Albanese looks into the abyss after No vote

Suburban battlers are weakening Albanese’s political capital and potentially derailing his grand ambition to keep Labor in power for a generation.

“It was all ridiculous,” says Dawn Wylie, an Earlwood resident and retired great-grandmother. Photo by Louise Kennerley

By Jacob Greber & Samantha Hutchinson Oct 20, 2023 Australian Financial Review

Great-grandmother Dawn Wylie, 83, was not surprised when more than half of the residents inside Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney’s electorate of Barton voted No.

Lack of clarity about the cause and a sense of deafness to how all Australians are “finding it hard to survive” meant the Voice to parliament was doomed, she tells AFR Weekend.

“A lot of people couldn’t understand what was going on,” says the long-term Earlwood and Marrickville resident. She spent most of her life working in childcare and retail jobs at Coles and Australia Post, well into her mid-70s, before her husband’s dementia forced her into a full-time carer’s role.

“They never explained what would happen if you said yes … I think a lot of our people need extra support. It’s not just one group. Why do they deserve it all? A lot of people around here do, too”.

Reliant on a pension, Wylie’s primary focus is on rising household costs. She doesn’t have a mobile phone or internet, but a landline that comes in at $27 a month. She says her electricity bill is going through the roof, but it’s her Canterbury Council rates, which are now at $900 a quarter, which are causing her the most pain.

“It was all ridiculous when people are finding it hard to survive,” she said about the Voice to parliament referendum held on October 14.

Pollsters, strategists and analysts from both sides of the political divide acknowledge that the concerns of voters like Wylie – who on paper look and sound like once-loyal Labor voters – were widespread and a key factor in the No vote succeeding.

And while racism undoubtedly played a role for some voters, many were simply overwhelmed by ongoing economic fears about high interest rates. That may have blunted their scope for compassion as well as any capacity to understand the arguments of the Yes campaign.

The economic gloom that pervades Australian households also reinforced a view that Albanese is focused on the wrong priorities, say analysts.

Above and beyond such explanations, the Voice result has reaffirmed longer-running trends, such as the shift away from ideology and battles between capital and labour.

The Voice demonstrated for those who have forgotten that politics hinges most often on cultural and economic pivots, as well as raw emotion.

Political recalibration

In its wake, last Saturday’s devastatingly unambiguous rejection of the Indigenous Voice to parliament unleashed a rethink on both sides of the political divide.

Labor and Coalition strategists are taking the outcome as a hammer blow that has shattered the conventional wisdom about Labor’s political ascendancy.

If the forces unleashed by the vote – and seen in New Zealand’s general election on the same day – translate at the next election, Albanese would be plunged into a minority government, forced to cut deals with the Greens and Teals.

And even before then, most political observers believe the referendum will force Labor to pivot away from the kind of progressive causes that light up X (formerly Twitter) and voters in the inner cities, and get back to the basics of suburban household-budget politics.

To the dismay of Labor, the last week has also seen an invigoration of Peter Dutton, who looked bereft and devoid of any real strategic road map for victory after the Liberal Party’s Aston byelection defeat in April.

While Albanese might have harboured hopes the Voice campaign would split the Coalition and render Dutton a political corpse, the process has instead wounded the prime minister. He heads into the second half of his term enveloped by the stench of failure.

And most worryingly for government strategists: voters who backed Albanese in May 2022 have demonstrated a readiness to turn away just 17 months later.

“It’s bad for Albo, events are worsening for him,” says Tony Mitchelmore, a veteran political consultant who helped on Kevin Rudd’s successful 2007 campaign. “He’s not a winner. He’s kind of a bit of a loser.

“It’s not that he’s unelectable because of this, but if you’re painted that way and there’s a growing sense that he’s ineffective in the current environment, that is a bad thing to be, because this cost of living thing is huge.”

Much of this week’s commentary has focused on charges of moral failure across Australia’s electorate, which rejected the historic righteousness of the cause.

Progressives have sought solace in the idea that voters were duped by a pernicious campaign of lies and misinformation led by Dutton and his indigenous spokeswoman Jancinta Nampijinpa Price.

For conservatives, the outcome has reinforced the view that the Coalition has definitively lost its former crown jewels – the socially progressive but wealthy women who switched to the teals and away from the Liberal party’s male-dominated offerings in 2022. Saturday’s vote reaffirms these voters will not be embracing Duttonism any time soon.

At the same time, the Coalition detects fertile new ground in the Labor-held suburban fringes, where low- and middle-income voters rejected the Voice in droves, delivering a blunt message that Labor has lost touch with their overarching economic concerns.

Progressive agenda in strife

To be sure, nobody – including top Liberal Party strategists – believes the Coalition can win without regaining at least some of the Teal seats. But Saturday’s vote indicates the electorate is angry enough about the economy that the Coalition could pick up a healthy swag of the roughly 21 to 22 seats it needs to win government. Labor need only lose three seats to become a minority party.

John Utting, the long-time Labor pollster who worked on the last victorious NSW and Victorian state elections, believes Saturday’s vote is a wake-up call for Labor that Albanese will be heeding.

“What this really told them is don’t let this progressive agenda get in front of where the centre of gravity is in Australia,” Utting says. “They’ve got to really respond to those kinds of downscale and regional voters.”

Utting adds that the result has left no doubt that Dutton “is a much bigger threat than people think”.

“He called this issue out and demonstrated that he has a significantly potent political skill set.”

Dutton, who has spent a political career hanging on to his north Brisbane suburban seat by the skin of his teeth, is well-placed to battle Albanese in the kind of seats that John Howard used to win – places like Cherrybrook in north-west Sydney.

Utting characterises such electorates as dominated by “people in middle and lower management positions, at home in McMansions that are too big for their suburban blocks, driving Pajeros and RAV4s rather than more expensive luxury four-wheel drives, and sending their kids to cheaper Catholic schools rather than exclusive Anglican institutions”.

Heavily indebted and halfway to attaining the good life these “are the people who really decide elections in Australia,” he says.

“When Labor gets to 48 per cent or 49 per cent, these are the people who get them over the line,” he adds. “Lose them, you go down the tube”.

Saturday saw many such electorates ruthlessly dump the Voice, reinforcing the notion that they are unmoved by political tribalism and more likely to get their news from old-school commercial TV or FM radio stations.

“They’re not ideological at all. In a sense, they’re just focused on themselves. For them, politics is almost another consumer issue,” says Utting. “They see politics essentially as a delivery mechanism for them.”

With cost of living crowding out the list of things voters care about, the push for a Voice came across as badly timed and irrelevant.

Western Sydney Labor MP Mike Freelander’s city-fringe seat of Macarthur has a sizeable migrant and refugee population, and posted a No vote higher than 65 per cent. He sat apart from his Labor colleagues during the week as he called out the sense of disenfranchisement the Voice engendered in many cash-strapped or outer-city groups.

Those groups perceived the initiative as a “project for the elites” that did little for the masses. “It was an echo chamber, elites talking to elites,” he said.

Freelander’s position is exemplified by the fact that support for the Voice was at its strongest in the most financially secure seats across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and Adelaide.

Outflanked

There was also the unmistakable weakness of the Yes campaign, which found itself outflanked by the No army.

One Yes campaigner, who could only speak on anonymity for fear of repercussions for his corporate role, compared a trip to polling booths on the city’s working class and immigrant-heavy fringes as a step back in time.

He saw scant resources going into materials for non-English speakers, as well as poor co-ordination on the slogans campaigners were meant to be using.

“What I’ve found completely striking was the lack of awareness … they didn’t appear to have done the grassroots network building that underpins effective campaigning. You need numbers and dozens and dozens and dozens of people who can give up time and energy.

“Of course, the north shore had high volunteer numbers. They’ve got a huge retired population and people on high incomes with time on their hands … in lower socio-economic indexing areas, where are the volunteers? They’re working. They don’t have time to spend an afternoon or three on pre-polling booths.”

Libs should be wary

Former Liberal strategist and director at Redbridge Tony Barry says both sides of politics now run the risk of learning the wrong lessons from Saturday’s vote.

While there is no doubt the Yes campaign ran a “singularly spectacularly bad campaign” that relied on celebrities and corporates, Barry says it would be wrong for Liberals to assume the outcome was “somehow an endorsement of the electorate rejecting so-called woke politics”.

“I wish that were the case, but it’s not. Yes 23 lost that campaign, is the truth of it. They talked the public out of it.

“So the Liberals wouldn’t want to read too much into it and Labor would want to be very mindful that people are very outcomes-focused right now.”

Rather than symbolic gestures, they want relief, particularly on issues like housing.

“The risk for Albo is not the so-called embarrassment of losing the referendum,” says Barry. “It’s the fact that he has not been talking about housing and cost-of-living for six months, and it’s difficult to pivot back to that seamlessly.”

Barry notes the Greens campaigned at the “bare minimum” on the Voice while keeping the foot on Labor’s neck over housing shortages and rental caps.

Another Yes campaigner who went to Parramatta was frank about the culture shock they endured jumping from the eastern suburbs.

“The vibe was not great,” they said. “It was tough. Really, really tough … the feedback at times was direct and open and very negative.”

Everyone who walked past would give you a ‘You’ve got to be joking’ or ‘Not on your life’ or just, ‘Get f---ed’.

Labor managed to crawl over the line in May 2022 and form a government with only a handful of seats and the lowest primary vote in living memory. Albanese’s success was not because the electorate was in love with him. Rather, they were sick of the Coalition’s handling of climate policy and many women loathed Scott Morrison.

“A lot of the things that Labor won on are no longer front-of-mind,” says Barry.

Economic uncertainty dominates, and there are no easy fixes for Labor. Spending more money to help households risks making inflation and interest rates worse.

“They’ve come up with kind of cost-of-living gimmicks,” says Mitchelmore. “They’ll make a real difference to a few people but not enough to change the economy, not really.”

“They need the world economy to switch. They need the Ukraine war to end, they need interest rates to come down in America. It’s all beyond them, really.” (Note: this is a ridiculous comment)

At the same time, Labor can no longer shun responsibility for the economy, or blame it on its predecessors or offshore events.

“That’s changing. People are going to get more and more impatient. And if they’re not seen to be making a difference, they’ll be characterised as ineffective, so maybe it’d be better under the Liberals,” notes Mitchelmore.

Ironically, the success of the No campaign might end up saving Labor. Had the Voice got up, progressives forces would now be demanding Albanese become even more ambitious, perhaps triggering a domino effect on issues like the Republic, Australia Day or the flag.

As one Coalition strategist noted this week, Saturday’s vote puts a spoke in the wheel of such objectives. It may even save Albanese’s political skin.

Original article here