Most people fall instinctively on one side or the other. And since these two communities speak different tongues, few people understand the way the other side sees the world.

Abbott spoke the language of outsiders on his favoured medium of commercial talkback radio. His successor speaks the language of insiders on the ABC. Neither was effectively able to understand the way the other side saw the world, the way they framed the problems facing them, let alone come up with acceptable solutions.

So Abbott failed to see that he couldn’t simply scorn middle-class concerns that were so articulately, even if illogically, expressed by the progressive media. He needed to take them seriously and address them; instead he simply wanted to dismiss them, or worse, mock them.

Abbott also terribly damaged relations with his Liberal base, when he raised taxes with the imposition of a deficit levy, just as he did when he abandoned, without notice, his commitment to the repeal of legislation that criminalised offending people on the basis of race.

Likewise, Turnbull has found it impossible to speak convincingly about the threat that unintegrated immigrant communities pose to those that have to live with them, particularly the threat of radical Islam, even when his re-election depends upon it.

Similarly, he has thrown a hand grenade at the Liberal base, which feels utterly betrayed by his cavalier imposition, without discussion, of taxes on income generated in retirement and his increased taxes on retirement savings. And his positions on gay marriage, a republic and climate change are as acceptable to one side of this divide as they are anathema to the other.

On either side, we are not speaking about mere semantics but about policies which impact on core values and which arise because of an inability to understand the importance of what is at stake. People on both sides feel scorned, angry, profoundly misunderstood.

Within Labor, the same cultural division provokes different political arguments. The issue of boat people has divided Labor politicians even more painfully than it has divided the Liberal Party, and climate-change policy has been equally problematic in the trade-off between energy costs and jobs on one side and costly, even if only symbolic action on the other.

Bill Shorten understands the political imperative of offshore detention but his MPs feel as if they are being asked to guard Auschwitz. On climate change he has committed to expensive renewable energy targets that will further drive up electricity bills, putting jobs at risk and creating pressures on the cost of living. These policies may help Labor fend off Greens in inner-city electorates but will lose Labor votes in the working-class areas where the costs will be borne.

The same broad divide provides the dynamic for contemporary political debate around the world. In the US, as in Australia, outsiders are more passionate and numerous than insiders pretend. There was nothing surprising about Donald Trump picking up Bernie Sanders voters and drawing even with Hillary Clinton in a poll in mid-May. To insiders this was shocking and unexpected. To outsiders, Sanders’s poor white disaffected, often unemployed, male voters look like kindred spirits, which they are.

In America, according to Reuters, 41 per cent of voters support Clinton, 40 per cent back Trump, and 19 per cent are undecided. In Australia, although Labor is ahead on the two-party-preferred vote, it still hasn’t got a big enough swing to break through in key battlegrounds in Queensland, where it is still well behind the Coalition, and in Western Sydney, although it is making progress in Victoria, where Labor looks as if it could pick up marginal seats such as retiring Small Business Minister Bruce Billson’s seat of Dunkley.

Turnbull’s champions didn’t even dream that they might one day need Tony Abbott’s disaffected supporters to help them out of a fix. Yet in the battleground electorates outsiders predominate. In Western Sydney, the threat of radical Islam and the problems created by uncontrolled immigration are potent issues. In regional Queensland, many workers depended on mining for jobs and the downturn has created rising unemployment. These are electorates where Abbott’s plain speaking on the Islamist threat and climate change scepticism has much more traction than Turnbull’s excitement about innovation and funding for renewable energy.

The bounce in the polls after Turnbull’s ascent gave him a crushing advantage. But it has melted away and Abbott’s supporters, disdainfully referred to as the Del-Cons, or delusional conservatives, matter more than Turnbull’s supporters—the Mal-contents, if you will—may care to admit.

James Allan wrote in these pages in December that if Turnbull had thrown the Del-Cons a concession—say getting rid of 18C—that would have gone a long way to soothing their anger—not least because they already felt betrayed by Abbott. But Turnbull felt no need to make any such overture. As a result, Allan has decided not just to spoil his ballot but to vote Labor. Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Blair, who is “Del-ighted to be a Del-con”, wrote that he would vote Labor just to stop hearing Turnbull talk about innovation.

Former National Party senator John Stone wrote in the Australian Spectator that such treachery and betrayal must not go unpunished. Unlike Allan, Stone wants a Coalition government with the tiniest of majorities, which is forced to negotiate on everything with the Right of the party. He has called for Del-Cons to punish MPs who voted against Abbott by not voting for them in the lower or upper house.

None of this mattered when the winter of the Mal-Contents was made glorious summer (with a sum of pork). As Liberal pollster Mark Textor put it, “The sum of a more centrist approach outweighs any alleged marginal loss of so-called base voters.” The deterioration of the polls has changed that equation.

These are dangerous days for the Liberals, at war not just with Labor but among themselves. Since its foundation, the Party has always had to be a broad church. The genius of Menzies was to unite a disparate group of people and organisations.

The last time the party was so destabilised in government was after the untimely death by drowning of Prime Minister Holt, which precipitated a leadership crisis because the Country Party would not support the deputy, William McMahon, becoming prime minister. McMahon, dubbed “Tiberius with a telephone”, destabilised Prime Minister John Gorton, who was eventually brought down by Malcolm Fraser, allowing McMahon to become Prime Minister, only to lose the election a year and a half later. Apparently, even Menzies voted for the DLP rather than for McMahon.

In politics, destabilisation is usually driven by a mix of ambition and ideological differences. And so it was in the battle between Abbott and Turnbull. But the difficulties Turnbull faces are about a divide that stretches right across the Western world. Abbott was the outsiders’ prime minister; Turnbull is an insider. The Mal-contents have no desire to cuddle a conservative. The Del-cons feel despised and betrayed.

This is not just war of words. There is substance to the division and so far no Menzian figure has emerged with the wisdom, stature and authority to bring these warring tribes together. A good place to start would be recognising that Del-Cons are not delusional but disillusioned conservatives, Dis-contents, if you will. And for both sides to recognise that a house divided against itself cannot stand. It should be unthinkable that Labor could regain the Treasury benches after only one term, when under Rudd and Gillard it ran up unprecedented debt and failed woefully to secure the nation’s borders. Yet that is not impossible, thanks largely to the divisions in the government.

As the nation drags itself towards the federal election, nobody, including the Prime Minister, seems excited about being an Australian. (At best they are relieved not to be American.)

Yet even in a contest where no one is popular, someone will form government. That is not the same as winning. To do that a politician or party needs to bridge the gulf that divides voters and lead the country away from the destructive politics of envy, putting Australia back on the road to prosperity.