THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

I thought the first week of the Federal election campaign would be boring. As interested as I am in politics it seems to me that Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott are both running conservative campaigns in the sense that neither seem interested in standing up for any particularly hard policy positions or making any big announcements. Both leaders seem to be on the defensive before they’ve even been attacked; the dire need to win over voters in marginal seats overrides other considerations like, say, good policies. Both leaders seem paralysed by the possibility that they might alienate voters in marginal seats, particularly the oft-mentioned marginal seats in western Sydney and Queensland. The result has been a disappointing start to the campaign.

This election is being fought in an environment where wedge politics provide the opportunity to land decisive blows on your opponent. The two major wedge issues, used to try and alienate voters from a political opponent, that came up in week one of the campaign were asylum seekers and climate change. The stances that both Labor and the Coalition are campaigning on indicate a strong swing to the Right. It’s bizarre; when Bob Hawke was elected back in 1983 the common knowledge was that his would be the most conservative Labor government to ever hold the Treasury benches. Just as Labor takes the bait laid out neatly for it by the Coalition to swing to the Right, who should reappear? Bob Hawke reappears, waltzing through some shopping centre and through the television news into my lounge room. Mind you, I like Bob Hawke, primarily because he and Paul Keating got shit done. And they did this with a method that has been noticeably absent from all the processes set up by the Rudd-Gillard Governments; they decided on what they thought was the best course for the country and attempted to convince the electorate of the merits of that course of action.

The defining characteristic of Rudd-Gillard Labor has been an inability to spend political capital trying to convince the electorate of the merits of a particular idea or policy. Focus groups drive policy creation. A policy is announced, the newspaper headlines and sound bites on the news duly received and the policy is hastily retreated from at the first sign of resistance. From Michelle Grattan in the Age to Paul Kelly in The Australian the pundits agree that Labor is hooked on focus groups; for Labor, and probably the Coalition as well, this is a focus group driven campaign. And this is the key reason why asylum seekers and climate change, wedge issues aside from key issues like health, education and economic management, have emerged to dominate the first week of the campaign. Most voters struggle to tell Labor and the Coalition apart on, for example, economic management. While I would argue this is largely because in these areas the two are largely the same, this drives up the relative value of campaigning on wedge issues. Combined with Labor’s focus group driven populism wedge issues, where Labor has so far refused to commit any political capital to put its own stance, provide the Coalition with an opportunity to damage Labor.

The swing to the Right over climate change and asylum seekers is the result of the Coalition wedging Labor over these issues. The Empire has struck back. In 2007 Kevin Rudd campaigned strongly to end the Howard Government’s Pacific Solution for asylum seekers and for an emissions trading system to help reduce our impact on climate change. Who could have imagined that Labor would dump these policies to give the nod to offshore processing of asylum seekers with their ill-conceived East Timor Solution or ditch the ETS in favour of a “citizen’s assembly” to demonstrate a community consensus that action on climate change was needed. I think Paul Kelly said it best: “Labor's stand is riddled with hypocrisy and gimmicks … [t]he proposed Citizens Assembly to assess the case for climate change is an unconscious Labor joke -- a grand focus group to conceal its leadership failure”. Even though other aspects of the policy, such as $1 billion for renewable energies, are to be supported, assessed as a whole Labor’s climate change policy is a joke. While Kelly also acknowledges that Tony Abbott’s stance on climate change constitutes “grand political fraud” the idea that Labor would abrogate its responsibility for leadership over climate change to anyone is infuriating.

No less infuriating is the position outlined this week by both leaders on asylum seekers. Tony Abbott has returned to the policy advocated by his predecessor John Howard: temporary protection visas, offshore processing in Naura and “turning back the boats” that bring asylum seekers to Australia while they are still at sea. Tragically, I think, in the key marginal seats that seem to be so important in this election this position is getting traction with voters. Or so the focus groups are telling the major parties. The problem for Abbott is that his approach is completely illogical. Asked to explain how the boats will be turned back, Abbott’s answer is that this is the job of the Navy. The Navy will turn these boats around and they will, what, comply and go to back to where they came from? A friend joked to me this week that Abbott’s real policy is to build a 20m high barbed wire fence around the whole country. Abbott would call it the ‘refugee-proof fence’.

Labor, successfully wedged and scared of alienating itself from voters in the key marginal seats, has rushed to follow Abbott in a race to the bottom of the right of centre. This is depressing for a number of reasons. It legitimises the assumptions of people who oppose accepting refugees into Australia and ignores Australia’s obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention, which we have ratified. Failing to consult Indonesia first, which Greg Sheridan argues is evidence of Gillard’s “highly amateurish” approach to foreign affairs, is another mistake and one that has missed much analysis in the media this week. Further, framed in this way the debate about immigration (and population) deflects attention away from what are the real areas of concern: the need for investment in infrastructure and the need for better services in the suburbs of Australia’s cities.

Waleed Aly, a politics lecturer at Monash University, said this was Australia’s “first election about nothing”. After the first week of the campaign I’m inclined to agree. Neither Labor nor the Coalition looks like changing the tenor of the campaign to a debate over big policy issues. We were forewarned this would not be a big spending campaign but I’m starting to wonder whether this was a guarded way to saying it would be a campaign without big ideas. Worse than that, a campaign where the desire to avoid a debate over ideas effectively means voters in the western suburbs of Sydney dictate policy for the whole country. This is a mistake. It won’t be the first election where a vocal minority has hijacked the debate, but it might be the first where our political leaders will try to deal with it by avoiding saying anything in response.

By James Walker