If we step back from the controversy surrounding the tip-off of the police raids on the Australian Workers’ Union,
this was a revealing week in federal politics. To understand why it was
revealing, we need to mute the shouting and examine what is actually
going on.
Let’s start by mapping out the current political contest, the pure politics theatre – leader versus leader, and the battle to secure the number of seats required to form a government.
If we strip it back to that level, the Coalition has two preoccupations or objectives.
The first is “get Bill”.
The government fancies Shorten is Labor’s weakest link. Polling suggests that Australians, as of today, are angry or disengaged enough to toss out Malcolm Turnbull’s government, but they aren’t entirely sold on the Labor leader.
So if you are a prime minister who might, periodically, be entranced by the mirage of a knockout blow (an instinct which has gotten Turnbull into trouble in the past), or even if you aren’t after a KO but are in the market for some momentum and a sense that fortune has turned in your favour, you will peck away at Shorten, hoping to convince voters that their hesitation is well founded.
So this pecking away happens constantly, often on the theme of Bill did a bad, bad thing (to borrow from Chris Isaak; sorry, yes, my musical tastes really are that sad). Just a little backing track.
But this week, the backing track shifted to top 40, courtesy of some enthusiastic stage management – an ill-advised media tip-off about the AWU police raids, which were connected to an investigation of old donations to GetUp when Shorten was the AWU boss in 2006.
A bonfire ensued, roaring back, as fires sometimes do, on the people clutching the kindling and the matches.
Now, we need to get to our second issue, which is the Coalition’s marginal seats problem.
Quick recap. Turnbull very nearly lost the last federal election. We all remember. I clearly recall speaking to Liberals during the campaign, who were, quite literally, overwhelmed by the resources of their progressive opponents on the ground, feeling like rabbits in the headlights.
The government knows that it has a major structural disadvantage in its field operation – what the political types call the ground game – because the Coalition is not supported by progressive activist groups like GetUp and the trade union movement, which campaign in parallel to progressive political parties, amplifying their effort.
Now it’s a myth that trade unions support only the ALP. Certainly the majority of the effort goes that way, but unions these days also hedge their bets, helping the Greens and some other non-aligned players on the Senate crossbench in an effort to protect themselves against adverse legislative developments in Canberra.
In any case, the government doesn’t quite fathom this subtlety, and sees only its problem – the fact that the centre-right in this country lacks a field operation of a comparable scale to the progressive side, and this is a serious problem if you want to win elections, unless you can counter it with some spooky kind of data magic, and even then, that gets you only so far.
Ever since the last election it almost lost, the Coalition has not been able to shut up about the evils of GetUp.
The night terrors play out in public, and they are amplified by a campaign the Australian newspaper is running against the activist organisation.
As well as fixating on GetUp, the government has also redoubled its efforts post election to tie up the trade union movement across a range of fronts, with at least five major legislative proposals wending their way through the parliament since Turnbull returned to the Lodge.
It’s no great thunderclap for Liberal governments to be intrinsically hostile to union activities; in fact that’s an article of faith for the conservative base. But the current union containment agenda across a range of fronts is busy, busy, busy.
So busy in fact, that some in the union movement think the agenda is actually more about obstruction, about tying them up and diverting resources that might otherwise go into field campaigns, as it is about the practicalities of labour market regulation.
Now in calling out the Coalition’s obsessive compulsions on this front, I need to be clear about my own views. Transparency needs to be at the heart of any healthy political system.
Union members have a right to know how their money is being spent. Voters also have a right to know who is influencing politics and bankrolling various campaigns, whether the campaigns be progressive left, hard right, or any shade in between.
So I think it’s entirely reasonable that Shorten and the AWU account for their donations a decade ago and explain whether proper processes were followed. I also think the funding flowing to activist groups, whether on the left or the right of the spectrum, should be transparent if the groups are politically active.
But putting my view about the merits of transparency to one side, and tracking back now to the events of the week, and viewing them through the prism of the Coalition’s political preoccupations, you can see why the government overreached.
You can see why a combination of a police raid, Bill Shorten, a trade union and a donation to a loathed activist group felt like “bonanza”, “bingo” and “boom” in the eyes of the warriors in the Coalition bunker.
You can see why getting the cameras on the scene before the cops would have felt, in the amped-up universe of inside political baseball, like a good idea. It would have felt like triumphing for a moment in the minutiae of a brutal political contest.
Sucks to be you, Bill, AWU, GetUp – that’ll learn ’em.
Well, it learned the government alright. And the way in which the story quickly turned from triumph to tragedy underscores the fact the Coalition has sound reasons to be worried.
Once the AWU was in the gun, with cameras on site before the police, the entire apparatus of Australian progressive activism swung into gear to foment outrage about abuses of institutional power.
Furious union officials peppered the airwaves. The Labor party too, which possesses all the message discipline and internal coordination that the Turnbull government so clearly lacks, also swung into overdrive.
The opposition rolled out one frontbencher after another to denounce the raids – on television, on radio, on the internet – and they took the ready convenience of a Senate estimates hearing to roll into full prosecutorial mode with the employment minister Michaelia Cash, hour after hour.
The Greens also swung into gear, amplifying Labor’s concerns, making it a story about a misuse of institutional power rather than a story about a failure of transparency.
So it’s true. The government has a clear asymmetry problem when it comes to effective campaigning. It’s a big problem for them.
But how you deal with your problems in politics is actually quite important.
Perhaps the Coalition – now at the end of the worst week it has yet suffered in office – could deal with its problem by trying to govern in sober and steady fashion.
It could focus on the issues that matter to voters, and use that as a platform to inspire, and rally like-minded institutions to their cause.
Perhaps the Coalition could deliver policies that working people were attracted to so that union members, who aren’t born with Labor chips in their brain, might vote Coalition rather than hand out leaflets and work in phone banks for Labor or the Greens.
Perhaps the Coalition could just stow the too-clever-by-half strategising and focus on the business of being a competent government with something meaningful to say about the future.
Because when the next election rolls round, voters are not going to give a stuff about the AWU giving money to GetUp, they are going to vote for the political party which they think has some answers, and an agenda which speaks to real-world problems.
If the government’s unsteady and underwhelming performance continues, Australians will vote the Coalition out, and they will not care about whether they are fully sold on Shorten.
We all know this to be true, because we’ve seen it happen, and in the very recent past. When a government couldn’t get its act together, and the voters knew it, Australians voted in droves for a prime minister they weren’t sold on.
In 2013. His name was Tony Abbott.
Let’s start by mapping out the current political contest, the pure politics theatre – leader versus leader, and the battle to secure the number of seats required to form a government.
If we strip it back to that level, the Coalition has two preoccupations or objectives.
The first is “get Bill”.
The government fancies Shorten is Labor’s weakest link. Polling suggests that Australians, as of today, are angry or disengaged enough to toss out Malcolm Turnbull’s government, but they aren’t entirely sold on the Labor leader.
So if you are a prime minister who might, periodically, be entranced by the mirage of a knockout blow (an instinct which has gotten Turnbull into trouble in the past), or even if you aren’t after a KO but are in the market for some momentum and a sense that fortune has turned in your favour, you will peck away at Shorten, hoping to convince voters that their hesitation is well founded.
So this pecking away happens constantly, often on the theme of Bill did a bad, bad thing (to borrow from Chris Isaak; sorry, yes, my musical tastes really are that sad). Just a little backing track.
But this week, the backing track shifted to top 40, courtesy of some enthusiastic stage management – an ill-advised media tip-off about the AWU police raids, which were connected to an investigation of old donations to GetUp when Shorten was the AWU boss in 2006.
A bonfire ensued, roaring back, as fires sometimes do, on the people clutching the kindling and the matches.
Now, we need to get to our second issue, which is the Coalition’s marginal seats problem.
Quick recap. Turnbull very nearly lost the last federal election. We all remember. I clearly recall speaking to Liberals during the campaign, who were, quite literally, overwhelmed by the resources of their progressive opponents on the ground, feeling like rabbits in the headlights.
The government knows that it has a major structural disadvantage in its field operation – what the political types call the ground game – because the Coalition is not supported by progressive activist groups like GetUp and the trade union movement, which campaign in parallel to progressive political parties, amplifying their effort.
Now it’s a myth that trade unions support only the ALP. Certainly the majority of the effort goes that way, but unions these days also hedge their bets, helping the Greens and some other non-aligned players on the Senate crossbench in an effort to protect themselves against adverse legislative developments in Canberra.
In any case, the government doesn’t quite fathom this subtlety, and sees only its problem – the fact that the centre-right in this country lacks a field operation of a comparable scale to the progressive side, and this is a serious problem if you want to win elections, unless you can counter it with some spooky kind of data magic, and even then, that gets you only so far.
Ever since the last election it almost lost, the Coalition has not been able to shut up about the evils of GetUp.
The night terrors play out in public, and they are amplified by a campaign the Australian newspaper is running against the activist organisation.
As well as fixating on GetUp, the government has also redoubled its efforts post election to tie up the trade union movement across a range of fronts, with at least five major legislative proposals wending their way through the parliament since Turnbull returned to the Lodge.
It’s no great thunderclap for Liberal governments to be intrinsically hostile to union activities; in fact that’s an article of faith for the conservative base. But the current union containment agenda across a range of fronts is busy, busy, busy.
So busy in fact, that some in the union movement think the agenda is actually more about obstruction, about tying them up and diverting resources that might otherwise go into field campaigns, as it is about the practicalities of labour market regulation.
Now in calling out the Coalition’s obsessive compulsions on this front, I need to be clear about my own views. Transparency needs to be at the heart of any healthy political system.
Union members have a right to know how their money is being spent. Voters also have a right to know who is influencing politics and bankrolling various campaigns, whether the campaigns be progressive left, hard right, or any shade in between.
So I think it’s entirely reasonable that Shorten and the AWU account for their donations a decade ago and explain whether proper processes were followed. I also think the funding flowing to activist groups, whether on the left or the right of the spectrum, should be transparent if the groups are politically active.
But putting my view about the merits of transparency to one side, and tracking back now to the events of the week, and viewing them through the prism of the Coalition’s political preoccupations, you can see why the government overreached.
You can see why a combination of a police raid, Bill Shorten, a trade union and a donation to a loathed activist group felt like “bonanza”, “bingo” and “boom” in the eyes of the warriors in the Coalition bunker.
You can see why getting the cameras on the scene before the cops would have felt, in the amped-up universe of inside political baseball, like a good idea. It would have felt like triumphing for a moment in the minutiae of a brutal political contest.
Sucks to be you, Bill, AWU, GetUp – that’ll learn ’em.
Well, it learned the government alright. And the way in which the story quickly turned from triumph to tragedy underscores the fact the Coalition has sound reasons to be worried.
Once the AWU was in the gun, with cameras on site before the police, the entire apparatus of Australian progressive activism swung into gear to foment outrage about abuses of institutional power.
Furious union officials peppered the airwaves. The Labor party too, which possesses all the message discipline and internal coordination that the Turnbull government so clearly lacks, also swung into overdrive.
The opposition rolled out one frontbencher after another to denounce the raids – on television, on radio, on the internet – and they took the ready convenience of a Senate estimates hearing to roll into full prosecutorial mode with the employment minister Michaelia Cash, hour after hour.
The Greens also swung into gear, amplifying Labor’s concerns, making it a story about a misuse of institutional power rather than a story about a failure of transparency.
So it’s true. The government has a clear asymmetry problem when it comes to effective campaigning. It’s a big problem for them.
But how you deal with your problems in politics is actually quite important.
Perhaps the Coalition – now at the end of the worst week it has yet suffered in office – could deal with its problem by trying to govern in sober and steady fashion.
It could focus on the issues that matter to voters, and use that as a platform to inspire, and rally like-minded institutions to their cause.
Perhaps the Coalition could deliver policies that working people were attracted to so that union members, who aren’t born with Labor chips in their brain, might vote Coalition rather than hand out leaflets and work in phone banks for Labor or the Greens.
Perhaps the Coalition could just stow the too-clever-by-half strategising and focus on the business of being a competent government with something meaningful to say about the future.
Because when the next election rolls round, voters are not going to give a stuff about the AWU giving money to GetUp, they are going to vote for the political party which they think has some answers, and an agenda which speaks to real-world problems.
If the government’s unsteady and underwhelming performance continues, Australians will vote the Coalition out, and they will not care about whether they are fully sold on Shorten.
We all know this to be true, because we’ve seen it happen, and in the very recent past. When a government couldn’t get its act together, and the voters knew it, Australians voted in droves for a prime minister they weren’t sold on.
In 2013. His name was Tony Abbott.
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