Southerly headwinds test Abbott

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This was published 13 years ago

Southerly headwinds test Abbott

By Josh Gordon

Baillieu's victory in Victoria is a fillip for the liberal wing of the Liberal Party.

You might think Ted Baillieu's election victory was all good news for Tony Abbott and the Coalition. And the demise of the 11-year old Victorian Labor government certainly has acted as a morale booster for the Liberal Party.

First, it allowed Abbott to claim, with some justification, that the Labor brand is on the nose nationwide. Second, it will complicate the reform process for Julia Gillard. Not only will she struggle to keep the key independents happy in the federal parliament, she will need to negotiate with hostile state governments in Victoria, Western Australia, New South Wales and probably Queensland. As if her commitments relating to problem gambling, carbon pricing, hospitals, water markets and schools are not diabolical enough.

And third, Labor's loss of power at the state level will offer Abbott a chain of friendly state bases to campaign from at the next federal election.

But despite the positives, there is a dark side to Baillieu's triumph for Abbott. There is an emerging view within Liberal ranks that Abbott's aggressive and Sydney-centric style - with its emphasis on boat arrivals - has little appeal for many Victorian Liberals.

One reader put the Abbott problem to me like this: ''Petro Georgiou (former member for Kooyong) is much more in synch with the Victorian electorate than Abbott, who is seen as socially conservative, environmentally indifferent, ideologically vacuous and cynically oportunistic.''

The concern, which is not confined to Victorian federal MPs, is that far from demonstrating Abbott's effectiveness, the Victorian election result actually highlights his failings.

A destabilising internal Liberal Party memo is being circulated raising questions about how almost 250,000 Victorians changed their votes from Labor to Liberal in the three months between the August 21 federal election and the November 27 state election. The Liberal analysis contends that state-specific factors alone cannot explain the huge difference in voting between the elections. The subtext is that Abbott was partly to blame; that more Victorians would have voted for him in August if he had done a better job.

It shows a combined two-party-preferred vote for Labor of 53 per cent compared with 47 per cent for the Liberal Party in the federal seats of Goldstein and Isaacs on August 21. It then overlays the so-called ''sandbelt'' state seats of Carrum, Mordialloc, Sandringham, Bentleigh and Brighton to allow comparison between federal and state voting patterns.

In these seats, Labor received just 42 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote in the state election, compared with 58 per cent for the Coalition. ''That's an 11 per cent swing to the Libs in the space of three months,'' the memo says. ''Even allowing for voters distinguishing between state and federal issues, that's a massive turnaround in party alignment/voting sentiment across essentially the same slice of the electorate. How come?''

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The big question for Abbott is why his party's federal vote has been going backwards in Victoria.

As George Megalogenis writes in the latest Quarterly Essay, as you travel down the east coast of Australia from north to south, Labor's two-party-preferred vote increases by about 5 percentage points each time you cross a state border, from 45 per cent in Queensland at the federal election, to 49 per cent in NSW, to 55 per cent in Victoria and to 60 per cent in Tasmania.

The problem, as some Liberals see it, is that many of the potential gains for the Coalition in Queensland and NSW have already been exploited. That means a renewed focus on Victoria will be needed if Abbott has any hope of winning the next election.

As Victoria's most senior Liberal federal MP, Andrew Robb, points out, in the 1970s the Coalition controlled about 70 per cent of Victoria's federal seats, falling to 38 per cent in the 1980s, rebounding to about 60 per cent in the 1990s, levelling out just below 50 per cent after the turn of the century and dropping to just 37 per cent at the last election.

To reverse this trend could require a very different style of Liberal leadership, one more policy driven, more socially progressive, less conservative, more aligned with the traditional Liberal values espoused by party founder Robert Menzies. Abbott already knows he will need to perform better in Victoria to win the next election (and quell renewed leadership rumblings next year).

Unsurprisingly then, he has recalibrated his slogan. Gone is his pitch to ''end the waste, pay back the debt and stop the boats''. Abbott is now all about ''lower taxes, fairer welfare, better services and stronger borders'' - the sort of values that might better appeal to voters in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, rather than Queensland and Western Sydney.

Gillard could take note. Her ridiculous emphasis on western Sydney in the election was one of the biggest political miscalculations of recent times. Next year, as Gillard herself notes, will need to be about policy and delivery. Could it be the political winds are shifting south? It would be no bad thing.

Josh Gordon is The Sunday Age federal politics reporter.

Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU

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