Malcolm Turnbull says Australians should not generalise “wildly” about the mood of voters after Donald Trump’s victory in the US election.
The prime minister said there will always be some disillusioned voters, but Australia’s electorate has not seen a rise in disenchantment equivalent to that in the United States.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott warned on Friday that Donald Trump’s victory should be a wake-up call for Australia, proving the country needs a strong centre-right leader.
He told ABC radio that voters who were unhappy with conventional standard-bearers in modern politics would look for alternatives.
“We have a problem. More and more people are feeling less and less represented by mainstream political parties,” he told Radio National.
“This is something that mainstream politicians ignore at their peril.”
But when asked to respond to Abbott’s claim Turnbull said at the last election in Australia there had not been a marked increase in voting for non-traditional parties.
“Well, I think the independent vote at the last election, the sort of non-Labor, non-Liberal/National vote ... was not markedly different,” Turnbull told Radio 3AW’s Neil Mitchell. “In Queensland where there was a strong vote for One Nation, it largely stepped into the space vacated by the Palmer United party.
“There hasn’t been a huge increase in votes other than for the two big parties. That’s a factual point.” he said.
Turnbull said it was important for the government to address voter disillusionment, and the best way to do that was to provide secure, cabinet government.
“If you look at one of the big issues in the last election here, it was obviously health. The ‘mediscare’. Labor’s campaign was outrageous, it was dishonest, it was fraudulent in fact,” he said.
“But the question for my party ... is why were people able to be frightened? And the answer is that they, and I think this stemmed from the 2014 budget and the [Medicare] co-payment, they felt they’d been let down, it had come as a shock, and what we have to do is rebuild the trust of the Australian people in our administration.”
Asked to clarify if he was saying that Tony Abbott had lost the trust of the people, Turnbull said he wasn’t saying that.
“No, no, Neil, you do the commentary, I’ll do the facts ,” he said.
“The 2014 budget and the co-payment proposal came as a shock. It was very, very unpopular. And it obviously had to be abandoned. But it was something that I believe, and I think it’s perfectly clear, it played into a narrative that the Coalition did not fully support public health.
“Now that is something, there’s no point kidding ourselves, we’ve got to own up to that vulnerability.
“I’m just being honest here; there’s no point in me trying to spin to you. Those are the facts. And that’s what I’m grappling with.”
He said he wouldn’t be changing his leadership style in the aftermath of Trump’s victory.
“You’ve got to be true to yourself, Neil. I am who I am. I’m a practical, pragmatic leader. I’m not an ideological leader.”
He said there were parts of Australia where employment had fallen significantly, but his government’s policies were designed to ameliorate that.
“Now, for example, Donald Trump has run a policy platform that could be described as being more protectionist than has been traditional for Republican party candidates ... having said that, from our point of view, and remember my job is to defend Australia’s interests and Australia’s jobs, the one thing we know is that free trade, particularly with the China-Australia free trade agreement, has been driving jobs and growth in regional Australia,” he said.
“One of the reasons that the impact of the mining construction boom downturn has not been as severe as many predicted is because of that uptick in exports.”
