Throwing them out or welcoming something new? – The Australian Federal Election, May 2022

When countries go to vote for new national leadership, traditionally voters tend to vote governments out, seldom actively embracing a bold new direction. In recent decades around the world there have been noted exceptions. While John F Kennedy threw out “Tricky Dicky” Nixon in 1960, it was as much a call to the promise of the emotive glamour of the young Democrat Senator from Massachusetts and his glamorous wife, Jacqueline as new policies and direction. Four years later, in Britain, the dull pipe-smoking Harold Wilson drew in an era of shabby Gannex raincoat-celebrating gloom to a British people tired of an upper-class PM, Harold Macmillan who had claimed in 1961 that Britons “have never had it so good,” exemplified by the well-meaning but decidedly out of touch Alec Douglas, First Earl of Hume, who briefly succeeded the ailing Macmillan in 1963 after the Profumo Affair.

A decade later, Australia cast off a quarter of a century continuum of the protective White Australia policy, ushering in three years of exciting change, chaotic and financially unaffordable seismic reset under Gough Whitlam, with the “It’s Time” slogan. French Politics seemed to make an emphatic step change when an all new LREM (La République En Marche) party under Emmanuel Macron strode into power with a swathe of non-politicians at his side. Five years later, the old order had set in once more, nationalist divisions rose alarmingly and the same divisiveness was once again alive and well, despite name changes. In Britain the wave of popular nationalism replaced the old order middle way conservatives when bike-riding populist Tory leader Boris Johnson stormed in with the largest majority in 2019 since 1987, only to crawl from Brexit implosion and pandemic Downing Street party scandal to successive cabinet resignations and a faltering economy.

Big political promises seldom deliver. “It will end in tears” my mother used to say when boisterous children that we were overdid the excitement of an excessively vigorous pillow fight. And so it often does. When in Australia the reforming Hawke-Keating Labor Years (1983-1996) came to an end, it was the rather dull but ultimately effective John Howard who rose like Lazarus, apparently from the dead, who replaced a Paul Keating that had simply run out of zeal. Despite that transition, history increasingly views those three immensely different national leaders as some of the most significant change agents in the country’s history, collectively enabling the country to chart its way through the turbulence of the early 21^st Century, starting largely free from debt, with a transformed domestic economy and a strong positive stream of immigration.

The Australian election of 2022 does reflect the long tradition of ‘throwing the bastards out” – the Liberal-Nationals coalition share of the Primary national vote as of Monday 23^rd May was down to 35.8%. But the newly elected Labor government primary vote also fell to just 32.8%. Australia’s complex preferences system allows the second choices to be added to the major vote such that they will likely form an outright majority in the House of Representatives with some 76 seats. The huge difference this time is a cross-bench prediction of 12 mostly ‘teal’ Independents, almost all women, who have decimated the Liberal heartland seats in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, along with 4 Greens, who have changed the face of inner Brisbane. In the COVID-isolated West Australian seats, an emphatic rout of the Coalition, with a swing against the former national government party of more than 10%, a clear message was sent that the arrogant “I don’t hold a hose, mate” PM Scott Morrison was not deserving of any further support. His support of an extraordinary Captain’s Pick candidate in the fightback NSW seat of Warringah signalled just how out of touch he is and was. Instead, the country has elected in a Labor government, led by the first divorcee Prime Minister in Australia’s history, who provided the smallest of small targets during his election campaign, with primary economic policies scarcely different from the former ruling coalition. Labor even attempted parachute politics of their own by lobbing in high profile former NSW Premier Kristina Keneally in a supposedly safe Labor seat, only to see her fail to a local candidate Dai Le, running as an independent. Enough of ignoring us, said the electorate; even to the likely new government. Parachutes can and do fail.

Australians, after drought, fires, flood and pandemic sent a clear message to the outgoing Liberals, the senior coalition party: You did not stand up to the rabble of National and right wing extremists, you let this country drift to the right without any mandate to do so and you rorted our taxpayer money at levels never seen before, breeching our trust by failing to carry through on your promise for a National Integrity Commission. Just as important, Australia’s long-established international reputation for generosity to its neighbours, for refugees and for progressive equity regardless of who was in power, lies in tatters, with a residual burden of broken relationships (-Think submarines and France), failure on Climate Change (-Think the sinking islands of Kiribati) and diminished reputation for balanced international relationships (-Think New Zealand and China).

Australia, long dependent on the power of the mining shovel has dragged the chain on climate, since its very earliest negotiations in Kyoto. That the ‘responsible economic managers’ that the Liberals have so long claimed to be have left Australia with $1Trillion of long-term-debt gives a lie to that historic charade. Housing has never been so much beyond the reach of young families, while jobs in health and education have never been so poorly strategically planned. While unemployment and interest rates may well be at historically low water marks, few but the richest in the land would take any real comfort from those numbers. The Coalition claim that one hour of work a week is being employed is clearly smoke and mirrors stuff.The election signals real change, because Australians feel their government has been a succession of distorting mirrors that have failed the next generation, while leaving Aged Care in its worst shape in recent history, despite ‘spending millions’. Seldom does throwing money at something produce many beneficial outcomes if the core reasons for failure are not addressed. The departing government slowly strangled the ABC National broadcaster over ten years, it had no constructive visible Arts policy, which it also starved under successive ministers, leaving artists and creatives in almost all fields destitute through the pandemic, while it also shuttered thousands of academics, researchers and post-graduate students and some self-employed businesses, simply by largely excluding them from support income during COVID.

The electorate has made a markedly different statement in the 2022 election: In voting-out what some would have regarded as generally moderate centrist Liberals, it has decidedly voted-in 12 Independents and most likely 4 Greens in the lower House, to say clearly and unambiguously, that Australia MUST do more on Climate policy. By contrast, in the regions the Nationals did relatively well, despite the evidence of the disastrous money-saving NBN roll-out, which left tens of thousands of homes with inadequate Internet connection during the forced home-schooling early months of the pandemic. With no lost seats in the election Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, if re-elected as leader, will likely wield more relative power in the Coalition with his 10 members, possibly forcing the Liberals to consolidate its right-leaning, often outdated policies. But the Nationals may themselves reflect on the voters’ message and elect a more moderate, more positive pro-climate leader at their next party meeting.

Meantime the electorate has demanded a new era of holding government to account through a national integrity commission and an end to sweet-talking ruinous ‘rorts’. One clear difference between Labor and Liberals was made in Anthony Albanese’s first sentences in his acceptance speech: “I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. And on behalf of the Australian Labor Party, I commit to the Uluru Statement from the heart in full.” Thus, he built on the National Apology delivered by former PM Kevin Rudd in February 2008, setting the tone for active recognition in the Parliament of Australia’s first Peoples.

Photo Courtesy of ABC News, Nick Haggerty: Albanese Acceptance Speech

So, what might the world expect of Australia in the next three years? For a start, while the House of Representatives, which in Australia is where the PM leads government, the Senate will most likely see the Greens holding the balance of Power after a half-senate election reflected much of the shift in national sentiment. One might reasonably expect that Australia will rapidly move from its pathetic 26-28% emissions reduction target by 2030, beyond the existing Labor commitment of a 43% reduction by the same year, reaching to an integrated national effort to reduce carbon emissions, including Methane, by 50% by 2030, the only possible route to containing temperature rise within 1.5°C. Prime Minister Albanese and long-time Senator Penny Wong will be flying to Tokyo within 12 hours of the abbreviated swearing-in ceremony in Government House, completed by 9.30am on Monday morning 23^rd May, with 12 seats still undecided. The important meeting of the ‘Quad’ leaders (Australia, India, Japan and the United States) will set the tone of international engagement by the new government. Senator Wong, as Foreign Minister, is committed to embrace Australia’s Asian and Pacific Island neighbours much more collaboratively than her predecessor Marise Payne. One suspects that Senator Wong’s long experience in the Upper House, a seasoned negotiator and survivor of the years of Labor turmoil, will serve Australia well, while navigating the coming years of adjustment to a more assertive China, muscling its way into a new place in the world.

Theodore White’s momentous volume The Making of the President 1960 has a closing chapter entitled The View from the White House. There are a couple of paragraphs that place perspective around the meaning of leadership in government. In the second of those paragraphs, after reflecting on the dull Taft and charismatic Roosevelts (both Theodore and Teddy), White writes, “Whether a man is burdened by power or enjoys power; whether he is trapped by responsibility or made free by it; whether he is moved by other people and outer forces or moves them – this is of the essence of leadership.” 

How Anthony Norman Albanese, the product of a single parent public housing upbringing, grasps the meaning of leadership as well as its possibilities, will mark one of the most turbulent periods in contemporary history, starting with Russia at War with the West, China spreading its influence globally while it tightens control at home, the climate changing faster than the scientists’ most dire projections, with women in Australian Parliament asserting their rightful place at the table to determine Australia’s future direction. The burden is a heavy and complex one. The opportunity for greatness is at hand.

John Swainston – May 23^rd 2022