Re: 2016 Federal Election
What happened on 7 September?
Source: Mumble Blog
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com...ralian/comments/what_happened_on_7_september/
WHY did the Labor government lose last month’s election?
A government bowing out after two terms in trying economic circumstances does not necessarily require much explanation, but this was a big defeat, against a lacklustre opposition led by a man most voters found unpalatable.
It certainly wasn’t Tony Abbott’s promise to repeal the “carbon tax” that did it. If anything this just got in the way of Australians’ task of voting for change. Apart from a couple of days in the final week of the campaign, that policy barely got a mention.
(If some Australians told exit-pollsters the “carbon tax” drove their vote, and those polling gurus took their rationalisations at face value, that’s the polling gurus’ business.)
On 7 September people voted to throw out the Labor Party—despite this action necessitating an Abbott prime ministership and likely cuts to government spending—because they thought it had been a very bad government. That’s bad in a very important way: it was sending the country broke with its reckless spending. And if the Coalition was being less than truthful about the harsh medicine that would be required, so be it.
That is, people’s belief in the Coalition’s debt and deficit story determined the election result.
It didn’t have to be that way, and after Kevin Rudd returned to the Labor leadership in late June it looked like it wouldn’t be.
Straight away Rudd challenged Abbott to a National Press Club debate on the economy and debt and deficits in particular. The opposition leader wisely declined but for the next few weeks Rudd continued hammering the theme.
On 8 August, five days after the election had been called, I wrote this post called “Why Labor will (probably) win”. Understandably, it’s been thrown back at me a few times since (although I did reverse the prognosis two weeks later).
I’d been overseas for two weeks and away from television exposure to the campaign and had assumed Rudd was continuing his incumbency-generation project.
But two days after that post I watched (online) my first Australian television in more than a fortnight, the formal Press Club debate between Rudd and Abbott, and was surprised, nay appalled, at the prime minister’s insipid performance.
That first debate was the only one with a large television audience and it had the potential to set the tone of the campaign. I had expected to see an incumbent prime minister exercising authority, demolishing the Coalition’s debt and deficits narrative at every opportunity.
Instead the viewer saw a wimpy wannabe, avoiding the topic, droning instead about GST increases under a Coalition government. What a loser; Rudd was running as an opposition leader, an insurgent, which I suppose is where he is most comfortable.
(This was my next post.)
Rudd returning to form was one important element in the result, but at a fundamental level the ALP never really tried to argue the debt and deficits story. Or at least never competently.
Labor and its supporters seemed determined to make the argument about the correctness of Keynesian economics; they wanted to convince people that they cushioned the effects of the downturn by going into deficit and the Coalition by contrast would have dragged the country in recession.
The problem with this is it implies they had a choice about going into deficit, which fuels the Coalition’s implicit (if not ever actually stated) argument that if they had remained in government there would have been no budget deficits.
The government had two simple sets of figures they could use: (1) Peter Costello’s four-year forward estimates of government revenue in his last budget 2007–8 and (2) actual government revenue in those years. The drop in receipts alone after the global financial crisis was enough to drive the budget into deficit.
(For elaboration see here.)
Only in fiction do single events in debates turn election outcomes, but imagine Rudd had called Abbott on that, perhaps forcing the Liberal leader to deny he had ever claimed a Coalition government would have delivered surpluses.
The Coalition was vulnerable on this and probably knew it but the ALP let them off. Here, for example, was new Treasurer Chris Bowen in debate with Joe Hockey on ABC’s Q&A in August, responding to a question from the audience:
“Well, let’s talk about debt. Yes, the Government increased expenditure during the Global Financial Crisis. Why? Because it was the right thing to do. It got us through without recession.
“You know, around the rest of the world, they don’t call it the Global Financial Crisis. They call it the Global Recession. We don’t call it that because we didn’t have one.
“And one of the reasons we didn’t have a recession was because we increased spending and, yes, we went into debt. But let’s look at the debt ...”
Hockey presumably couldn’t believe his luck. In truth any governing party would have racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, but Labor couldn’t bring itself to make this point.
Amazing.
The thematic blunder of Rudd’s retreat on the economy was driven, I am told, by party “research”.
The second major reason for the Coalition’s big win was all Rudd’s doing: those flaky, quickly-thought-up feel-good announcements. They were so obvious they reminded voters that Kevin believes in nothing.
Because Australian elections are contests between two leaders, Rudd’s undignified behaviour during the campaign—his public stature was at rock-bottom by the end—made Abbott more prime ministerial.
(The public service heads’ intervention at the end of the second-last week was disastrous as well, but we’ll never know if it would have happened had the near-unanimous expectation of a change of government been absent.)
With the Abbott government having gone quiet about a “budget emergency”, Labor people are crying foul. But politicians have been telling whoppers about their opponents forever.