One Nation holds the keys to Canberra

Newspoll today paints no change for Malcolm’s Turnbull’s doom, now -16 trailing Labor in a row:

Malcolm Turnbull has won back supporters from One Nation while Bill Shorten has gained ground on the Greens, as voters turn against the minor parties while cementing Labor’s lead over the government of 53 to 47 per cent in two-party terms.

The Coalition’s primary vote has increased from 35 to 36 per cent at the expense of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which has seen its support fall from 11 to 9 per cent in its biggest setback this year.

The latest Newspoll, conducted exclusively for The Australian, also reveals a gain in Labor’s primary vote from 36 to 37 per cent, at the same time as a fall in support for the Greens after the forced resignations of the party’s two federal deputies over their citizenship.

Support for minor parties is now at one of its lowest points for the year, in the wake of the Prime Minister’s message last week on national security and the Opposition Leader’s attempt to lure younger voters from the Greens with a warning about generational inequality.

Over the weekend, Paul Kelly nicely wrapped where our political parties have come to:

The Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader operate in a new politics. It is the world of Donald Trump, social fragmentation, fake news and discredited elites. But they are opposites, with rival political and emotional views of the nation’s mood.

Turnbull, a rationalist and pragmatist, seeks to prevail in a wild time of populism and polarisation — his pitch being that with false prophets everywhere he remains the nation’s safest and best bet.

Shorten by contrast rides the tide. He is far sharper and more political; almost every line is crafted to punch home his theme — that inequality is “on the March” and that Australia is being fractured by an inequality that has become the frontline economic issue. Shorten offers a milder but more sophisticated version of the Jeremy Corbyn mobilisation of the disaffected. He declares the system is “entrenching unfairness” and “accelerating inequality”, and yesterday provided a highly effective political framework Labor will take to the next election.

While Turnbull sends different, sometimes conflicting messages, Shorten is laser-focused, a political animal every minute. The Turnbull-Shorten contrast is embedded in their characters and fates.

Turnbull is PM at a time of weak wages, heavy household debt, fiscal limitations and punishing power prices, where every policy is riddled with compromise.

Shorten is Opposition Leader at a time when fear and anger are rife, fed by a disintegrating social compact, economic uncertainty, insecurity and resentment.

…Turnbull wants to take populist protectionism to the slaughter yard where it belongs. In the process he seeks to destroy the idea he is not a genuine or legitimate Liberal leader.

Shorten’s pitch is powerful, with emotional resonance. Warning that inequality “kills hope” and that “people are underpaid, under-represented” and often “too frightened to complain”, his message is that inequality is now the core threat to prosperity.

Shorten stands for government intervention in the cause of redistribution, fairness and grievance appeasement. Having pledged to increase income tax by 2 per cent for people on more than $180,000, cut back negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions, Shorten signals he wants to go further in removing benefits for corporates and better-off earners.

But it was Katherine Murphy who nailed it when discussing the Greens:

Any objective, clear-eyed assessment of the party’s current performance would conclude the Greens are not gaining ground in an atmosphere that should benefit them – an atmosphere of disenchantment with the major parties and with politics as usual.

Di Natale conceptualises the Greens as a potential party of government.

He chafes against his “inner urban pragmatist” type-casting, but it is nonetheless true – Di Natale wants to do deals when there is merit in doing deals, rather than style the Greens as a centre of permanent protest.

Di Natale is a medical doctor, and most doctors I know are possessed by the need to make things better in practical ways. Doctors aren’t professional symbolists. They want to heal and improve quality of life.

Obviously, this instinct is a considerable distance short of a thought crime.

But Di Natale has come to the party leadership at a time when public antipathy towards establishment political systems is high, and there is an appetite on both the left and the right for radicalism.

Voters are responding to politicians who can differentiate themselves from the systems they operate inside. They want a bit of movement-building and a bit of fire in the belly.

Labor, too, has made life more difficult for the Greens in a product differentiation sense by moving more assertively into redistributive territory on economic policy, and by grabbing the global inequality debate, somewhat anaemically during the federal election campaign in 2016, but more assertively in recent times.

Quite right. Di Natale and Turnbull are much of muchness. “Transactional” Kelly calls it. The rest of us see it as hypocritical.

Peter Hartcher captured the implications for the Government:

Turnbull merely wants to hold his job; Abbott wants him destroyed. But what of Nick Greiner’s warning that the government will lose office? He’s correct, no doubt, but Abbott thinks it’s irrelevant – he is sure that they are going to lose anyway.

The logic is this. The Coalition is permanently behind in the polls because its primary vote is too low, in the mid 30 per cent range. It will remain there so long as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is polling the 7 to 11 per cent that it has enjoyed since the last election. She has taken disenchanted Liberal voters away and they are not coming back. But wouldn’t most come back ultimately, through the preferential voting system? It’s possible but it’s highly unpredictable. It’s impossible to predict the sort of preference-swapping deals that Hanson might make with other parties. This is the structural vote trap Turnbull finds himself in.

So how can the Coalition raise its primary share of the vote to winning levels? One option is the one represented by Abbott. He and his acolytes argue that, if he is restored as leader, he will appeal to Hanson’s voters with an authentically right-wing appeal, with policies such as his proposals to cut the immigration intake and have the federal government build coal-fired power plants.

The other option is the one represented by Turnbull. By moving to the “sensible centre” on policies such as schools funding and health care as he did at the May budget, he will win votes at the centre of the spectrum, votes that otherwise would go to Labor. The problem with this scenario is that, so far, there’s no sign that it’s actually working. The polls have remained unmoved.

…With an election still more than a year away, why should Turnbull be so desperately chasing votes week to week? Because he himself announced the polls as his judge and jury. Remember that he said 30 losing Newspolls in a row constituted a death sentence; he has lost 15 already. And Abbott is limbering up to be his executioner.

Yep. But will Abbott be the replacement? For that we turn to the High Priestess of Loon, Janet Albrechtsen:

Dutton as leader? After rummaging through profiles, press releases, interviews, news stories, let me count the ways this makes sense. The starting point is that he is not Turnbull or Tony Abbott. That alone draws sighs of relief from despairing Liberals who are deserting fundraisers, some even asking for their money back, others withdrawing their membership, and threats of coups in safe seats.

It’s also welcome news for those outside the party who simply want a sensible centre-right Liberal government. And there’s Dutton’s second tick of approval. He’s unashamedly conservative at a time when the Prime Minister has proved himself too arrogant or deluded to invite conservatives back to the Liberal fold.

Dutton didn’t enter politics wading in the usual kiddy gene pool as a pimply faced staffer for a politician. Another tick. He came to it after working as a policeman. His CV reads like Elliot Stabler’s in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit without the hot-headed explosions — worked sex crimes, passionate, saw a side of human misery the rest of us cannot fathom. Misery that he remembers.

His colleagues tell profile writers he’s solid, straightforward, laconic, has a strong sense of self, knows right from wrong. Park that for a moment, alongside the fact that John Howard liked him right from the start.

More importantly, he’s from QLD so has the pedigree to beat back One Nation. But it will take more than that to achieve it. Creepy Pete is no boring accountant type that can make regular folks feel at least unthreatened. He is a repulsive personality of the out-riding Right that will lose the party votes in the centre. Thus his ascendancy will need to wipe out One Nation for it to make sense.

And that is the rub. For all of the insights of the press gallery, it still doesn’t get it. Or doesn’t want to. This is not a battle about Left vs Right. Nor is it about liberalism versus populism. Nor is it about scapegoating for workers disenfranchised by globalisation, as it was in the US and UK. In our case, the political flux is about the management of the post mining boom adjustment. In particular, the mass immigration program that has been chosen as the major policy offset to falling mining. It’s been loaded up to carry Australia’s entire services economy, sustaining high house prices and consumption, force injecting aggregate domestic demand where none now is indigenous.

All three political parties are custodians of this model and policy choice. There is no distinction between them. They simply support their respective capital, labour and demographic interests that benefit from the same source. But running mass immigration into an oversupplied economy generates immense tensions within all three:

For the Coalition that takes the form of One Nation, a single-issue anti-immigration breakaway movement inspired by White Australia culture wars. The Coalition is now wedged between this and its mates in business that benefit from the demand arising from more people.
Labor is wedged by falling wages and absurd house prices, a class war on workers and youth antithetic to its base.
The Greens are destitute, caught supporting an ideology that is fantastically hostile to everything that the party stands for, from meeting Paris decarbonisation targets to preserving the natural and built environments.

Viewed in this context, each of the three party’s election platforms have strengths and weaknesses.

Labor’s inequality agenda is actually an immigration management platform that uses industrial relations re-centralisation, tax re-distribution and negative gearing reform to remediate the deleterious effects of mass immigration on wages, infrastructure and house prices. It’s in the box seat to win in a landslide.
If the Coalition persists with an open borders Malcolm wedded to market principles then it will get wiped out in the election as the unaddressed impacts of mass immigration worsen living standards. More importantly, it will face existential ruin in opposition as One Nation captures the conservative counter movement against Labor’s ongoing mass immigration program beyond the election. If the Coalition changes to Dutton and cuts immigration today then it will limit the damage but still lose, though at least then it will destroy One Nation and capture the conservative counter-immigration movement in opposition. It could well be back in power in one term. If it keeps Malcolm and cuts immigration today it has a fighting chance of winning the election by holding the centre while destroying One Nation and rendering Labor’s remediation platform obsolete.
If The Greens don’t get over Paulinephobia and swing back to sustainable population principles then they may not survive as a force at all as Dick Smith et al rip it to pieces.

One Nation is the radical counter-movement in Australian politics that has grasped the nettle of our times. It now holds the keys to Canberra.