Venom
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In a show of force against Morrison on the floor of Parliament, the government lost a series of votes by 74 to 75 on procedure before a final and telling defeat on significant legislation, an upset that had not occurred in the lower house since 1941, when John Curtin had won two independents to his side and Arthur Fadden had resigned as Prime Minister at once. The medical transfer law was passed over the thundering objections from Morrison and Dutton about the risk of more boat arrivals. Morrison came very close to losing a vote on a money bill, an event that would have been the trigger for his resignation, because the amendment at one point included a cost to taxpayers and, arguably, an appropriation. Shorten stepped back from this final blow. Some of the independent MPs had pledged support to the government on confidence and supply. They agreed to remove the appropriation from the bill.
Shorten did not call for an immediate election and Morrison tried to shrug off the battering. ‘Votes will come and they will go, they do not trouble me,’ he said. It took time, but he was proven right. Labor had the undoubted mastery in the House of Representatives. It was up to Morrison to prove he had the upper hand in the world outside the chamber.
The government was pronounced doomed by a crowd of commentators, a verdict its own ministers seemed to confirm by choosing to leave the Parliament at the coming election. Kelly O’Dwyer announced her decision on 19 January and Michael Keenan did the same on 26 January, while Steve Ciobo and Christopher Pyne did so on 2 March. After weeks of rumours, Julie Bishop announced her resignation on 21 February. Craig Laundy, now on the backbench, announced on 14 March that he would go as well.
The most positive sign for the government was the success of Gladys Berejiklian and her Coalition government at the New South Wales election on 23 March, showing her federal colleagues that the path to victory was to focus on delivery and avoid culture wars. The result showed the campaign power of the NSW Liberals, who bested the famous NSW Labor machine, and it was a vindication for Morrison’s decision to hold back from a federal election until as late as possible.
While others departed, Abbott remained. Liberals feared his decision exposed the government to even greater risk. Every seat mattered on the narrow path to an election victory, and Warringah was a safe seat the Liberals feared losing to independent candidate Zali Steggall. The safest choice was for him to make way for a new Liberal candidate, a woman perhaps, but this was impossible when Abbott was intent on staying in Parliament and some of his admirers believed he was destined to be their next Opposition Leader. Yet he was at odds with his community on climate change and knew it. In the first week of March, at a candidates’ forum with Steggall, he changed his stance to declare there was no need after all to withdraw from the Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
‘We’ve got a new Prime Minister and a new energy minister,’ Abbott said.5 ‘We had an emissions obsession that needed to be broken, and it has now changed.’ The weather vane gyrated; a policy so central to the campaign against Turnbull was no longer a problem. Turnbull returned fire on Twitter, calling Abbott’s claims about coal-fired power ‘innumerate idiocy’.
No departure was as witty or disarming as Pyne’s valedictory. ‘I have seen some truly dreadful people come through here over the last quarter of a century,’ he told Parliament, before politely excluding his current colleagues. He admitted he had had a fortunate life. ‘I don’t have a log-cabin story like so many people in this place — although I did once have to get my own lemon for a gin and tonic!’6 But the bad blood in the party room was still visible. Abbott watched with no sign of amusement; Bishop left the chamber before Pyne had begun speaking. In the closest he came to a comment on the past, Pyne acknowledged the Liberals could be a ‘rambunctious’ group at times but said he was a team man and added: ‘I just happen to go for the team that is the election-winning machine.’ The Labor benches erupted at this boast, so fanciful did it seem.
The Morrison government was regaining its balance in the very week Pyne made his speech. The federal budget on 2 April gave Morrison and Frydenberg a solid foundation for the campaign by repeating the design of the budget one year earlier. It was all about tax cuts, the one idea that could unite the Coalition and highlight the contrast with Labor and its tax revenue increases. The centrepiece was an income tax cut of $158 billion over a decade, made more generous by the decision the previous August to scrap the unlegislated company tax cuts. There was barely any innovation in the plan other than matching Labor on the scale of the benefits for those on lower incomes and accelerating some of the benefits promised for later years.
Frydenberg promised a surplus of $7.1 billion in the year ending June 2020 and spoke as if this were an outcome rather than a forecast, in effect asking voters to trust him when he declared the Commonwealth finances were ‘back in the black’ and ‘back on track’ — a line taken from former treasurer Peter Costello. Two days later, Shorten responded: he rejected most of the income tax cuts for anyone earning more than the median income, offered a better tax offset for workers on lower incomes and identified a new area — cancer treatment — for higher spending.
By the time Morrison called the election, on 11 April, the competing messages were set. While Shorten pledged ‘fairness’ with more spending on services and a tax increase on wealthier Australians, Morrison relied on the fear of a Labor agenda that was greater than any manifesto seen at an election in decades. The vital Coalition attack line came on the first full day of campaigning, when Morrison released a government estimate of the higher tax revenue under a Labor government over a decade. The figure came to $387 billion.
Only a portion of this was a tax increase. The biggest single component was $230 billion from Labor’s decision to reject some of the government’s income tax cuts — in other words, Labor’s decision to keep many of the tax rates and thresholds unchanged. The other $157 billion came from measures that increased the taxes paid to the Commonwealth from changes to negative gearing, capital gains tax, dividend imputation, super, family trusts and a 2 per cent ‘deficit levy’ on incomes over $180,000 a year. Labor tried to dismiss the estimate, but it was close to Labor’s own costings, which were revealed later in the campaign.7
Morrison had defined the Labor agenda with a single number. He made sure the campaign was not only about individual tax measures but the sheer weight of the total.
Shorten was not tricked into setting out this big target. He did so consciously, proud of the Labor platform and confident it would work to his advantage.
‘You’ve got to go in with a clear agenda,’ he said on the eve of the election campaign.8 ‘And we’re outlining it. Love us or hate us or be somewhere in between, you can’t say we’re not working out the issues now. We haven’t been an opposition who’s coasted on the mistakes of the government and the division of the government.’ Shorten believed Labor’s long debate about its big policies gave him an edge over Morrison — or ‘the other fellow’ as he sometimes called him — because the Prime Minister had leapt into the leadership with too little time to devise an agenda and too many Liberals engaged in mutual hatred. ‘We’ve spent five and a half years preparing for the next five and a half weeks,’ Shorten said in this interview. ‘I do think they have fallen apart. The level of hate. They’re like addicts. They know they shouldn’t but they just can’t help themselves.’
Labor was too confident Australians would embrace its agenda and too sure the Liberals would cruel their own campaign. These two miscalculations, equally fatal, were revealed in Shorten’s words and deeds during the campaign rather than the explanations offered in hindsight. Central to the Labor approach was the contrast of a ‘big target’ policy ambition with a ‘small target’ political strategy. The first two weeks of the campaign included moments when Shorten stumbled over the sheer scale of his own plans, as if he had already banked the money from tax changes he and his shadow cabinet had approved years earlier.
At times, Shorten seemed to feel the case for change had already
been made and he had no need to prove his policies could work.
On a dry, hot day in Adelaide, after visiting Flinders University to speak about healthcare, Shorten spoke to a group of journalists who wanted to discover more about his policies. He blocked their every attempt. When James O’Doherty of Sky News asked whether he would rule out new or increased taxes on superannuation, Shorten said ‘we have no plans to increase taxes on superannuation’ despite having a stated policy of raising billions of dollars in tax revenue from super changes over a decade.9 Asked when he would tell Australians the cost of his climate change policy on the economy, he changed the subject to wages, corporate profits, health, education and tax loopholes. The reporter, Jonathan Lea of the Ten Network, remonstrated. ‘You didn’t answer the question,’ he said. ‘Answer the question, when can people know, Mr Shorten, the cost to the economy?’ Shorten ignored the question and turned to another reporter.
Labor had powerful support for its effort to advance a broad climate change policy without falling into an argument over costs and the economy. GetUp, the activist group that had done so much damage to Liberal candidates at the 2016 election, had raised $12.5 million during the twelve months leading up to the 2019 election. Most of the donations were small amounts from tens of thousands of individual donors. The group’s director, Paul Oosting, put $4 million of this towards the election campaign and could call on more than 9,000 volunteers to hand out howto-vote cards at polling stations. The group targeted conservative government MPs including Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton, Greg Hunt and Kevin Andrews. It supported Kerryn Phelps in her bid to hold Wentworth as an independent MP.
Yet the activist model was under more pressure at this election than the last. GetUp arranged ‘calling parties’ in which its members would gather at someone’s home to make automated phone calls to voters in target electorates. Volunteers in Canberra, for instance, might try to sway voters in northern Brisbane. But on climate change and another environmental issue, the development of the Adani coal mine in the Galilee Basin of central Queensland, the activists from the south showed no sign of convincing the voters in the north. The emblematic protest of this geographical divide was a convoy to stop the Adani coal mine, a group led by former Greens leader Bob Brown and his foundation, and launched in Salamanca Place, Hobart, on 17 April. The convoy reached Melbourne, Albury and Coffs Harbour over the following days and arrived at Emu Park, north of Rockhampton, on 24 April. The group held rallies in central Queensland over five days before returning south.
Liberal National Party candidates showed no alarm at the visitors and responded with ‘start Adani’ t-shirts and declarations that Queenslanders should decide their own affairs. Shorten hedged on whether he believed the coal mine should go ahead. By the time the election was over, the electorates where the LNP was meant to be vulnerable became strongholds instead. Voters in Capricornia, which includes central Rockhampton, swung to the LNP by 11.6 per cent. Those in Flynn, which includes Gladstone and Emerald, did the same by 7.6 per cent. In Dawson, where local member George Christensen had faced newspaper reports about his trips to the Philippines, the swing to the government was 11.2 per cent. And there was an emphatic defeat for Labor in the neighbouring seat of Herbert, where the LNP claimed victory with an 8.4 per cent swing. The convoy from the south looked like a lesson for the future on how not to campaign.
Morrison attacked without rest to warn voters about the full suite of Labor promises, not only on climate change but on superannuation, dividend imputation, family trusts, negative gearing and capital gains tax. This was about turning the sheer scale of the Labor election platform, including its spending promises, into a weakness.
‘He tells everybody everything they want to hear,’ said Morrison in the final fortnight of the campaign.10 ‘On everything. That means he goes around promising them everything and he doesn’t tell them the price because he’s not the one who’s going to have to pay for it.’ Morrison never faltered in his criticism of his opponent, turning every question about his own ideas into an answer about the problems with Shorten. ‘I’m quite a focused person when it comes to showing the discipline that’s necessary to keep all these things in balance,’ he said of his approach to budget policy. It applied equally to his political style. He displayed total focus and discipline, up to and after polling day.
The Coalition campaign headquarters, or CCHQ, was established in Brisbane to acknowledge the importance of holding and winning ground in Queensland. Andrew Hirst, who had been deputy chief of staff to Abbott in the upheavals of 2015, was now Liberal Party federal director and ran the campaign with deputy directors Isaac Levido and Simon Berger. They were joined by Morrison’s chief of staff, John Kunkel, and Mathias Cormann. The CCHQ team spoke at 5.30 a.m. each day before holding a conference call at 6.10 a.m. with Morrison and the core group travelling with the Prime Minister: principal private secretary Yaron Finkelstein, Liberal MP Ben Morton, communications director Andrew Carswell, operations director Sonia Gentile and social media chief Kelly Boxall, a former adviser to New Zealand prime ministers John Key and Bill English. At 6.30 a.m. Morrison held another call with the government leadership group, including Simon Birmingham as campaign spokesman.
This was repetitive work. The campaign message rarely changed. Morrison made sure his team knew the importance of talking about the economy without fail. ‘Every day I go off message, we lose,’ he told them. Hirst and his team analysed the research each morning, including qualitative findings from focus groups and quantitative research, and considered the target seats that warranted another visit from Morrison. Even random events, like an attempt by a protestor to ‘egg’ the Prime Minister at a meeting of the Country Women’s Association in Albury, did not throw the campaign off message. Morrison’s unworried response, and his help for a CWA member who had been knocked to the ground, meant the distraction was judged a net positive.
The track polling of twenty marginal seats, most of them held by the Coalition and under threat from Labor, confirmed the strategy was working. The government’s primary vote rose from 38 to 41 per cent after the 2 April budget was released and the official campaign was underway. These figures were the average of the three weeks before the budget and the three weeks afterwards. The gains were sustained over subsequent weeks, leading the CCHQ team to a stunning conclusion: they were closer than they thought to a majority.
On 10 May, with eight days to go until the polls closed, Hirst received a special poll of voters in Longman, the area on the northern fringes of Brisbane where Turnbull had suffered his devastating by-election defeat ten months earlier. The results showed the Coalition was solidly ahead. Hirst kept the news quiet to avoid alerting Labor to its danger. Six days later, Morrison made a sudden foray into Longman to meet voters without giving Labor enough time to respond. The Coalition took the seat from Labor with a swing of 4.1 per cent.
While the published opinion polls showed Labor was ahead nationwide, the Crosby Textor polling, carried out by Michael Brooks, a London-based pollster brought out for the campaign, showed the Coalition was ahead in its target seats. The final track poll had the Coalition primary vote on 43 per cent and the Labor primary vote on 33 per cent.11 This was an unusually low primary vote for Labor compared to most published polls. The final election result showed the nationwide primary votes were 41.5 per cent for the Coalition and 33.3 per cent for Labor.
The recovery was astonishing. The Turnbull government had experienced similar levels of support the previous year, according to equivalent track polling by Crosby Textor, and it also witnessed a gain in support from tax cuts promised in the budget. The Coalition primary vote had risen from 37 per cent in March 2018 to 40 per cent in May and 44 per cent in June, before falling to 42 per cent in July. While popular support had collapsed after the chaos and discord of August, the government had slowly climbed back towards victory.
Could Turnbull have kept the government in a competitive position? His supporters were sure of it; his enemies laughe
d off the idea. Every verdict on the bloodletting before the election campaign depended upon this hypothetical, yet the polling showed the Coalition was always competitive when it was united.
The Labor campaign headquarters heard no alarms to warn Shorten and his team of the trends on display on the Coalition spreadsheets. Yet there were dangers emerging, some of them on a scale the Labor campaigners did not recognise until the days after the election. The first whispers of trouble came before the campaign began, when Shorten’s chief of staff, Ryan Liddell, was told of attempts on the Coalition side to spread stories about proposals for an inheritance tax. Liddell also saw the way Frydenberg seized on the ‘death tax’ phrase as early as January.
The union movement identified the problem days before the election was called, when social media accounts began sharing false claims about a death tax. By the third week of April, with one month to go until polling day, Australia was experiencing a form of ‘fake news’ similar in style, if not scale, to the campaigns seen overseas. One screenshot purported to show Sally McManus, the secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, announcing a Labor policy. The tweet, dated 21 April, said: ‘At the Labor National Conference the imposition of an inheritance tax was passed by the majority of candidates as being a Labor objective within the term of the next Parliament. The ACTU proudly supports this initiative.’ There had been no such policy or vote by candidates. The tweet was a doctored image. Some Facebook posts claimed Labor, the Greens and the unions had ‘signed an agreement to introduce a 40 per cent inheritance tax’. No such agreement existed.
‘We were being told every single day that people were receiving messages in their Facebook accounts saying Labor and the Greens and the unions had done a deal to introduce a death tax,’ McManus said after the election.12 ‘It just grew and grew and grew.’ She called it a ‘subterranean’ social media campaign that was impossible to stop. The death tax claim, in all its forms, was boosted by hundreds of conservative Facebook accounts and could be traced to Coalition voices. Ian Macdonald, a Liberal National Party Senator, warned of death taxes under Labor on 31 January. George Christensen, the LNP backbencher, did the same one week later. By the day before the election, for every person searching Google about a ‘retiree tax’ there were thirty searching the term ‘death tax’.13