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With the Voice referendum suffering from confused messaging, no obvious leadership, no co-ordination, festering competitive tensions between and within Indigenous camps and a ruthlessly misleading No campaign, Anthony Albanese confronts a wicked dilemma.
If he throws himself body and soul into the campaign to try to rescue it while cost-of-living pressures remain paramount in the minds of voters, the danger is he will lose more votes than he gains. If he holds back and things continue as they have, the referendum will go down and he will be seriously damaged. The recriminations will be bitter and enduring.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has a lot riding on the Voice referendum.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
While they might be sympathetic to the plight of Indigenous people, voters still uncertain about the Voice will resent a prime minister seemingly distracted from addressing their pain or diverted from managing the economy to fight for a constitutional change so contested by fair means and foul.
It is one of the many fears of those intimately involved in the campaign, who still believe it is salvageable, even though the vibe in the latter part of the year when the referendum is expected is bound to be hostile whether Albanese is prominent or not if – also as expected – prices remain high, unemployment rises and recession beckons.
Defeat in such an environment could trigger a spiral that even the wily Albanese will find difficult to reverse.
So far, a combination of good luck and good management has helped keep the government in the game. But the opposition’s tactics have driven the Coalition down a particularly low road to hunt with vigilantes of the right and align with the rent-freeze-seekers of the left, while simultaneously assuring middle Australia they are fighting divisions rather than inciting them. This could ultimately produce results.
Illustration by Dionne Gain.Credit:
Having failed to make inroads by attacking the government’s handling of the economy and forgetting that not so long ago they had been lecturing on decency, due process and presumption of innocence, Liberals decided on a new strategy.
They forgot women began deserting well before most people had heard of Brittany Higgins, most determinedly after then prime minister Scott Morrison demanded the sacking of the Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate over a trifling matter, then refused to take the advice of Liberals (including Simon Birmingham) and Nationals (former senator Ron Boswell) to apologise and ask her to stay.
They ignored the fact that at almost every point of the Higgins saga, it was Morrison’s cack-handedness or the incompetence of his office that deepened the crisis.
Any legitimate questions for Labor senator Katy Gallagher about what she knew and when she knew it fizzled quickly before the issue exploded in the faces of the opposition when Dutton was forced to expel Victorian Liberal senator David Van following sexual assault allegations against him first by Senator Lidia Thorpe, then by former Queensland Liberal senator Amanda Stoker. (Van strongly denies the allegations and no formal investigation has been conducted.)
Unfazed by such an unmitigated disaster, their lust for revenge unsated, ignoring the advice of colleagues who warned it looked like they were “baying for blood”, female Liberal MPs – the black dames rather than black knights (see Monty Python) of political swordplay – continued to lead the assault on Gallagher, ignoring the harm they might be inflicting on victims or on the party itself.
There was considerable internal disquiet about such a grubby exercise. Not only moderates like Andrew Bragg, new senator Maria Kovacic (whom Marise Payne could apparently barely bring herself to congratulate after she had secured the Senate vacancy caused by Jim Molan’s death over Payne’s preferred male candidate) and Bridget Archer warned about the moral and political consequences of such a strategy.
Conservatives like Victorian senator James Paterson argued they should be concentrating on the economy, once impregnable Liberal territory. No longer.
Reflecting on the party’s plight recently, Dutton told Liberals: “We’ve been here before. We came back. And we will come back again.” Maybe.
We will know on July 15 if Dutton’s tactics are working, if the Coalition manages to secure a swing in Queensland against the government at the Fadden byelection, where negative campaigns are duking it out. The Coalition is linking Albanese to rising crime as well as the cost of living. Labor has reprised its Aston ads largely focusing on Dutton and a poor choice of candidate.
Cameron Caldwell, forced to stand down as a state candidate previously because of questionable behaviour, was preselected for Fadden, vacated by Stuart Robert, who has been accused in parliamentary proceedings of questionable behaviour.
Female Liberals guffawed when they heard Dutton publicly reassure Caldwell that: “I don’t think we could have preselected a better candidate.”
Labor has doorknocked or called about 2500 households and while the general mood is not violently anti-Labor, campaigners report no signs they will win or cut deeply into the LNP’s 10.6 per cent margin.
That hasn’t stopped a few panic-stricken Liberals fearing they could lose the seat and others predicting – in some cases hoping – their vote will suffer and that could force change. Liberal women say unless Dutton focuses on interest rates and childcare, he has no chance of winning back female voters.
At least five men are now circling Karen Andrews’ seat of McPherson after her decision to retire. Alarmed at the state of the party, Andrews has decided to be proactive.
Even before Van’s expulsion, she had arranged for Stoker to attend an event in her Queensland electorate on Sunday, July 2. Andrews is hoping that rather than run for state parliament, as has been suggested, Stoker will put her hand up for McPherson. That is unlikely.
If she doesn’t and if Angie Bell fails to ward off a (male) preselection threat in Moncrieff, the Liberals could end up without a single female representative from Queensland in federal parliament.
Meanwhile, there was a sliver of benign news for Labor from the canvassing in Fadden so far. Voters were not mentioning the Voice. When it was raised with them some people thought they were talking about the TV talent show.
Niki Savva is an award-winning political commentator and author. She was also a staffer to former prime minister John Howard and former treasurer Peter Costello.
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