What will decide the 2013 federal election?
The carbon price won’t do it. People who expected Tony Abbott to ride to power on a wave of community hatred for the “carbon tax” were always confusing culture-war narrative with reality. An election held before the package was introduced would have been a referendum on it, but not one afterwards.
The outcome won’t be determined by boat arrivals, although the opposition will bang on and on about them. Boats and immigration generally are potent topics in the community, but despite the conviction on both sides of politics and the political class generally, they aren’t great vote-changers.
Instead, this election will, like most of them, come down to two questions for swinging voters.
They are: (1) am I ready to throw the government out? And if the answer to that is ‘yes’, then (2) is the alternative palatable, acceptable? Or is it too scary? I know what to expect from the government, for all its faults, but I don’t know what the alternative would be like in power.
The safety of continuing incumbency versus putting the other, untried, side in. That’s what elections are generally about.
That formulation was absent from the 2010 contest because there was no incumbent. In 2007 the answer was a clear ‘yes’ to both.
In 2004 it was affirmative to the first but negative to the second. In 2001 the answer to the first was ‘no’, so question number two didn’t arise.
On current settings, the answer in 2013 will be a fist-raising, celebratory ‘yes!’ to question one. Oh please yes, thank God this will soon be over.
Question two is difficult. It elicits sullen responses. Must we? But the strength of that first ‘yes’ outweighs misgivings about an Abbott prime ministership.
But in the end it and discomfort with Abbott will be buried by the desire to get rid of the Gillard government and the hung parliament, by perceptions of a government addicted to spending and unable to rein in debt and deficits. (The government’s argument, that we easily outperform most comparable countries, will continue falling on deaf ears.)
Of a governing party that talks about itself way too much. Yes, failure on border protection will be there too.
Time for a prime minister with authority again. If that has to be Abbott then so be it. We can get rid of him in three years.
And we don’t have to ask what Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan will be like during the campaign because we’ve seen that show already. And since then they’ve discovered billionaires, Bruce Springsteen and north shore Sydney toffs.
The Labor government’s only chance of victory would be personnel changes at the top.
But they march towards the cliff with a fatalistic calm.
by Peter Brent.
