Peter Dutton’s speech in the marginal seat of Chisholm a few days ago was supposed to sketch the terms by which the opposition leader would fight this year’s federal election.
Reading the full transcript feels like listening to a compilation CD of greatest hits from the early 2000s – all-too-familiar tunes some would prefer to forget.
We need less tax and government waste, he says. Renewables are making energy bills higher. Migrants are driving up the cost of housing. First Nations communities need more policing, cashless debit cards and inquiries into sexual abuse.
That being said, there are a few bangers in there. Restoring the number of Medicare-subsidised psychological sessions from 10 to 20 on a permanent basis would be one important move towards addressing the mental health crisis. And there are a few moments in the speech where Dutton nails the central problem we face, that governments should play a critical role in addressing.
“Our society is less cohesive,” he says. “For so many Australians, aspiration has been replaced by anxiety. Optimism has turned to pessimism. And national confidence changed to dispiritedness.”
Media reporting about Dutton’s increasingly positive polling numbers usually carry the reflection that a Coalition win would upset almost a century of political history by unseating a first-term government.
Such a victory would be surprising but not shocking. Our political past may be a less and less reliable tool from which to understand the current political environment, precisely because of what Dutton identifies: a rise in polarisation and a fundamental shift in our relationship with information and communication increasing that polarisation.
Dutton strikes a confident pose in this speech. The party he leads is back in town and ready to win majority government. Not by default, on the back of a wave of antagonism towards the Albanese government, but because it has won, as Dutton puts it, “a civilised battle of ideas”. He says: “Oppositions can – and do – win elections.”
I’ve seen that once and once only in my 20 years as a social researcher. Kevin Rudd in 2007. And even then, public fatigue with John Howard as prime minister was at its highest point, along with frustration at his intransigence on climate change and his draconian WorkChoices laws. Rudd’s victory was still a symptom of voter dislike of the government.
It’s not a new thing that voters punish a PM they don’t like by voting for someone they don’t really know.
Just before the 1983 federal election Bill Hayden said (in the press conference after his ousting as Labor party leader) that sentiment about the federal government was so low that even a drover’s dog could lead his party to victory. It didn’t necessarily need the charismatic figure of Bob Hawke to make that happen.
I think Hayden was being unfair to dogs with that comment. Drovers’ dogs are energetic, smart, watchful, loyal and courageous – attributes we long for in our leaders.
Even more now than when Hayden made that comment, we vote against governments, not for alternative leaders. The last election result was not the electorate en masse embracing Labor’s progressive agenda or a ringing endorsement of the Labor leader. It was a wholesale repudiation of Scott Morrison, a man whose management of the pandemic had made his government ride high in the polls, almost wiping out memories of his ill-advised holiday to Hawaii during the black summer fires.
Similarly, if Dutton wins or manages to form minority government it will not be because of enthusiasm for his compilation playlist of all-too-familiar policies or because of excitement about nuclear energy.
It will be proof positive that we are stuck in what Prof Gabriele Gratton describes as a “bad democracy trap”. Low voter trust in politicians. Scepticism about the effectiveness of institutions in holding politicians to account. A preference for “default”, familiar policies with short-term benefits.
In a bad democracy trap, opposition leaders are required to stand still and point the finger at the other person. They are voted in on what might seem like a wave of approval but is in fact only a surge of reactive anger against “the system”. There is an oh-so brief honeymoon period, after which this collective anger resets quickly and is again directed at whoever is running the show.
Individual politicians, particularly those who thrive on negativity, have a vested interest in this trap continuing. But political parties, and any talented and principled leaders within them, have an interest in addressing its root causes.
This is because, as the trap gets worse, it’s harder and harder for politicians to get credit for good work. For example, when the Morrison government introduced jobkeeper during the pandemic. When the Albanese government scrapped the damaging stage-three tax cuts.
As Gratton writes, in such an environment “voters behave as if their politicians and institutions are of low quality, even when in fact these are of high quality”.
In his Chisholm speech, Dutton identifies some of the broader social and economic forces that feed this bad democracy trap: anxiety, polarisation, pessimism. Yet his solutions may intensify these forces rather than mitigate them. And if he does become prime minister, it is important for our nation he ensures they don’t.
We need leaders with more of the attributes of drovers’ dogs if we are going to do anything about the deep pessimism across the electorate, which seems to be getting worse with every election cycle.
Rebecca Huntley is director of research at 89 Degrees East and a fellow of the Research Society of Australia
