Could the Albanese government’s hopelessness get it re-elected?

My column in the Financial Review on Friday was about Peter Dutton’s suggestion of a referendum to allow the government to deport dual citizens convicted of serious crimes. I said that while the idea had some merit, with a federal election a few days away from being called, it was a strange time for the opposition leader to start talking about the subject.

I also said that if the Coalition ever did have a referendum on deporting criminals, it could add a few other topics. Such as whether we should even allow dual citizenship in the first place. (My view is we shouldn’t. I’ve never understood how one person can owe allegiance to two, or more, different countries. There’s no limit to the number of foreign countries of which an Australian citizen can have citizenship.)

I suggested that Net Zero would also be a good issue for a referendum. Usually a position on Net Zero isn’t the sort of thing you’d make the subject of a referendum. Still, a referendum on it would at least mean there was some debate on whether a commitment to Net Zero is in the country’s best interests.

In The Australian a few weeks ago, former treasury official David Pearl put it well:

With China, India, Russia and now the US not committing to cutting emissions, our paltry efforts are being swamped by the rest of the world. In the annals of Australian public policy disasters, our climate folly has to take the cake. [I think the Covid lockdowns do. Net Zero is second.] Yet our political leaders and public service oligarchs tell us that Net Zero – far from being a multi-trillion dollar economic deadweight and threat to our standard of living – is the key to our future prosperity. This is doublespeak that would make Orwell’s Big Brother blush…

So that leaves Peter Dutton. I think he knows Net Zero should be dropped. But he is afraid of upsetting the denizens of Warringah and Kooyong, who seem to derive their sense of moral superiority from the pain suffered by the battlers.

After my piece I got quite a few messages from Coalition MPs and staffers about the last part of my column.

Since Malcolm Turnbull’s time as prime minister, the Liberal way of doing policy is to accept the lowest common denominator that causes the least discomfort to anyone. Anything contentious has been put off to another day. Vigorous debates have been sacrificed on the altar of party unity.

At this year’s election, the Coalition’s plan for nuclear energy will at least be a Coalition policy the public will have heard of. Other than Scott Morrison’s promise during the 2022 campaign to have the government censor “misinformation”, it’s difficult to recall a single Coalition policy or pronouncement from any of the past three federal elections.

When Tony Abbott was removed as Liberal leader, his colleagues accused him of having too many policies. Since then, the Liberals have spent the past decade over-compensating.

The final two sentences, in particular, caught the attention of MPs.

Perhaps the Liberals have convinced themselves that the Albanese government is simply so bad the Coalition doesn’t actually need any policies to win the election. Time will tell.

It would be ironic if the Albanese government’s hopelessness somehow got it re-elected. In the absense of the Coalition presenting clear and different policies from the Labor Party, voters could end up sticking with the status quo.

In January bookmakers had the Coalition favoured to win the election. As of this afternoon on Sportsbet, Labor is the favourite. A successful $1 bet on the ALP to form government (either with a majority or in a minority) would pay $1.80. A successful bet on the Coalition would pay $2. Obviously, the election is still close, but those odds do reflect a feeling that the Coalition’s lack of policy direction is slowly catching up with it. As my friend Nick Cater wrote today about the opposition leader’s budget reply, ‘Peter Dutton’s speech on Thursday evening will be the most important he has made in his 23 years in federal parliament.’

Australia’s politics is often described as a ‘two-horse race’. It’s a competition and realistically only one of two teams can win. The description of politics as a race is accurate as far as it goes, but politics as a football game might be a better way of seeing what’s happening between the ALP and the Coalition at the moment. In football, what you do depends on what your opponent does and vice versa. And how well you play depends on how well your opponent plays. A good team can be dragged down to its opponent’s level. There are academic papers on it. (Not that an academic paper is necessarily determinative of anything.)

Google the title of this paper, ‘Competing with Lower Level Opponents Decreases Intra-Team Movement Synchronization and Time-Motion Demands during Pre-Season Soccer Matches.’

Researchers tracked the movement of players in a Portuguese top-tier professional soccer team during six pre-season matches. Two matches against each of a top division team, a second division team, and an amateur team were measured. The results were not surprising. The better the quality of the opposition, the better the team played.

The higher amount of time spent in synchronization when competing against better teams may be explained by the great demands imposed by higher-level opponents. It is possible that these demands might enhance the need for collaborative work in order to gain an advantage over the higher-level opponents in both attack and defence game phases… The results also suggest that decreasing the opponent level tends to lower the required movement synchronization. When preparing the pre-season fixtures, teams should be aware that playing against opponents of lower levels might not present sufficient stimulus for tactical and physical development.

In layperson’s terms, playing a lower-level opponent allows you to take it easy. Which is what the Coalition has done. On top of that, there’s also a feeling that if the Coalition loses this year’s election, a likely Labor/Teal/Greens minority government will be so bad that the Coalition will definitely win in 2028. There’s a certain logic to this thinking, but a great deal of damage will be done to the country in the next three years.

As much as the establishment in this country smugly tells itself and the public, ‘We don’t want a Trump/Musk/Melei in Australia – and we don’t need one’, after three years of a Labor/Teal/Greens administration, a Trump or a Musk or a Melei might be what the country will need.

Recommended watching and reading

This year is the twentieth anniversary of the publication of one of the world’s cited research papers, ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’ by John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University. The paper is free to read, and you can find it here. (I hope it doesn’t apply to the paper on soccer teams that I’ve just been talked about.) This is a brilliant discussion with Ioannidis from a few days ago, ‘The legacy of Covid-19 policies’. It’s a conversation as much about the politicisation of science as it is about Covid.

This next recommendation also talks about Covid, but it’s not because of Covid that I’m mentioning it. As of January this year, the great Toby Young is a member of the House of Lords in the UK. (Young was nominated by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch who also nominated Nigel Biggar, who is now in the Lords as well. ) Last week Toby gave an outstanding speech, ‘A Day of Infamy’. The first half is about Covid, and if you’re reading this, you probably know it all already – including that Australia had more excess deaths than Sweden. It’s the second half of the speech that I want to draw your attention to. Toby asks a question I’ve often pondered as applied to Australia.

So, why did they [Conservatives] prove so spineless? I should point out that it wasn’t just conservative politicians, but lots of conservative journalists too, who heartily endorsed the lockdown. Even people in Right-wing conservative think tanks [not the Institute of Public Affairs of course!], people on our wing of the movement – members of our tribe! – become lockdown enthusiasts…

But why did so many people in this movement – our movement – embrace this catastrophic policy? I can think of three reasons.

First, I think it was a yearning for the approval of the metropolitan liberal intelligentsia. Being at odds with the BBC, most national newspapers, the Civil Service, the majority of the political class, the Great and the Good etc, in almost every public debate isn’t as much fun as it sounds.

Being cast as evil Tories, as not caring about the poor and the dispossessed, of putting profit before people, of shilling for the oil and gas industry – it takes its psychological toll. With the pandemic, here was an opportunity at last to be on the same side as the chattering classes, to bask in their approval. ‘See! We’re not as evil as you think. We don’t want to kill granny either.’

I fear that for many of our friends, that opportunity was irresistible.

I won’t spoil the rest of it for you – you can read about the other reasons why the Conservatives [and the Liberal Party] abandoned freedom here on Toby’s The Daily Sceptic website. If you haven’t already you should subscribe to the sites daily emails and if you donate £50 a year (about $100) you can access special exclusive content.

Finally, I wouldn’t usually recommend a video of two Kamala Harris supporters in America talking to each other – but it’s a fascinating conversation that’s received a lot of attention. It’s Ezra Klein of The New York Times interviewing Democrat pollster David Shor about why Trump won. There are many aspects to the analysis, but for me, there’s one standout. Of the four categories of American 18-year-olds who voted in the election: white men, ‘nonwhite’ men, white women, and ‘nonwhite’ women, a majority in each of the first three categories voted for Trump. Shor said:

…the thing I am most shocked by in the last four years – is that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the Baby Boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to become potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced may in 50 to 60 years.

Thank you for your support.

kind regards John