How The ALP Can Save Face Over Aboriginal Affairs

The ALP has trumped nearly everything that the Coalition has put on the table this year, from broadband to climate change to IR. What’s more, they’ve done it before the Coalition, so that they always seem ahead of the game. This week’s new policy on Indigenous Affairs is bold and volatile, and while it’s also being considered to being a clever wedge tactic, just like 2001’s Tampa, it is politically smart for a simpler reason. It puts the Government back on the front foot.

With no new Indigenous Affairs policies to show, the ALP has made the wise but reactive response to support the measures. This will ensure that their vote won’t plummet like it did in 2001, but some of the soft polling numbers will drift back to Howard over this bold new strategy.

For Rudd and the team to get back on the offensive, they need to be arguing vehemently that the Government offer appropriate services in the NT Aboriginal communities to deal with alcohol addiction. They need to say something like that it will ensure that the vacuum of time and money from the forcibly sober won’t be wasted on drugs, or on going to the white towns to drink. This needs to be done before the Coalition cough up the details of their plans. It will make the ALP out to be not only more compassionate, but also more stable. To work with the compassion angle, they shouldn’t talk about rehab as an election promise, but to lobby the Government to make sure that they happen.

And if NT Chief Minister wants to take one for the team, she should continue to complain about how she wasn’t told about the plans until they were announced to the public. It will paint the Coalition as being brash and impulsive, and reinforce Rudd’s image as being a safe pair of hands.

The ALP should pray that Noel Pearson keeps quiet for a good few news cycles, though it isn’t likely. If the most respected advocate for Aboriginal rights comes out in verbal support of the Government, it will undermine Labor’s position as being the best party to deal with Aboriginal affairs.

Even with this damage control, Labor will take a hit in the polls, but it will soften the blow considerably.

Have a Seat: Mitchell

It’s going to be near impossible to tell what the safest Liberal seat after the election will be, but it certainly won’t be Mitchell. The North-West Sydney seat is the safest Liberal seat in New South Wales, and their safest urban seat in the whole of Australia. But the seat will have a swing to the ALP disproportionate to the rest of the country.

Alan Cadman is currently the second-longest serving member of the House, behind Phillip Ruddock and tying with John Howard. But while Ruddock has served as MP for both Parramatta and Berowra, Cadman has been in Mitchell for the length of his parliamentary career, dating back to 1974.

Redistributions since 1974 have made the seat safer and safer for the Liberals, but the last sitting member for Mitchell was the ALP’s Alf Ashley-Brown. A lot changes over thirty years, but it’s difficult to determine how much of a personal vote Cadman holds over the general electorate.

Presumably a lot more than among the Liberal Party branches. The incumbent found that he was so low on votes for the preselection that the only option was to retire to save face. In his place came 29-year-old Alex Hawke, protégé of right-wing powerbroker David Clarke, engineer of NSW Opposition Leader John Brogden’s downfall, and former president of the Young Liberals. Hawke is considered such a vicious right-winger that Howard sent Bill Heffernan to the seat to back a more moderate candidate. Howard’s old Chief of Staff Arthur Sinodinos and former Premier Nick Greiner also opposed Hawke’s preselection.

Considering how the resignation of Brogden seriously undermined the Liberal Party’s efforts in the New South Wales election, it’s hard to think that Hawke will be embraced by the electorate with open arms. Hawke claims to be a practicing Christian himself, but it’s hard to think that the dirty tricks he has been so rigorous involved in will appeal to Sydney’s Bible Belt, including Mitchell’s own Hillsong.

There’s no candidate for Labor in the seat yet, but if they had any brains they would endorse somebody nothing short of being honourable and decent. The Bible belt aren’t as rusted-on Liberals as Alex Hawke would hope, and while it is still highly unlikely that the Libs will lose this seat, they are due for a massive backlash.

Have a Seat: Gilmore

Any person working in advertising and marketing will tell you with confidence that nobody uses the expression ‘to the max’ any more. Correction: Not only will one person in advertising tell you that, but they will use it themselves when quoted in a newspaper. It brings down any confidence that the ALP candidate for Gilmore, Neil Reilly, is more in touch than the incumbent of eleven years, Joanna Gash.

In the front page story of the local paper, the South Coast Register, they talked about how Joanna Gash had put an anti-nuclear power petition on her website, and in the interests of balance, a pro-nuclear petition as well. Neil Reilly said she was “indecisive to the max”. Even the independent candidate quoted in the paper who changed his name by deed poll to ‘None of the Above’ sounded more credible.

Reilly also conceded in the article that Gash had her finger on the pulse and knew every pothole in her electorate.

His ALP biography page talks of Reilly’s history in the advertising industry, his two years in the army and his support for Meals on Wheels. It neglects to mention the long history he has in amateur acting, including a number of starring roles in the Arts Theatre in Cronulla. It’s all well and good to keep some things about a candidate quiet, but there’s not much point if the amateur theatre webpages found on Google outnumber all the others.

It would take an annihilation of today’s AC Nielsen poll’s proportions (57-43) to put Reilly into Gilmore, but with what seems to be a dud candidate, it might not be so.

Is this the best candidate the ALP can field in a seat occupied by Labor as recently as 1996?

The Downturn

It turns out that the Galaxy poll at the start of this month was more than just a statistical anomaly. The 53 to 47 two-party preferred result was the lowest Labor have had since the promotion of Golden Boy Kevin. Surely a glitch, an error. Perhaps the 1000 or so people called in the poll were all AWA-holding, 200-grand a year Western Australian miners? Newspoll’s 60-40? That’s more like it.

We were spoiled for Newspolls in May, and the fortnight or so that we’ve done without it has forced the newspapers to dwell on the results from Galaxy. And then one from Morgan. Were an election held today, Labor would still win, albeit narrowly, and despite losing seats in WA. But the results of this month have taken the wind out of their sails, and allowed Howard to avoid a suggested tap-on-the-shoulder, or from another perspective, allowed Costello to avoid a hospital pass.

Save for the Keating interview on Lateline, there hasn’t really been anything lately to bring Labor down in the polls. So why the bad results?

The only argument I can think of is that perhaps the ‘union bosses’ campaign of the Coalition is beginning to stick. It isn’t much of a valid concern. Kevin Rudd has less of an union affiliation than Paul Keating did. Much, much less than Hawke. When interviewed on Insiders during the ALP National Conference, a look of fear crossed Rudd’s face when questioned about his own union membership. The implication was that he was unsure about whether he was still a member of the union that he used to be a part of.

If Latham was unappealing because he was volatile, then Rudd may become unappealing because he is nice. The way Joe Hockey has been talking about union bosses implies that they would be far too brutish for little Kevin Rudd to handle. All of a sudden voters do mind that Rudd is calm, bookish and mild-mannered.

Polls from AC Nielsen and Newspoll will come out in the next few days. We’ll get a better impression on June’s results once we get a consensus from all the pollsters. In the next few weeks, Rudd and the unions need to have a dispute, and Rudd needs to come out triumphant.

A Comparison

I am yet to speak to somebody who finds Speaker of the House David Hawker fair. Sometimes I wonder if the Prime Minister could be hitting Anthony Albanese over the head with a golf club, and still be considered to be in order. Below is a YouTube clip of Albanese trying to raise a point of order, and being denied. Regrettably the entire incident, which took place two weeks ago, wasn't there.



And here's a comparison with the Speaker in 1995, Stephen Martin, who puts up with being told he 'ought to be ashamed of himself' by the then Opposition Leader.

Have a Seat: Adelaide

Being a backbencher immediately behind the lectern is not dissimilar to being in the front row at the Oscars. You must always appear to be paying attention to the person speaking, rather than catching up with reading, correspondence or heckling, as most backbenchers do. This is because you are practically always on camera. And while the front row at the Academy Awards is usually filled with the best known and regarded people in the industry, the lectern-adjacent backbench position seems to be reserved for those most in need of public attention.

There are four ALP members in direct camera view during Parliamentary Question Time, and all are in very marginal seats. All the candidates defeated sitting Coalition members in 2004, despite the Mark Latham factor, and all hold their seats with less than 1.5%. Julie Owens defeated the disgraced Ross Cameron in the seat of Parramatta, but a redistribution has made the seat notionally Liberal, with Owens needing a swing of 1.1% to retain it. Steve Georganas won on preferences in the Adelaide seat of Hindmarsh by only 108 votes, while Richmond’s Justine Elliot beat Doug Anthony in the NSW North Coast seat by a margin of 1.5%.

Pride of place in the lectern-adjacent backbench is given to Kate Ellis, from the 1.3% marginal seat of Adelaide. Ellis is the youngest member of the House of Representatives, and according to a report by Andrew Leigh and Amy King, is the best looking ALP member in the caucus.

And while the current polls are indicating that none of the lecture-adjacent backbenchers on the ALP side have anything to worry about, it certainly doesn’t hurt to imply on the television news that three-quarters of Labor backbenchers are women. In truth, the figure is only 36.6%.

The marginal seat tactic isn’t used on the Coalition side, and for good reason. There are no marginal seats on the Coalition side that are currently held by women, save for two from retiring MPs Trish Draper and Jackie Kelly. Instead, the seats are three-quarters filled by women candidates. After the promotion of Christopher Pyne several months ago, the positions have been filled by Sussan Ley, from the ultra-safe seat of Farrer, Louise Markus, whose seat’s recent redistribution gave her an extra 10.4% buffer, Teresa Gamboro, from the safe-ish North Brisbane seat of Petrie, and the sole male in the pack, Kym Richardson, from the ultra-marginal seat of Kingston.

Ultimately, it seems that the Coalition value the appearance of gender balance more than they do promoting their marginal members. Women in the Coalition in the House of Representatives make up only 19.5% of the total, not a good statistic for the party that got in last time round because of the female vote. But Kevin Rudd has greater appeal to women than Mark Latham, and it is reflecting in the polls. Women making up three-quarters of the Coalition’s lectern-adjacent backbench is a wise statistic, but it doesn’t help that those three backbenchers outnumber the women in cabinet.

Correction

It turns out that the Socialist Alliance candidates I listed were the candidates from the 2004 election. That pretty much undermines my argument.

What on Earth is holding up Liberal Party preselections?

ALP preselections have been all but completed, with only the safest Liberal seats as yet unfilled. Union bigwigs in the safe seats and atop the Senate tickets, celebrity candidates in the marginal and not so marginal Liberal seats and high profile ALP movers and shakers left unallocated because of the sheer amount of talent wanting to join the Labor juggernaut. Frontbench material (Combet in Charlton and Shorten in Maribyrnong) has been parachuted into the blue collar seats and famous distractions (Bailey in North Sydney, McKew in Bennelong) dropped into the blue ribbon seats. Not that Bennelong is as blue ribbon as it used to be.

But there’s 63 seats up for grabs for the Coalition, and though they would be lucky to win any of them (save for the vacant and completely redistributed Calare), they have only endorsed 15 candidates in seats that they don’t already occupy. These positions belong to the ultra-marginal Labor seats, especially in Western Australia, where the Coalition is still ahead in the polls.

But nobody’s been endorsed in ALP frontbench seats like Griffith, Lalor and Lilley. It seems that the Coalition isn’t even going to try to distract the Rudd dream team from their nationwide duties.

Meanwhile, the Socialist Alliance has endorsed candidates for 25 seats across the country already. Sure, none of the candidates stand any chance at all, but if one of the smallest political parties in the country can preselect 25 candidates (not including their Senate hopefuls), then why can’t the biggest?

On a brief note, Socialist Alliance’s top-of-the-ticket Senate candidate Ray Hayes, who scored a total of 536 votes in 2004, looks nothing short of homeless in the photo on the party’s website.