If disunity is death in politics, Malcolm Turnbull's best chance of staying alive is for Barnaby Joyce to lead the National Party out of the Coalition and for himself to move the Liberal Party out of John Howard's shadow. Simply taking random pot shots at the Rudd government won’t work, particularly while voters are distracted by ongoing ructions in the Liberal and the National parties.
The Coalition has done badly in the opinion polls ever since the Howard government lost last November’s election. Initially, Turnbull was well received by voters after replacing Brendan Nelson as Liberal leader in September. But his approval rating in last week’s polling crashed. Admittedly, it’s not an easy time to be Opposition leader. Rudd is treating the current economic turmoil as akin to “a series of national security crises” and is reaping the rewards for taking decisive action.
A large chunk of the government’s $10.4 billion stimulus package was delivered to retirees and families last week, with minsters urging them to spend the money before Christmas. A group of economists argued that it have been better to tie part of the money to spending on items such as smart electricity meters, solar hot water heaters and home insulation to provide ongoing benefits. But the flood of cash has not hurt Rudd’s approval ratings and seems to have helped boost consumer confidence.
Such effects often prove ephemeral. If unemployment keeps rising, the mood could be very different by February. The government need not suffer electorally, however, if the Opposition doesn’t look like it can provide a steady pair of hands on the tiller. Turnbull can’t afford a repeat of the debacle on the last senate sitting day in which Joyce and three other National senators voted against the wishes of the shadow cabinet on a major infrastructure bill. So did two Liberals. Another 25 abstained, including the Liberal leader in the Senate, Nick Minchin.
Although he is the National’s Senate leader, Joyce refuses to take a Coalition shadow portfolio in case he has to vote the same way as the Liberals. But Joyce is the Nationals’ best hope of attracting votes at the next election. Unlike the current leader Warren Truss, he has the ability to “cut through” to voters.
To capitalise on this ability, Joyce needs to move the House of Representatives, replace Truss as leader, then take the Nationals out of the Coalition. Easier said than done, of course. Joyce lives in St George in western Queensland. If the local member Bruce Scott won’t step aside, Truss should vacate his coastal Queensland seat of Wide Bay. The Liberals would also gain if the Nationals left the Coalition. Headlines about “splits” would vanish.
One obvious drawback is that the parties would come under pressure during an election campaign to outline their terms for forming a coalition if they win enough votes to govern. Nevertheless, the Liberals and the Nationals succeeded in forming a new coalition government in Western Australia after campaigning as separate parties at the state election in September.
Federally, the Liberals need to recognise that they were overly dependent on one man — John Howard— for electoral success. Howard was a skilled politician, but also extremely lucky. He won the 1998 election with a minority of the two-party preferred vote. He rode to victory in 2001 in the wake of the September 11 terrorist atrocities in the US and local fears about asylum seekers. A volatile new Labor leader Mark Latham imploded before the 2004 election. By 2007, Howard had run out of puff. As he acknowledged before the election, his colleagues kept expecting him to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but he had neither rabbit not hat.
Voters made it plain that they wanted to move on, but a recalcitrant group of Liberal parliamentarians behave as if nothing changed at the 2007 election. When Labor introduced its new industrial relations laws last month, some Liberals demanded that Turnbull “show some guts” and oppose any change to Howard’s unpopular Work Choice laws. Turnbull took the view that voters had given Labor had a mandate for change, but would oppose any deviation from what was put to the electorate.
Not every thing needs to be jettisoned. The Rudd government, for example, has no plausible explanation for cutting Howard’s projected spending on the CSIRO, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Meteorological Bureau. Conversely, Turnbull could remain true to liberal values about individual liberty by urging Rudd to repeal Howard’s revival of sedition laws which make it a criminal offence to “bring the sovereign into hatred or contempt”, and “urge disaffection” against the government.
But the main requirement is to convince voters that the Liberals offer an acceptable alterative to Rudd’s team on the economy. When he was shadow Treasurer earlier in the year, Turnbull correctly argued that government and the Reserve Bank had badly underestimated the likely fall-out from the sub-prime lending crisis in the US.
Since becoming leader, however, he has been too reactive, too willing to snipe at whatever the government does, too captive to the demands of the 24 hour news cycle to have something negative to say. He should relax over Christmas and come back with a more coherent story to tell.
Email a friend