When compared with Brexit or the Trump ascendency, Australia’s election on 2 July may appear beige. But look closer and there are similar currents swirling through this marathon eight-week campaign.
Ten months ago the Liberal-National Coalition was led by the socially conservative onion-eating Tony Abbott, the man who reinstated a long-defunct honours system to knight Prince Phillip and kill his own leadership. But with the elevation of Malcolm Turnbull to the prime ministership in September 2015, the Coalition reached for the other end of the spectrum. He is the most progressive person in the conservative party room, a man known for his support of marriage equality, a man who describes himself as a feminist. A former merchant banker and barrister who entered public consciousness with his successful defence of the Spycatcher case. A silvertail with a silver tongue, a business background and a liking for technology.
But like David Cameron in Britain, his bigger task within the Coalition – along with winning government – is uniting his party. Cameron lost the argument. While Turnbull looks like winning the election two days out – polls show him inching ahead of Labor in the final week – it remains to be seen whether his party will unite behind him.
Challenging Turnbull is Labor leader Bill Shorten, a former union official who assiduously made his way up the Labor party ladder. Shorten is a numbers man who swung votes first against the former prime minister Kevin Rudd and then against the former prime minister Julia Gillard, in favour of a return to Rudd. He had been roundly panned as an opposition leader until Turnbull’s honeymoon polling numbers started to slip.
The prime minister needed two things to bed down his leadership: an electoral mandate or a win in his own right and a majority in both houses of parliaments to deliver an agenda.
To achieve that, Turnbull changed the rules for voting for Senate candidates, hoping to get rid of minor parties and independents at this election. Then he called a double-dissolution election – putting all senators up for election instead of the usual half – because the Senate refused to pass the Australian Building and Construction Commission legislation. The political point was to nail the construction union, a key ally of Labor, but the electoral reality was to halve the votes required to get into the Senate. In this election, anything could happen.
In this climate Australia launched into an election campaign on 8 May – less than a week after Turnbull delivered his first budget, which promised $50bn worth of tax cuts for small business and large corporations over 10 years. This formed the basis of the Turnbull agenda, to promote “jobs and growth” through innovation. Shorten’s Labor agenda centred on health and education, described as “putting people first”.
Of all the Australian states, Queensland has had the most dominant hand in recent election outcomes. Shorten began by flying straight to northern Queensland, spending the first week in marginal seats facing the Great Barrier Reef. Shorten targeted public schools to push his $37bn education policy. Every day he swept through classrooms, picking up children, doing interviews in school playgrounds.
In contrast, Turnbull began his campaign in the fruit market stalls of Melbourne, before moving on to what became a signature event – small innovation events to push the government’s “jobs and growth” mantra. The smaller, vetted events often had Turnbull walking around a room with a microphone, interviewing bright young entrepreneur types about their clever ideas. His catch-cry – “There has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian” – became a joke, delivered at family and business gatherings across the country.
Candidates fell by the wayside. In the first week, the Labor and Liberal parties both lost little-known candidates for not declaring their full histories to their parties. A Liberal candidate resigned because he forgot to tell the party he owned a brothel. In week two it was revealed Labor frontbencher and powerbroker David Feeney had failed to follow parliamentary guidelines by not registering a $2.3m inner Melbourne property. Feeney decided to fly all the way to the nation’s capital to go on to Sky News with one of the best television interviewers, David Speers, where he was promptly skewered. He did not know current Labor policy and sadly declared his situation “the biggest own goal of the campaign” thus far. Feeney has rarely been seen since.
The Liberal party’s immigration minister, Peter Dutton, made an equally pointed entry into the campaign while hoping to contrast Labor’s asylum seeker policy as weak. Refugees would simultaneously take jobs and lie in unemployment queues.
“These people would be taking Australian jobs, there’s no question about that, and for many of them that would be unemployed, they would languish in unemployment queues and on Medicare and the rest of it,” Dutton told the Australian population – about half of which was born overseas or has a parent born overseas.
Rather than recant, with the right of the party watching and the progressives waiting, Turnbull polished the Dutton message. “They are from dreadful, devastated, war-torn regions of the world and many of them, large percentages of them, have no English skills at all,” he said. “Many of them are illiterate in their own language. Many haven’t completed high school. That is no fault of theirs … What the Labor party is proposing to do, as you know, is to double the refugee intake.”
Shorten slapped both down but got little credit for it.
The Australian federal police chose the middle of the election to raid the offices and homes of Labor staffers over leaks from the National Broadband Network – a government project highly contested and formerly run by Turnbull as communications minister.
Also around the halfway mark, a major storm cell intervened, killing three people. Australian beaches and rivers raged, in one case tearing waterfront houses away and flooding inland areas. Leaders briefly stopped campaigning to tour the damaged areas.
The political storm, though, was building in South Australia, a state ravaged by the collapse of manufacturing industries such as steel and car making. In response, independent senator Nick Xenophon, who has been in the state and federal parliaments since 1997, has established his own party. The Nick Xenophon Team threatens to make as big a dent as the storm cells, despite the Labor and Liberal parties refusing to preference him. Polling has shown he could take up to a third of votes in some seats and may hold the balance of power in the Senate.
Xenophon is not the only minor party or independent threatening the status quo. Two of the former independent MPs who helped Gillard form minority government, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, announced they would attempt comebacks in safe National party seats. Windsor is challenging the agriculture minister and deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, in his former seat of New England, while Oakeshott announced a lightning fast campaign in another NSW regional seat. At the other end of the political spectrum, the rightwing Pauline Hanson is standing for the Senate in Queensland. She has a high chance of getting a seat.
As the weeks stretched on, the treasurer, Scott Morrison, relished his role of government attack dog. He held shouty press conferences and launched comic negative ads about the dangers of a Labor government – such as the $67bn black hole, which was quickly scaled back. After widespread ridicule, by the middle of the campaign, the attack dog conferences were over.
In the second half of the campaign, Labor then confirmed it would run higher deficits ($16.5bn) in the next four years and backflipped over several government cuts it had vehemently opposed.
In spite of winning two out of three political debates, it was about this point that Shorten’s campaign started wobbling. Several difficult press conferences ensued. While Shorten looked much more confident campaigning on the ground, with much more contact with ordinary voters – including a bear hug from a woman named Margo – it failed to translate into momentum.
Conversely, the Liberal party was hit with revelations that its MPs paid an electoral allowance into a party company called Parakeelia, which in turn donates back to the party. Some called it money laundering. The Liberal party was stonewalling but it failed to derail the campaign.
By the day of the Brexit decision, Turnbull declared it would create uncertainty and shock. Minor parties and independents were the last thing the country needed.
“So there is no cause for Australians to be alarmed by these developments,” he said. “However, there will be a period of uncertainty and some instability in global markets.”
The take-home message since then has been one of stability. Turnbull nuanced his signature statement by the time of the final Coalition rally came around – with a nod to the Brexit vote and the potential of a Trump-Clinton campaign.
“There has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian,” he told Liberal supporters.
“But only if your optimism and confidence is matched with a clear-eyed understanding of what makes the economy work, what makes businesses invest and hire, and an ability to see the world as it is, not how you would like it to be.”
After eight weeks of campaigning, there has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian voter. If only to get it out of the way.
