If the opinion polls are correct, on 7 September Australians will vote to end six years of Labor government, returning the conservative Liberal-National Party to power.
That they are doing this in the 22nd year of continuous economic growth to a government that successfully navigated Australia through the global financial crisis goes against all conventional logic.
Starting with the government of Paul Keating at the end of 1991, Labor has overseen an economy that has outperformed just about every country in the OECD, but as Election Day approaches, Australians are gripped by a strange neurosis.
Rather than bask in their good fortune, they are prepared to punish the government that has engineered it.
At just 5.7 per cent, unemployment in Australia is moderate, interest rates are at record lows, the government is one of a select few still with a Triple-A credit rating, wages are rising and living costs have fallen.
Yet the electorate is anxious, pessimistic and deeply divided.
The election pits Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s centre-left Labor Party against the Liberal-National Party coalition (also known as “the Coalition”) led by Tony Abbott.
Rudd seized back the top job from Julia Gillard – Australia’s first female Prime Minister – on 27 June , the culmination of a long insurgent campaign by his supporters after Rudd himself was removed by Gillard in an overnight coup almost exactly three years earlier.
Rudd, a Mandarin-speaking technocrat, led Labor to an historic victory in 2007 which ended an unbroken spell of 11 years by Australia’s second-longest serving Prime Minister, John Howard, who was thrown out of parliament by his own constituents at that election.
Happy recession, grumpy recovery
A little over a year after coming to power, Rudd was faced with the emergency posed by the global financial crisis.
His government took the brave decision of investing in a Keynesian stimulus package that warded off a recession and paved the way for Australia to quickly rebound from the downturn while the rest of the developed world languished behind.
This quick-thinking is a major reason for why Australia’s economy has been so strong, yet Labor has been haunted ever since by its failure to sell to the public what a significant achievement this was.
In the words of prominent political journalist and author George Megalogenis, Australians have enjoyed “a happy recession and a grumpy recovery”.
“We exceeded our wildest expectations and were able to continue growing when the rest of the world had a calamity,” he says.
But with clear signs that the growth is slowing and unemployment rising, Australians are beginning to feel uneasy.
For most of the past decade, China’s rapid economic expansion pushed up iron ore and coal prices, feeding a massive level of investment in the development of new mines and jobs, particularly in Western Australia.
But as China’s growth has slowed, it has become apparent that Australia’s own economy has become overly reliant on mining with no Plan B. And unlike many other resource-rich countries, Australia does not have a sovereign wealth fund into which commodity earnings could be invested for the national benefit.
An attempt to introduce a new royalty on resource profits, which would have been re-invested into nation-building projects, failed after strong opposition from multinational mining companies.
Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs are falling at an alarming rate. Over the past decade, 112,500 jobs have been lost in manufacturing, and the sector’s share of total employment has fallen from 11 per cent to 8 per cent.
A form of the phenomenon known as the Dutch Disease has taken hold as the high value of the Australian dollar in recent years, which has not only hurt local manufacturing, but also tourism.
Meanwhile, despite the global success of Australia’s finance sector, service jobs are being sent offshore at a rapid pace.
Clever politics, needy voters and in-fighting
Part of the explanation for Labor’s gloomy outlook lies in clever politics by Abbott, who with the assistance of a compliant media dominated by the newspapers of Rupert Murdoch, has been able to turn Labor’s navigation of the economy through the crisis into a negative by highlighting the rise of government debt and the fiscal deficit since 2008.
But some political observers also believe something deeper is happening: a long-term realignment of the Australian mindset.
After over two decades of continued economic growth, it appears that voters are expecting more from their government and are less satisfied with what they are getting.
“We’re in the 22nd year of an uninterrupted growth phase and voters have become a little more needy,” says Megalogenis, whose award-winning 2012 book The Australian Moment examined how the national economy has developed since the 1970s.
“They’ve become a bit greedier and harder to please. Labor hasn’t been able to buy a vote in the six years. Every dollar it’s spent it hasn’t been able to extract a single percentage point gain in an electoral sense.”
But the explanation also lies in the civil war that Labor has waged with itself since 2010.
The 2010 coup that replaced Rudd with Gillard deeply divided both the party and the electorate.
Gillard went to an election soon afterwards and managed to negotiate a minority government, but the circumstances of her rise to power left a bad taste in the electorate’s mouths.
Her three years in office will be most remembered for the introduction of a carbon tax that she had previously promised not to implement.
Meanwhile, Gillard was the victim of a shrill and sexist campaign both inside and outside Parliament.
Her government delivered lasting reforms, such as a national disability insurance scheme, but with opinion polls consistently showing that Rudd was more popular with the public than both Gillard and Abbott – and that Labor faced an electoral wipe-out if she remained in the job – a desperate Caucus decided to give Rudd a second chance on 27 June.
This produced an immediate bounce in the polls for Labor, but as signs emerged that the honeymoon was beginning to wane, Rudd called the election for 7 September.
Rudd’s reputation as a strong performer on the hustings has failed to translate into a swing towards Labor, although his return may be enough to prevent the Coalition gaining control of the Senate.
His opponent, Tony Abbott, is an arch-conservative who openly courts the racists, bigots, and misogynists of the far-right.
Despite almost four years in the job, Abbott remains loathed by a large section of the voting population, particularly women.
Abbott has generally avoided articulating an alternative economic plan, preferring to focus on the government’s perceived shortcomings.
But there are some clear differences between the parties on some key issues, including workplace relations, support for industry, tax, and spending on public services.
Unions and migrants
Still scarred by the 2007 election result and the campaign by the union movement which harnessed community concerns about an unprecedented attack on workplace rights and conditions, Abbott has sought to downplay industrial relations, promising only minimal changes and a review of the system by the neo-liberal Productivity Commission.
Yet the vocal public lobbying of influential business and employer groups make it all but inevitable that should he win the election, he will implement policies that will weaken collective bargaining, undermine core entitlements and conditions, and reduce the ability of workers to be represented by a union.
The union movement also fears that it will be dragged into a Royal Commission on union governance, after allegations of low-level corruption by a handful of officials in one mid-sized union.
Another policy ‘failure’ that has been exploited by Abbott has been an increase in the numbers of asylum seekers arriving on boats from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Iran via Indonesia.
Although this is a trickle rather than a ‘flood’ (there were 15,800 asylum claims lodged in 2012, a fraction of the 479,400 claims made globally), Abbott has successfully played on fears about border security to engage Labor in a political race over who can be the cruellest to vulnerable refugees.
This has resulted in both parties adopting a form of John Howard’s long-discredited Pacific Solution: Labor would send asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea for indefinite detention, while the Coalition would send them to the tiny island of Nauru.
The fact that these policies are not only morally irresponsible, but possibly illegal under international law does not seem to matter to either major party, who can both see votes in appealing to the latent xenophobic and racist attitudes buried in the outer suburbs of Australia’s largest cities, and in regional Australia.
Kitchen table issues
For all his negativity and general unpopularity, however, the election appears to be Abbott’s to win, says Nick Economou, who lectures in politics at Monash University in Melbourne.
He says that although the refugee debate grabs headlines, most Australians will vote based on the ‘kitchen table’ issues of living costs and job security.
Again, this is where Labor should have the upper hand, but the chaos and instability of the Gillard minority government and the battle with Rudd has taken its toll.
“I don’t think Australians want vision but what they want is a competent government,” says Economou.
“They want a government that is coherent and unified enough to provide a sense of direction. We’ve had three wild years in Australian politics where the party of government has been in disarray right from the start.
“None of these things reinforce any sense of confidence in the community about the party in government so what we’re seeing is the Australian public preparing to shift over to the Coalition.”
There is still a fortnight to go until the election, and with a superior package of policies, Labor could still get across the line.
Abbott’s reliance on simplistic slogans in lieu of real policies, his penchant for verbal gaffes, and unanswered questions about how he would fund his policies while also sticking to a pledge to return the Budget to surplus, could all derail his campaign.
However, barring a disaster in the last fortnight of the campaign, Tony Abbott is likely to become Australia’s 27th Prime Minister on 7 September with a comfortable majority in the lower house.
Ironically, he will inherit an economy that may struggle to maintain its performance under Labor, and it may not take too long for many of those who voted for him to wake up and ask themselves, “what the hell have I done?”
