Ken Phillips
Abbott's hidden votes
It's important to understand what’s really been happening in the fight in the coalition over the last fortnight. It’s been a fundamental battle to secure the core constituency that normally wants to and will vote for the coalition.
This core constituency was deserting them. The hard heads in the Liberals realised this and were panicked into action. The Nationals had realised this some months ago and had already begun to move into the constituency vacuum that was opening. The election of Tony Abbott is intended to fill the vacuum.
The Turnbull tactic of appealing to the political middle ground as defined by Rudd’s ALP has been discarded, confirming that the federal coalition has learned from the entrenched electoral disasters that have defined their state colleagues for more than a decade.
The state coalition parties have made the mistake of thinking that all politics is about the middle ground. In being middle-ground obsessed they have failed to differentiate themselves. They have become a pale imitation of their Labor opponents, persistently bullied by Labor into political corners. Differentiation has been at the margins rather than fundamentals. It’s been the state coalitions’ electoral deaths.
Abbott is from the Howard mould – which means defining what you stand for as core values. Liberal South Australia Senator Corey Bernadi made this clear in a Lateline interview last week.
The art of politics is to secure your base around policy substance and simple articulation of what the policy means. Rudd’s team do this well. From a secure base the electoral task is to both inch into the middle ground and seduce the middle ground to come to you. The middle ground wants to be seduced. They do listen to arguments and will shift if convinced. This is where my own organisation's members, the self-employed sector, is so important.
Rudd has demonstrated a recognition that elections cannot be won without securing the politically sceptical and unaligned self-employed in Australia – all 2 million of them. Just as this group has no entrenched loyalty to any one firm, they largely have no loyalty to any political party. They shop for the best deal; business or political.
Rudd specifically courted this group the moment he became opposition leader in late 2006. He held tight to his union and (non-crazy) left-leaning constituency and targeted ‘Howard’s battlers’ – mainly those who are self-employed. Rudd’s big spend on the ‘education revolution’ is in truth a grab to keep the self-employed tradies working and voting Labor.
Abbott knows his brief. He must define and articulate the coalition’s core values. He spent time working this through in writing his book Battlelines.
He’s probably the standout coalition candidate capable of securing the coalition’s political base and avoiding complete electoral destruction in 2010.
Securing the base won’t win the coalition government, however. The seduction of the middle ground will be harder. Inside the coalition this starts by repairing the marriage between conservatives and liberals. It then involves working out the ‘deals’ that will be communicated to the key self-employed and other swinging voters. Abbot can't afford to lose sight of this part of the electorate for a minute.
Ken Phillips is executive director of Independent Contractors Australia and author of Independence and the Death of Employment.
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