Liberal leadership | Andrew Robb makes important contribution
Former Minister and Liberal Party State Director Andrew Robb’s opinion article on the election result is worth reading, particularly in light of the Liberal leadership contest set to play out this week.
Robb essentially argues that the party need not overreact to the result—it was all Trump’s fault, he suggests. What he fails to explain, however, is why the Australian electorate is so skittish—so prone to shifting quickly and in large numbers in response to events far removed from domestic concerns. Even so, his article is an important background contribution to the Liberal leadership battle.
(Note: Andrew Robb is now something of a controversial figure in Australian politics due to his role in the leasing of the Port of Darwin to the Chinese-owned company Landbridge. Darwin is a critical security region for Australia and hosts a rotating contingent of US Marines. The Port is essentially situated in the middle of major troop and naval exercises.
Robb—a clever tactician—was, apparently, the paid lobbyist employed by Landbridge to help persuade the Northern Territory Government to approve the lease. He maintains a low profile these days, despite his past reputation as a strategic genius.)
Robb’s article ran in The Australian Financial Review this morning and is reproduced below:
Robb's article ran in the AFR this morning and is reproduced here:
Don’t believe the spin – the Australian election was Trumped
I’ve had enough of the misreading of the election result. It was not about Labor’s strategic brilliance but rather voters’ response to Donald Trump’s wrecking ball.
I have no wish to rain on anyone’s parade, nor excuse the inadequacies of the Coalition’s federal election campaign, but I’ve simply had enough of the misreading of Saturday’s federal election result.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, his colleagues and supporters are grinning widely because winners are entitled to be grinners, and I congratulate them.
And, of course, Labor members are entitled to spin the result any way that suits their political purpose; they are in politics, and how you position your result, win or lose, can be material because the next campaign begins the moment you finish the last. Just ask Paul Keating regarding his 1993 winning election night declaration that “this is the victory of the true believers”. It became a powerful symbol of his arrogance that led to the Liberal Party’s biggest ever election victory three years later, and the beginning of John Howard’s 11 years as prime minister.
So while the political parties have their job to do, so do the political commentators. Their job is to cut through the spin and, to the best of their ability, objectively present their assessment of what happened, why it happened and how it happened. Their job is not to use the result to reinforce their own political prejudices.
Labor’s election win is truly a huge one; a victory it will savour for decades to come.
It is a win that invites many accolades for Albanese and the party.
But the size of the win and the speed at which political fortunes changed in the space of virtually 10 days in early May should at least prompt some commentators to ask: “why”?
Furthermore, given that just three days before the election concluded, a poll reported that a significant majority of the voting population, many who went on to vote Labor, said it did not deserve to be re-elected to government (much less with a thumping majority). This warranted some considered analysis.
When you add to that Labor’s three years of broken promises on power prices, living costs and mortgages, the housing crisis, uncontrolled immigration, the neglect of national defence, the loss of nearly a year of governing with the costly and hugely divisive Voice campaign, a forecast of 10 years of budget deficits, the spread of violence and the wave of antisemitism, recalcitrant unions, burgeoning red and green tape and the related failing “renewables plus storage” experiment, you would think something was amiss here.
Yet on Saturday night’s political panels and subsequent media coverage, we heard or are reading an endless stream of “strategic brilliance”, “acute sense of raw politics”, “Australia has changed”, without any serious assessment of how Labor turned a sow’s ear into a silk purse virtually overnight.
There’s no reference to the fact that through January, February and March, Labor government MPs thought the Coalition could not win, but were privately expressing great concern that the party was heading for a loss of several seats and would be confronted with handling a very difficult minority government for the next three years.
The fact is that such an extraordinary turnaround in polling, as we witnessed in early May, does not happen without a major, unforeseen consequence emerging.
In this instance, of course, it was US President Donald Trump, as he traversed the globe with his tariff-led campaign of revenge, entitlement, coercion and economic destruction.
Trump threw his wrecking ball around from April 2 to April 9 as he imposed tariffs on 185 trading partners, ranging from 10 per cent to – in China’s case – 145 per cent.
The Australian election was called on March 28. Five days later, Trump started his onslaught.
In the first week of March, the Roy Morgan national poll (the longest-running political poll in Australia) had the Coalition on 50.5 and Labor on 49.5 for the two-party-preferred vote.
Just over a month later, after Trump’s global onslaught, and a little more than a week into the campaign, the same poll had the Coalition at 45.5 and Labor on 54.5 for the two-party-preferred vote – an unheard-of turnaround in a month, and a result that matched the actual election result four weeks later.
The huge Labor win was not the result of “strategic genius” or a reward for a job well done; it was because voters adopted the instinctive human response when confronted with a big global development, over which they had no control: “stick with the devil you know, rather than change to the devil you don’t”.
In such circumstances, incumbency enjoys a huge advantage.
An identical phenomenon occurred just days before our election in Canada. Two months ago, the incumbent government there was 20 points behind the opposition and had been so for many months. It was heading for a landslide defeat.
When Trump attacked Canada, the incumbent government responded in a way all Canadians would expect. As a result, it wiped out the huge 20 point-deficit and held on to government. The opposition leader lost his seat.
Labor was the political beneficiary of being in power when Trump began his unbelievable campaign to tear down the American-built international trading system that has served the world so well for 70 years.
Australians are right to be deeply concerned. We are only at the beginning of this Trump escapade, and no one knows where or how it will end. It is a source of great uncertainty.
Embracing incumbency is an understandable and defensible response to this situation.
My conclusion is that within the first 12 days of the campaign, most voters had made up their minds, and for many that meant voting for the incumbent so that they did not have to deal with further uncertainty – in the form of a change to a Coalition government or a Labor minority government. The subsequent poor Coalition campaign just served to reinforce the Trump-inspired early disposition.
This in no way undermines the legitimacy of the Albanese government. However, understanding why many people voted the way they did is important because it pinpoints the priority expectation of many – the Albanese government will be overwhelmingly expected to provide stability.
This result, therefore, is not a blanket endorsement of Labor’s policies, as many of those created very significant instability and uncertainty in people’s lives. Just remember that right to the end, despite voting for Labor, a huge majority were reported as believing that Labor did not deserve to be re-elected.
Andrew Robb was Australia’s minister for trade and investment 2013–16.