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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

It’s the job of politicians to come up with policies that'll be popular enough for them to capture voters and win elections.

So it was particularly interesting when last week, Peter Dutton announced his first policy since becoming opposition leader.

It’s something that experts, including former strategists for the Liberal party, say will lose Peter Dutton votes from the exact people they should be trying to win over.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe, on why the road map to political success is changing.

It’s Monday, March 11.

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ANGE:

Mike, last week we saw some of the first big policy announcements by the parties who want to take some voters away from the Labor government. What's been announced and what do these announcements tell us about what kind of contest we're going to have at the next election?

MIKE:

We did see a couple of things last week that could be quite significant. The Greens, for one, identified housing as a big issue. In fact, they've been identifying housing as a big issue for months, but they were more concrete in what they plan to do about it, I suppose. And clearly this is going to be pretty central to their election pitch next time around because, you know, they tend to appeal to younger voters and they tend to appeal to renters. The Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather said the Greens would see 360,000 homes built.

Audio Excerpt - Max Chandler-Mather:

“...360,000 good quality homes over the next five years, representing about 30% of Australia's existing construction capacity and 610,000 homes over the decade in addition to whatever the private sector is going to build. The public developer would employ its own town planners, architects, project managers and get the government back in the business of building good homes. Homes would be sold at just over the cost of construction, while rents would be capped at 25% of household income.”

MIKE:

So the Greens are making sure that this is well and truly on the agenda, and they're going to keep hammering it. And I think it will probably play to their advantage.

Audio Excerpt - Max Chandler-Mather:

“I think over the next few years, the entire political class is going to find out what happens when you ignore the one third of this country getting screwed over by a housing system that funnels billions of dollars into the people that don't need it right now, like the banks and property investors.”

MIKE:

In contrast with that, last week, Peter Dutton came out and made his first promise. He's been under a lot of pressure from within the party to start releasing some policies and he's now released one and that is building nuclear power plants.

Audio Excerpt - Sunrise:

“Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has dismissed the push for nuclear, saying the opposition’s policy just doesn’t add up. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton joins us now, good morning to you. Well, how big are these going to be? They're not the modular ones, are they? And how much are they going to cost?”

Audio Excerpt - Peter Dutton:

“Well, the first point is that we want to get energy prices lower. At the moment, people know that their bills are just going up and up.”

MIKE:

This was the first big promise from Peter Dutton. And, I've got to say, it's received pretty negative responses from the energy experts who say that nuclear energy is by far the most expensive option for generating power, and it takes decades to build, 10 or 20 years. There's an interesting political question here, of course, which is who exactly does he think he's going to attract to vote for this side of politics with this policy? Once I started asking that, that kind of led me to the broader question of whether Peter Dutton actually could win the election and how he might do it. You might recall that after the big coalition loss in the 2022 federal election, Dutton announced that he would henceforth focus more on outer suburban and regional seats and getting votes from the working class and tradies. And so, I basically set about trying to find out if these announcements were being informed by that change of direction, and how the demographics and the electoral map of Australia might have changed, and whether there is, in fact, an electoral path to victory for Peter Dutton.

ANGE:

And Mike, just how much has that path to the party's changed over the last few years?

MIKE:

Well, it's changed considerably. And, you know, I went out talking to some of the best poll watchers in the country this week. That's Tony Barry and Kos Samaras from RedBridge, the ABC's Anthony Green, John Black up in Brisbane. And they say the political map is only changing more and more. If we look at Dutton's path to victory, and what that looks like at the next election, well right now the coalition only holds 55 seats and they would need 76 to win government, which is a pretty big ask. So, perhaps we'll do just a quick whizz around the country to see what these people told me.

Let's start in Queensland. Duttons home state. Great conservative stronghold. They currently hold 21 of 30 seats. As far as the experts are concerned, there's really only one possible pick up there, which is the seat of Blair, which is around Ipswich.

In the Northern Territory, Antony Green says the coalition has a chance of picking up one seat, which is Lingiari, which is that big one that takes in Alice Springs, takes in most of the territory. The result there depends on the turnout among Indigenous voters, obviously. Because if there's a big turnout of Indigenous, Labor wins. If there's not, Labor probably loses. So there may be one pick up for the coalition in the Northern Territory. Western Australia, which has turned into quite a strong Labor state in recent years, it's not easy for the coalition there. There are two marginal seats there that the liberals could pick up. But to get anything more than that, they would need a swing of 8% or more.

In South Australia, there's only one seat within striking distance, that's Boothby. In Tasmania there's one, maybe two. And in the ACT, where the conservatives held no seats, highly unlikely they will win any seats, frankly, the ACT just doesn't like conservatives. It's a very, very liberal place. So that brings us back essentially to the two big states, New South Wales and Victoria.

So if the coalition's to win, they have to do it there.

In New South Wales, they're about ten Labor seats that, on paper, look marginal, you know, fairly narrow results. But not all of them are vulnerable, of course. There's another big bunch of seats in Sydney's west, in the Hunter Valley and up the central coast, of places that the Dutton strategy would seem to be targeting, right. It's outer suburban slash regional. It's heavy with tradies, it's light on migrants. There's a lot of people who are insecure about their futures so there's a chance of picking up a few seats there. Which brings us back to Victoria. Out on Melbourne's fringes, there's a few seats that match the Dutton prescription. Working class, tradies, etcetera etcetera. So that's the context. The context there is that it looks pretty hard for the coalition. Maybe not impossible, you'd never say anything is impossible in politics, but it looks highly unlikely that they will pick up enough seats across the nation at the next election. And this is kind of what makes Peter Dutton's announcement about nuclear power so interesting, politically. I mean, clearly the big issues of the moment are economic insecurity, cost of living, housing crisis, with a side of climate, perhaps. And Peter Dutton gives us nukes? It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense and it also doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, frankly, in terms of the long term demographic shifts that are moving away from the conservative parties and eating into their electoral support. So, it's a puzzle.

ANGE:

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure the Liberal Party wants to win over voters. So, just to get into the strangeness of this approach, why would they be making a pitch that doesn't line up with where the country's going?

MIKE:

Well, you tell me and we'll both know. When I spoke to Tony Barry from Redbridge, who I might add is also a former deputy director of the Liberal Party in Victoria and a former Liberal strategist. His take on this was that Duttons nuclear policy amounts to, and I'm quoting him here: “the longest suicide note in Australian political history.” This was informed also by the fact that Redbridge has just undertaken a big survey of Australian's attitudes to energy policy, and they find that only about 35% of people actually support nukes. And that is much lower among non-liberal voters, among young folks, among women, and also in the state of Victoria. Now, this is very interesting because as Barry points out, Australians under the age of 42 are much more progressive and they're staying progressive as they age, and only about 1 in 5 of them votes Liberal as things stand.

So, in answer to your question of why they would do something so unpopular with the people they win over, Tony Barry says his former colleagues in the Liberal Party are obsessed with what he calls internal audiences. That is the right wing echo chamber typified by some of the Murdoch press and particularly Sky News After Dark. And they're also unduly involved in internal factional warfare. And the right of the party is clearly cutting up particularly rough in Victoria.

So long as the coalition focuses on those things, the big winners of the demographic shift are going to be Labor, the Greens and the minor parties and the independents.

ANGE:

After the break, why all signs are beginning to point toward a minority government.

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ANGE:

Mike, we've been talking about how the electorate has been fracturing in recent years, and the major parties can't count on dominating the field anymore. But I guess as more Australians turn towards minor parties and independents, how does that change who has a better shot of being the next Prime Minister?

MIKE:

Well, it does shift the equation quite a lot actually. You're right, this demographic shift is a problem for both Labor and the Coalition, both their primary votes, long-term downward trend. You know, roughly a third of people now go to a minor party or an independent. This is a problem, like I said, for both sides, but it's less of a problem for Labor. It's in a better position because it gets a much greater flow of preferences. It gets preferences from the Greens. The coalition, on the other hand, has to count on preferences from the likes of, you know, Pauline Hanson's party, Clive Palmer's party, people like that who don't do so well. So the coalition, if it wants to win, can't rely so heavily on preferences. And the experts I spoke to, including Tony Barry, said that to be in any way competitive, they had to have a primary vote. That is, a first preference vote of 45%, roughly, if they wanted to have a shot at winning and where they are now is around 38%, so they're at least seven points off the pace. The minor party and independents are helping Labor, not only by directing preferences, but also by actually taking Liberal seats, as we've seen. When I spoke to John Black, who's a former Labor senator, sure, but a long time ago and these days he does, sort of, demographic research, and the way he put it was that the Dutton strategy is picking up blue collar blokes, as he called them, no doubt about that. But, A- they mightn't be in the right seats and, B- the big demographic that the conservatives have to capture, that everyone has to capture, is the female professional demographic, which is getting bigger, which is the demographic that tends to vote for the teals. That was the basis of teal support.

ANGE:

Right, so even though the Liberal Party faces a bigger threat as these kind of demographic changes happen, it still does sound like a challenge for Labor. How does a declining primary vote affect Anthony Albanese and his plans? And, you know, I assume he wants to have a second term.

MIKE:

Well, absolutely, and you’re quite right. Albanese is certainly no fan of the Greens. You know, he still always calls them the Greens political party.

Audio Excerpt - Anthony Albanese June 2023:

“For the Greens political party, this isn't...”

Audio Excerpt - Anthony Albanese February 2024:

“...isn't that the Greens political party...”

Audio Excerpt - Anthony Albanese June 2023:

“But the Greens political party have formed...”

MIKE:

Just to remind everyone that these are just other professional politicians, this is the subtext there. But the truth is he's being forced into dealing with the Greens and the other parties more and more, and most of the experts I spoke to said all indications point to a minority government being more and more likely in the future. Of course, things can change and, you know, governments can always blow up. We've seen that happen with a whole series of recent governments, where internal tensions or, you know, external shocks destroy them. But based on how things look today, a minority government is entirely likely at the next election. And that would be a significant change for the country. The last time we had one, was the Gillard government back after the 2010 election. And famously, the Gillard government was forced to agree to deal with the Greens and independents over the course of that parliament on lots of things that we probably wouldn't have seen. For example, Australia had world leading carbon trading scheme. We saw legislation passed to protect journalists' right to keep their sources confidential. There was, you know, money spent on hospitals that hadn't been spent before. It tends to be the case that when you have the likes of the Greens, they're very much in favour of much bigger social spending than even Labor. So that's the kind of thing we might get again.

ANGE:

I suppose a minority government is a huge risk for Anthony Albanese because, as you say, the last time it happened, you know, the coalition turned it into a huge target. They really were not happy with that arrangement. But do you think with voters being more supportive of independents and the Greens today, that Anthony Albanese may, kind of, have no choice but to warm up to the idea that Australia will have more minority governments in our future?

MIKE:

Well absolutely, and the chances of the conservatives winning the 21 seats that they need are pretty remote. Labor only clings on by a whisker. So it would really only need for Labor to lose a couple of seats and for the independents to maintain the strength they have now and bango-o, we're straight into minority government.

If we did get minority government, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, plenty of countries in Europe function just fine with multi-party governments. The other thing, of course, is that they tend to have stronger social safety nets, better social services, and of course, higher taxes to pay for them, because that tends to be what happens when you get small progressive parties, as part of a government.

So Labor has had to work with a lot of these people already, and so they are gradually coming around to it.

If you have a quality cross-bench, the result is often better policy. And I suspect that the public, as they watch and see the teals in particular, acquitting themselves so well, and, you know, there's some pretty impressive people in the Greens as well, that the public is warming to the idea. It's the way of the future. Get used to it.

ANGE:

Mike, thanks so much for your time today.

MIKE:

Thank you, cheers.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today...

US President Joe Biden has begun his campaign for re-election in earnest, releasing an ad referencing his age.

In it, he says: “Look, I’m not a young guy, that’s no secret, but I understand how to get things done for the American people.”

Biden and Donald Trump are the oldest candidates to contest a US presidential election, beating the record they set 4 years ago.

And,

Heatwave conditions across south eastern Australia are continuing today, with millions experiencing record temperatures.

Over the weekend, the Pitch music festival paused and ticket buyers urged not to come, because of extreme fire risk; and the Moomba festival was canceled.

Conditions are expected to ease Monday.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am, we’ll be back again tomorrow and my guest will be journalist Stan Grant, speaking about racism, power, and how the media responded to the Sam Kerr allegations. See you then.

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