Extract from The Guardian
The
final election count is a bit like a distressed marathon runner. After
nine long weeks the finish line is most definitely in sight, but it’s
almost as if the process has developed the staggers: two shuffles
forward, one shuffle back, onwards into the weekend.
Over this past week Malcolm Turnbull has ridden an emotional rollercoaster in front of the voting public.
He’s gone from being fully pumped at the prospect of consigning the Abbott era to history and securing his own mandate (despite the grim portents of the final week, where the tracking poll for both major parties picked up a 4% swing to Labor from about Wednesday) – to falling in a heap on election night with that terrible, fury-laden, outburst.
After a brief spell at Point Piper he pulled himself together and has forged on with the delicate business of trying to achieve the stability he spent eight weeks promising voters that only he and the Coalition could deliver. That’s quite a cycle in less than a week, even in the febrile, careening, hyper-accelerated cultural phenomenon that is Australian politics.
The Coalition is now projecting confidence, extreme from Christopher Pyne, and duly humble from Turnbull, that it will emerge from the wreckage of the election governing in its own right.
This projection is doubtless a combination of actual confidence, wishful thinking, and strategy, given that the prime minister is in the middle of negotiations with new crossbenchers who are coordinating efforts among themselves to ensure that their various wishlists are given due care and attention.
The experience of the hung parliament in 2010 has made this new batch of crossbench players much more wily about how they approach the negotiations. The learnings are instructive. Cathy McGowan wants no formal agreement and no deals but will offer confidence and supply on the basis that the prime minister be collaborative with the parliament. Bob Katter has a healthy wishlist in return for confidence and supply. Nick Xenophon, as always, is beavering about madly while playing his cards close to his chest, but his talks have centred around the fate of the troubled steelmaker Arrium. Xenophon, of course, represents double trouble for the government: he’s a number in the House of Representatives and he’s also a power bloc in the Senate.
Turnbull during this period has to walk a line between courting crossbench support, building a foundation of goodwill, and not promising his firstborn child in return for that endorsement. The budget gives him little room to play Santa Claus, and Standard & Poor’s fired a clear warning shot this week about Australia’s medium-term outlook that is mind-focusing, to say the least.
If the prime minister does, in the end, emerge with a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, that will certainly be a comfort. We should pause here and acknowledge that comfort, because a majority is a lot better than the alternative, and, in politics, a win is a win.
But it’s also not a panacea. If Turnbull secures a majority it will be a slender one, and, as Katter so colourfully observed on Thursday, no one better go to the toilet for the next few years, or plan to take a phone call at the wrong time.
Let’s look beyond the horizon a little further to assess the sum of the prime minister’s parts. It is certainly possible that the verdict of the voters will be a sobering enough check on Coalition MPs to restrain deliberately destabilising behaviour in the new parliament, at least in the short term.
But no one who has lived through the last two terms in Australian politics – or even through the rolling festival of recriminations over this past week – would be so rash as to bet the house on it.
There’s also a category of behaviour that is a step back from outright destabilisation but is potentially problematic for the prime minister.
Just consider the following realities.
Sensible Liberals, now licking their wounds out in their held seats, know the program the government took to the election did not resonate with the voting public. It went down like a lead balloon with the battlers, who fled either back to Labor, or to protest parties such as One Nation, or in South Australia to the Nick Xenophon Team.
2016’s now infamous jobs and growth message did not trickle down to voters who pass their days in the old economy, and have no prospect of a second career designing apps or working for Atlassian.
If Turnbull tries to tough it out with the old program, I predict things will get lively. In this new parliament, backbenchers are powerful people. When every vote counts, every member of the government is potentially a kingmaker.
What do I mean by this? Well, to put it simply, the Liberal party internally has a different culture to the Labor party. Labor in 2010 had the advantage of going into a hung parliament with an important structural strength: MPs aren’t permitted to cross the floor in parliamentary votes.
By contrast, every parliamentary vote for the Coalition is a free vote, technically at least. We haven’t seen a massive culture of crossing the floor in recent parliaments but it will be interesting to see what happens when the underlying dynamic has changed and individual votes matter. My judgment is Coalition MPs who worked hard in their electorates to keep their seats in the middle of an anti-government swing, keeping doubts they had about the national campaign to themselves, will be in no mood to play lemmings, lining up meekly at the cliff face, once the new parliament rolls around.
So back to the sum of the parts, the prime minister (whether he governs in minority or majority) will have to approach the new parliament in a spirit of genuine collaboration, courting crossbenchers while finding the time to duchess his own people and keep them happy.
I haven’t even arrived yet at the Senate (I suspect we’ll all need a stiff drink before contemplating that) and, of course, there’s the task of managing the conservative faction, a group who still view Turnbull as the enemy. Colleagues this week are saying the prime minister must include more up-and-coming conservatives to stabilise his own fortunes and the broader fortunes of the government. The names around in dispatches are Zed Seselja and Michael Sukkar.
So where have we landed? Turnbull’s task is, quite simply, enormous. Not impossible, but enormous.
The prime minister has spent much of the past 12 months telling us all there’s never been a more exciting time to be alive.
How right he was.
Over this past week Malcolm Turnbull has ridden an emotional rollercoaster in front of the voting public.
He’s gone from being fully pumped at the prospect of consigning the Abbott era to history and securing his own mandate (despite the grim portents of the final week, where the tracking poll for both major parties picked up a 4% swing to Labor from about Wednesday) – to falling in a heap on election night with that terrible, fury-laden, outburst.
After a brief spell at Point Piper he pulled himself together and has forged on with the delicate business of trying to achieve the stability he spent eight weeks promising voters that only he and the Coalition could deliver. That’s quite a cycle in less than a week, even in the febrile, careening, hyper-accelerated cultural phenomenon that is Australian politics.
The Coalition is now projecting confidence, extreme from Christopher Pyne, and duly humble from Turnbull, that it will emerge from the wreckage of the election governing in its own right.
This projection is doubtless a combination of actual confidence, wishful thinking, and strategy, given that the prime minister is in the middle of negotiations with new crossbenchers who are coordinating efforts among themselves to ensure that their various wishlists are given due care and attention.
The experience of the hung parliament in 2010 has made this new batch of crossbench players much more wily about how they approach the negotiations. The learnings are instructive. Cathy McGowan wants no formal agreement and no deals but will offer confidence and supply on the basis that the prime minister be collaborative with the parliament. Bob Katter has a healthy wishlist in return for confidence and supply. Nick Xenophon, as always, is beavering about madly while playing his cards close to his chest, but his talks have centred around the fate of the troubled steelmaker Arrium. Xenophon, of course, represents double trouble for the government: he’s a number in the House of Representatives and he’s also a power bloc in the Senate.
Turnbull during this period has to walk a line between courting crossbench support, building a foundation of goodwill, and not promising his firstborn child in return for that endorsement. The budget gives him little room to play Santa Claus, and Standard & Poor’s fired a clear warning shot this week about Australia’s medium-term outlook that is mind-focusing, to say the least.
If the prime minister does, in the end, emerge with a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, that will certainly be a comfort. We should pause here and acknowledge that comfort, because a majority is a lot better than the alternative, and, in politics, a win is a win.
But it’s also not a panacea. If Turnbull secures a majority it will be a slender one, and, as Katter so colourfully observed on Thursday, no one better go to the toilet for the next few years, or plan to take a phone call at the wrong time.
Let’s look beyond the horizon a little further to assess the sum of the prime minister’s parts. It is certainly possible that the verdict of the voters will be a sobering enough check on Coalition MPs to restrain deliberately destabilising behaviour in the new parliament, at least in the short term.
But no one who has lived through the last two terms in Australian politics – or even through the rolling festival of recriminations over this past week – would be so rash as to bet the house on it.
There’s also a category of behaviour that is a step back from outright destabilisation but is potentially problematic for the prime minister.
Just consider the following realities.
Sensible Liberals, now licking their wounds out in their held seats, know the program the government took to the election did not resonate with the voting public. It went down like a lead balloon with the battlers, who fled either back to Labor, or to protest parties such as One Nation, or in South Australia to the Nick Xenophon Team.
2016’s now infamous jobs and growth message did not trickle down to voters who pass their days in the old economy, and have no prospect of a second career designing apps or working for Atlassian.
If Turnbull tries to tough it out with the old program, I predict things will get lively. In this new parliament, backbenchers are powerful people. When every vote counts, every member of the government is potentially a kingmaker.
What do I mean by this? Well, to put it simply, the Liberal party internally has a different culture to the Labor party. Labor in 2010 had the advantage of going into a hung parliament with an important structural strength: MPs aren’t permitted to cross the floor in parliamentary votes.
By contrast, every parliamentary vote for the Coalition is a free vote, technically at least. We haven’t seen a massive culture of crossing the floor in recent parliaments but it will be interesting to see what happens when the underlying dynamic has changed and individual votes matter. My judgment is Coalition MPs who worked hard in their electorates to keep their seats in the middle of an anti-government swing, keeping doubts they had about the national campaign to themselves, will be in no mood to play lemmings, lining up meekly at the cliff face, once the new parliament rolls around.
So back to the sum of the parts, the prime minister (whether he governs in minority or majority) will have to approach the new parliament in a spirit of genuine collaboration, courting crossbenchers while finding the time to duchess his own people and keep them happy.
I haven’t even arrived yet at the Senate (I suspect we’ll all need a stiff drink before contemplating that) and, of course, there’s the task of managing the conservative faction, a group who still view Turnbull as the enemy. Colleagues this week are saying the prime minister must include more up-and-coming conservatives to stabilise his own fortunes and the broader fortunes of the government. The names around in dispatches are Zed Seselja and Michael Sukkar.
So where have we landed? Turnbull’s task is, quite simply, enormous. Not impossible, but enormous.
The prime minister has spent much of the past 12 months telling us all there’s never been a more exciting time to be alive.
How right he was.
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