The coalition that must not be named

[poddster]

Paul Sheehan

Sydney Morning Herald columnist

The election is being contested by two antagonist political coalitions, both  highly disciplined in their voting unity. While one of them is called,  unimaginatively, the Coalition, the other coalition has no name and pretends it  does not exist. It is the Voldemort of Australian politics, aka  He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

This coalition that will not name itself may tremble with mutual mistrust but  it has, nonetheless, been supremely disciplined where it counts: voting. In the  2010 election, 45 of Labor's 72 MPs won their seats on Greens' preferences. This  alliance kept Julia Gillard's minority government in office for an entire  three-year term. Over those three years, the coalition-that-must-not-be-named  exercised ruthless efficiency in tandem. In the Senate, where Labor and the  Greens could combine to impose their will, they paired up to guillotine debate  on 216 bills and rammed  them through Parliament.

This statistic may not mean much to most people but, by way of contrast,  during the last three-year term of the Howard government, the Coalition had a  majority in the Senate but guillotined debate on only 32 bills.

The ruthlessness of the Labor-Greens coalition reached its zenith during the  frenetic final day of Parliament, in the hours after Labor had decapitated its  leader, recycled Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, and intended to ram through as  much legislation as possible to fireproof the next Parliament against expected  defeat in the federal election.

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Labor had a very willing partner. So willing that, on the last sitting day,  Friday, June 28, it was able to guillotine debate on 55 bills. That is more in  just six hours than the Coalition had guillotined in three years. Little wonder   leader of the opposition in the Senate Eric Abetz delivered one of the most  revealing and enraged parliamentary speeches of the three-year term of  government.

''Never before in the history of the Senate have the provisions of the  standing orders been so abused … Earlier this week I asked whether any deal had  been done with the Australian Greens to get their agreement, their connivance,  to move this unprecedented guillotine of over 55 bills this week …

''Not content with guillotining bills through this place, those opposite, the  Labor Party, are now doing the dirty work for the Australian Greens, sponsoring  Greens' motions as government business.

''So we had to have the pantomime of that thespian Senator Bob Carr claiming  to attack the Greens. What a pathetic act that was, when we now see the dirty,  sleazy deals that are done behind closed doors, away from the microphones.

''When I asked Senator Stephen Conroy [then government leader in the Senate],  'Can you give an assurance that no deal has been done with the Greens in  relation to the guillotine?' he studiously avoided the question. He did not deny  the allegation. We now know why.''

The unspoken deal-that-could-not-be-named, by the coalition-that-must-not-be  named, was that the Greens would get several of their provisions passed into  law, plus a motion to give them a seat on the Senate privileges committee, the  most influential in the Senate, during the next Parliament.

''So,'' thundered Abetz, ''on the very last day of this Parliament, there are  the Australian Labor Party and the Greens, they may have publicly ripped up the  marriage certificate, but they are still cohabiting … And I say to the empty  press gallery … the gross hypocrisy of some of the scribes in the press gallery  who wrote column after column after column condemning the Liberal and National  Party majority in the Senate for the outrage against democracy for forcing 32  bills through the Senate. Where are their fingers on the keyboards [now]?''

In this context, the least surprising major preference development of this  election is the Coalition putting the implacably hostile Greens last in every  contest, while Labor gives the Greens its first preferences everywhere except  Queensland, where Bob Katter, an old mate of Rudd, will get the nod instead.

The coalition-that-must-not-be-named is thus sticking together where it  matters, voting, which may deliver the Greens the balance of power in the Senate  and even save their one seat in the House of Representatives, Adam Bandt's  electorate of  Melbourne.

Labor's candidate for this once safe Labor seat, Cath Bowtell, has said her  campaign is so starved of resources and finance that volunteers have resorted to  borrowing mobile phones and computers. No need to wonder why.

Thus while the media has been fixated on a presidential-style election  campaign between Rudd and Tony Abbott, what has been neglected is the important  rearguard action that Labor is fighting in the Senate campaign. As its decision  to preference the Greens shows, it would rather have the Greens with the balance  of power. This means Labor wants gridlock, something the Greens are happy to  deliver. As  Gillard said in 2011: "We happily leave to the Greens being a party  of protest with no tradition of striking the balance required to deliver major  reform.''

Dirty deals can backfire. The Greens learnt this on the final day of  Parliament when Abetz, knowing a guillotine was hanging over every matter,  proposed several amendments, which consumed the limited time available, and the  Greens' perk of the privileges committee became a casualty of its own  guillotine.

[poddster]

Bit of a scroller but worth the read 🙂

by Malcolm Farnsworth

http://australianpolitics.com/

After Kevin Rudd’s return to the prime ministership on June 27, and throughout July, I told anyone who asked that I thought the electoral psychology of Rudd’s revival wasn’t clear. I wanted to wait until the end of July to see what the polls revealed.

It seems clear now that the country breathed a sigh of relief that Gillard was gone. The electorate was also prepared to give Rudd a chance to show his stuff. There was a general sense of excitement that we now had a contest.

But it’s also clear now that the increased ALP vote was probably lapsed/disappointed/appalled/outraged/hopeful Labor voters returning to the fold.

Opinion polls now show consistently that swinging voters who deserted the ALP two years ago are staying away. Today’s Newspoll puts the Coalition’s lead at 54-46, a figure that is roughly the average of the past two years.

The spate of polls in marginal seats over the past few days are devastating for the ALP. Whether it’s Forde, Brisbane, Dobell, Robertson, Banks, Lindsay, Aston or Corangamite, amongst others, it’s clear that a mighty vote against the government is looming on September 7.

It isn’t really a surprise. I could never find the seats that the ALP needs to pull off a spectacular re-election. The polls briefly had the parties running neck-and-neck but that only lasted a couple of weeks as a fair-minded citizenry paused to see what Rudd would do.

Now the brutal reality of the election is laid bare: It has always been difficult to believe that any genuine swinging voter would turn to the ALP in this election.

Leaving aside the noise and irrelevance of most of the media’s political coverage, one thing stands out. This has been a government wracked by ongoing crisis in key policy areas, political strategy and leadership.

From the Budget to asylum seekers, the achievements of the government have been overshadowed by its failures. Competence is a key concern for many voters.

Regardless of who you blame and how you write your character assessments of Gillard and Rudd, it is a government that has been wracked by division, constant leadership speculation and a series of leadership upheavals. Today’s Cabinet bears little resemblance to the one that was sworn in on September 14, 2010. Any sensible assessment of the government sees it as unstable and unpredictable.

If Gillard was a disaster, Rudd is inadequate. Between them, they have led a government that has been much less than the sum of its parts. It is a government so lacking in political skills as to be beyond belief.

In retrospect, it is clear the election was lost in early 2011. In February that year, Gillard announced the carbon pricing system and then ceded all of her political ground to Abbott. She accepted the view that she was introducing a “carbon tax”. She vacated the political playing field for nearly five months whilst the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee met in camera to thrash out the details. Tony Abbott barnstormed the country and won the political debate. Trust in Gillard was destroyed. The climate change issue became a negative for the government. It was all downhill for the next two years.

After Rudd’s defeat in his leadership challenge of February 2012, I incorrectly believed he would never return to the job. In the end, the cataclysmic defeat that Gillard’s leadership portended persuaded enough members of the caucus to remove her.

But it now seems clear that bringing Rudd back two months before the election was never really going to work.

Put simply, the government has been unelectable for a long time. It is difficult to mount a convincing argument for its re-election. It isn’t credible to believe the electorate will return it.

It is a government now paying the price for its mediocrity, the logical outcome for a party that has withered from within, its dessicated membership outgunned by the union-based factional cliques that still run the party as a job placement agency for the favoured few.

The disconnection of the party from the real world can be seen in the other great constant of the past four years: the ongoing and obsessive misreading of Tony Abbott. A bizarre mixture of fear and dismissiveness, the Abbott factor has now become the final pillar of the government’s campaign.

We’ll soon see how the anti-Abbott advertising onslaught launched last night will play out. So far there’s no evidence to indicate the ALP has the slightest idea of how to put Abbott under pressure.

As in the final stage of the 2010 campaign, the ALP might benefit from three weeks of a companion campaign on jobs, health and education, its traditional areas of strength.

All the same, it was a somewhat pathetic spectacle last week to see Rudd embracing the nuttiness of long-discredited ideas of “developing the north”, although it may have ensured Bob Katter’s preferences. But throwing half a billion dollars of pork from the never-never beyond the forward estimates at the car industry in Adelaide over the weekend showed how piecemeal is the ALP’s strategy.

The government’s campaign may work to some extent and it remains possible that a major blunder by one side could make the election turn. The ground war also matters, as the weekend’s preference decisions demonstrate.

But let’s not kid ourselves too much. It’s over.

The marginal seat polling of the past few days shows that the ALP is in serious trouble. Seats that Rudd was supposed to save – “the furniture” – are now back in contention.

For instance, in New South Wales, Chris Bowen in McMahon is still in trouble. Jason Clare clings to a narrow lead in Blaxland. Lindsay is gone for all money. There’s talk of Kingsford Smith falling. There’s no sign in the polls that Dobell, Robertson, Reid or Banks are safe. Only a disastrous Liberal candidate in Greenway offers any hope for the ALP. We’ve had no polls from Eden-Monaro or Richmond but you have to wonder what’s happening in those regional areas.

In Victoria, seats thought saved are now back in the mix. Keep your eye on Chisholm, Bruce, Isaacs, McEwen and Bendigo. The JWS poll in Aston shows the Liberals on 63%, an indication of what’s likely happening in neighbouring Deakin and La Trobe.

In Queensland, Peter Beattie confronts a poll showing the Liberal incumbent in Forde well ahead on 60%. Teresa Gambaro is polling well in Brisbane. Those six or seven seats Rudd was supposed to be winning seem to have evaporated. And does anyone seriously think regional seats will fall when even Brisbane is so hostile?

Reports out of Tasmania suggest a bad result for Labor. Bass and Braddon seem shaky. In South Australia and Western Australia, the prospect of gains are few. There are more seats at risk.

It’s got so much harder again. The ALP confronts an electoral Sisyphus.

Whereas Gillard looked like losing between 30 and 40 seats, Rudd looks like he’s going to lose 20 or more.

Most of this year has been politically surreal. An air of unreality has surrounded most government pronouncements. It now seems certain that the major political decisions of 2013 are still to come.