THERE is something about election campaigns these days that is akin to a meal of boiled rice: you eat your fill but still remain curiously unsatisfied. This should be something like a national conversation, but for some reason many of us feel that we aren’t part of it. Why?
The answer lies in the way modern election campaigns are run – and specifically the focus on marginal seats. And herein lies a paradox. Thirty years ago, at the 1980 election, traditional voting patterns were very much in evidence, with the ballots cast for the Coalition parties and the Labor Party accounting for almost 92 per cent of the vote. By 2007, this had slipped to 85.5 per cent, which suggests an erosion of traditional support bases and a potentially larger pool of unaligned voters to be targeted. Labor set the pattern when it responded, in 1990, with a strong environment policy deliberately targeting the growing vote for the Greens.
But this focus on unaligned voters hasn’t translated into an attempt by the major parties to convince more of us to buy their goods. It’s more a case of strategists identifying which particular voters in a handful of key electorates need to be persuaded to change or to repeat their vote from the last election. Instead of a national conversation on the big issues in which we can all take part, we have a series of private chats, informed via focus groups and local polling, that effectively exclude the vast majority of the population. It is a legacy not just of modern campaign techniques but also of the electoral system of single-member electorates in the House of Representatives.
Nowhere was this seen more clearly than in the election in South Australia earlier this year, in which the Labor government suffered a statewide swing of almost eight per cent yet lost just two seats. With swings of up to 16 per cent in some safe seats, with Premier Mike Rann weathering a 10 per cent swing and Treasurer Kevin Foley a swing of almost 13 per cent, Labor saved its hide by concentrating its resources in marginal seats. Its heartland might have been unhappy, but the waverers were sufficiently persuaded to stay with the party. It was a quite extraordinary victory for the party’s political strategists in the face of a swing that in most circumstances would have delivered a change of government.
Given that campaigning costs – especially television advertising – are high, the parties really only go through the motions of a catch-all campaign; hence the glibness and the slogans in lieu of hard policy. While the leaders like us to believe they are talking to all of us, the reality is that we are merely overhearing a conversation addressed to a very small number of voters, perhaps as few as a couple of thousand people, whose perceived concerns become paramount in strategic calculations.
The problem, however, is that no two marginal seats are identical. Indeed, the issues in marginal seats might be highly antithetical. A key seat with a large number of environmentalists in inner Melbourne, say, might be vital, but so too might a seat in Tasmania where jobs are seen to be threatened by heavier environmental regulation.
The government’s majority is currently fifteen, but redistributions since 2007 have made this now a notional eighteen, which makes the Coalition’s task commensurably more difficult – it now needs to make a net gain of nine seats to take government. Of the most marginal seats held by Labor, ten (including the notionally Labor seats of Dickson and Gilmore) are held by less than 1 per cent, which equates to a very small movement of support being necessary to bring about a change of government. The Coalition will also have to be mindful of shoring up its support in its most vulnerable seats, six of which are held by majorities of less than 1 per cent.
The seats that come to mind in this campaign as the key marginals are as diverse a range as could be found, and this presents a real challenge to party leaders trying to craft a coherent message that somehow addresses often contradictory wishes.
For example, why are we hearing such a lot about immigration and population targets? Who is most concerned about immigration as an issue? A look at the electoral map might throw some light on that. Bennelong in Sydney, which Labor took from John Howard in 2007, has experienced a big demographic shift in recent years, with its proportion of non-Australian-born residents growing rapidly, buying property and, some fear, pushing up property prices. The growing number of international students attending Macquarie University and living in the electorate has also added to the growing international flavour and prompted some local concerns, which show up in party polling. A similar though not so pronounced effect is being measured in Deakin (Labor-held by 1.4 per cent), in Melbourne’s east, with its growing immigrant population and its proximity to Monash University. Strange as it may seem, this is probably where the parties are picking up most concern about asylum seekers.
The notoriously volatile seat of Bass in Tasmania’s north, where sitting candidates have been rolled at five of the past six elections, is held by Labor with just a 1 per cent margin, and local sensitivities to job security and the pulp mill debate are paramount. It was here that John Howard’s abortive hospital takeover in 2007 backfired, and this time Bass will be a prime reason why Labor goes softly on environmental fanfare. This, of course, is likely to have repercussions for Labor in its inner-city seats in Sydney and Melbourne.
While Australia weathered the economic storms of the global financial crisis better than any other country, there is still a perceived nervousness about economic management. Why do Andrew Robb and Joe Hockey continue to insist that debt is a problem? Again, the electoral map provides a clue: debt levels have an impact on interest rates, housing affordability continues to be an issue and the fastest-growing area in Australia is prime marginal-seat territory – Longman in Brisbane’s north, held by Labor by just 1.9 per cent, the sort of seat where the Coalition needs to achieve traction if it is to take government. Many of the newcomers to Longman since 2007 are first-home buyers, heavily committed and anxious about interest rates.
The big long-term issues are pushed aside in all of this, and some big issues of immediate concern, such as Australia’s commitment to the increasingly problematic war in Afghanistan, do not even figure (except of course under the dubious rubric of national security, just like asylum seekers). We have seen yet another deferment in decisive action on climate change, a semantic shift from “big Australia” to “sustainable Australia” minus any policy detail, and a belated recognition that Brisbane is slowly being strangled by population growth without adequate transport infrastructure.
Pork-barrel populism is far from dead; it has just taken on new form. Meanwhile, we all try to tune in to a conversation that really does not include us – or not the vast majority of us. It is perhaps little wonder that political disenchantment runs high. •
