Without decent policies, Labor would get fewer votes, not more

The main reason so many voters have given up on politics and politicians is their belief that modern pollies care more about advancing their careers than advancing the wellbeing of the nation.

So, were Labor to decide that it lost the election – which dodgy polling encouraged it and everyone else to believe it was sure to win - because it made itself a "big target" by having lots of policies to fix things, rather than "small target" with few policies of any consequence, it would risk confirming voters’ suspicions that it cared more about getting back to power than improving voters’ lives.

Not a great way to garner votes. Particularly because, for reasons I’ll get to, the small-target strategy works better for the party of the business establishment and the status quo than for the party representing those who think the status quo needs reforming.

When you decide that having too many policies was the main reason you lost, it’s only human nature to flip to the opposite extreme of having none. Human, but not smart.

Economics teaches that success in life comes from seeking out the best “trade-off” between conflicting but equally desirable objectives. It involves using your brain to nut out the best answer, not turning it off.

As political scientist Rod Tiffen has reminded us, the no-brain response after elections is that “everything the winning party did is treated as a stroke of genius, and all the loser’s moves were foolish”.

If Labor wants to draw the right conclusions about the various reasons for its failure it will need to put a lot more mental effort into answering the eternal policy question: “what works and what doesn’t?”.

One obvious possibility is that Labor lost partly because it “did a Hillary Clinton,” focusing on the well-educated, socially progressive (and often public-sector employed) section of the party’s base and forgetting about the less educated, less progressive section in outer suburbs and the regions.

Labor’s had the tricky job of straddling these two, very different parts of its heartland for decades. When John Howard perfected the technique of “wedging” your political opponent, the original application involved driving a wedge between the well-educated and the blue-collar parts of Labor’s base. The classic case is the treatment of asylum seekers.

The no-brain response would be for Labor to “go back to” its blue-collar base. Labor can’t win without both ends. But it certainly needs to put a lot more effort into satisfying both ends. What can it do to help the regions than isn’t too blatantly wasteful? How can it look after victims of the inevitable shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy?

With every summer getting hotter, it’s not surprising the Greens had a good election. And the best explanation for the swing to Labor or independents in many well-heeled Liberal electorates is Liberal voters’ growing recognition that we need a government that’s genuine about combating global warming.

It’s quite possible this is of less concern to the blue-collar end of Labor’s heartland, particularly if it can be (falsely) convinced the immediate cost to household budgets would be high. But for Labor to tone-down its climate policy would risk it getting an even lower primary vote as more of its progressive base shifted to the Greens and, in the case of the Senate, didn’t flow back.

Labor needs reminding that life wasn’t meant to be easy for reformist parties. The party of the business establishment and the status quo always starts with a built-in advantage. They’re the people who surely must be better at running the economy and who stand for minimal change – the thing we all fear.

That’s why the Libs can get elected with no policy other than blocking the rise of all those Labor trouble-makers, and why Labor gets elected only by making the case for change. Why vote for a Labor status quo when you can vote for the original and best?

One of the Libs’ most effective lines was “Labor can’t manage money so they’ll come after yours.” Labor’s eternal vulnerability on the money question is why it would be folly for it to lay most of the blame for its failure at the feet of its one money man who does command the respect of econocrats, economists and business people, Chris Bowen. All the people who wanted to win votes by promising to spend big on education and health, scapegoating the poor blighter who had to find ways to pay for it all.

Similarly, when Labor relegates to a junior role a highly regarded former economics professor, Andrew Leigh, simply because he’s not a member of any faction, it reinforces voters’ suspicion that Labor members put their own careers ahead of the country’s good governance.

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Why did Labor lose? Not because of its tough tax plans

It’s been a week since the election so, naturally, by now a great many of the people who work in the House with the Flag on Top – politicians, staffers, journalists – know exactly why Labor lost and the Coalition won: those hugely controversial dividend franking credits.

There were other reasons, of course, but franking credits is the big one. How do I know they know? Because this is what happens after every election.

The denizens of the House take only a few days to decide on the single most important factor driving the result. Surprisingly, each side of politics – the winners and the losers – almost invariably comes to the same conclusion.

And once they have, the concrete around the notion sets quickly and what started as a theory becomes received wisdom, something any fool knows and part of the building’s corporate memory.

Months later, political scientists will come up with different, much more “evidence-based” explanations, but by then it will be too late. No one listens to them because the die has been cast.

Which is why it may already be too late for research by Dr Richard Denniss and others at the Australia Institute to debunk the quite misguided notion that it was all the people who’d be hurt by the franking credits policy voting against an evil-intentioned Labor Party.

When you see Denniss’ quite startling findings it should also disabuse you of the notion that, particularly in a country as big and varied as ours, a party’s loss of an election could ever be, as the academics say, “mono-causal” rather than “multi-factorial”.

Labor’s performance was disappointing (for its supporters, anyway), not disastrous. The composition of the House of Reps has changed surprisingly little. So it may surprise you, but shouldn’t, that as well as there being lots of electorates that swung to the Coalition (measured on a two-party-preferred basis), there were also lots of electorates than swung to Labor.

Get this: the seats that swung to the Coalition were mainly those whose voters had low incomes, whereas the seats that swung to Labor tended to be those whose voters had high incomes.

Among the seats with the 10 biggest swings to Labor were five from Victoria, three from NSW and one each from WA and the ACT. The swings varied from 3.7 per cent to 6.6 per cent.

In all but two of those seats, they had at least twice the proportion of high income-earners (people in the top 20 per cent) than the national average. Under the Coalition’s three-stage tax plan, voters in the same eight electorates are estimated to get tax cuts in 2024 varying from 49 per cent more to double the national average.

Across Australia, the average value of franking credits per taxpayer is $695 a year. In those eight electorates (five of which are held by the Coalition), the average value ranges from $1213 to $2578 a year.

Now let’s look at the 10 electorates with the biggest swings to the Coalition – six in Queensland and four in NSW. The swings varied from 6 per cent to 11.3 per cent. All of the seats had less than the national average of people with high incomes. And for all but one of them, the average tax cut in 2024 will be below the national average.

How much do they get in franking credits? All 10 seats get less than the $695-a-year national average. Between 83 per cent and 16 per cent of the average, to be precise.

Looking more generally, electorates with more people on low and middle incomes tended to swing to the Coalition, whereas electorates with more people on high incomes tended to swing to Labor.

Next, since it’s the (well-off) retired who would have been hit by the plan to end refunds of unused franking credits, the researchers looked at the voting trend for electorates with a high share of voters over 65.

They found only a very slight tendency for such electorates to move their votes to the Coalition.

So, what should we make of all this? Well, for a start, the figures allow us to rule out some possibilities, but leave others open.

They seem to refute the contention that many well-off retirees (or even prospective well-off retirees) moved their votes away from Labor because they were deeply opposed to the planned changes to franking credits.

They leave open the possibility than many less well-off voters moved their vote away from Labor because they disapproved of the way well-off retirees were to be treated. If so, they were being very magnanimous towards people better off than themselves.

Possible, but not likely. It’s easier to believe they (or, at least, some of them) were renters voting against Labor in response to the real estate agents’ scare campaign claiming Labor’s plan to limit negative gearing would force up rents.

Turning to the higher-income electorates, there’s little sign of many people moving their votes away from Labor because of their opposition to its franking credit plan – or to its move against negative gearing, for that matter.

According to Denniss, it looks like renters voted to help their landlords keep their tax lurks, whereas the landlords voted for Labor’s offer of free childcare and the restoration of penalty rates for their tenants.

Well, maybe. What can be said with more confidence is that it’s hard to see much sign of an outbreak of class warfare.

Moving on from Labor’s controversial tax changes, the success or near success of independents running in Liberal seats such as Warringah and Wentworth in prosperous parts of Sydney, and Indi in rural Victoria, makes it easier to believe the swing to Labor in so many high-income electorates was motivated by a concern that Australia needed a more convincing policy to combat climate change.

As for the swing against Labor in many low-to-middle electorates in Queensland and NSW, my guess is they felt Labor was neglecting their worries about jobs and the cost of living.

It’s never as simple as many workers in Parliament House convince themselves.

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Now the pilot's back, economy flying on a wing and a prayer

It’s always nice for the country to be led by someone who’s obviously got God on his side. When he prays for a miracle, he gets it. And the challenges facing the economy are such that Scott Morrison may need all the divine assistance he can summon.

The Coalition – and their dispirited opponents - should remember the fate of the last chap who won an unwinnable federal election: Paul Keating in 1993. By the time the next election arrived, voters were, in Queensland Labor premier Wayne Goss’s words, “sitting on their verandas with baseball bats”.

The Liberals shouldn’t forget the miraculous nature of their win. After their years of infighting and indiscipline they richly deserved to be thrown out, but were saved by Morrison’s superior campaigning skills and his success in convincing people with nothing to fear from restrictions on franking credits and negative gearing that they should be fearful (not sure what God thought about that).

This was not a historic vindication, just a reprieve. Carry on the way you have been, and your fate will only have been delayed.

And remember: Keating’s reprieve came as part of the 25 years Australians spent trembling at the thought of a tax on services as well as goods. “If you don’t understand it,” Keating told the punters, “don’t vote for it.”

We’ve now had such a tax for almost 20 years. And would you believe? Turned out the GST was no biggie. What brave souls we are.

Come July, we’ll have gone an amazing 28 years without a severe recession. Starting to sound ominous.

Look around the world – trade war between America and China, China’s faltering economic miracle, America’s boom that must bust, Japan and Europe with chronically weak economies and Brexit Britain about to shoot its economy in both feet – and it’s not hard to think you see our next recession in the offing.

Certainly, it has to come some time. But I don’t see one as imminent. What many don’t realise is we have enough troubles of our own, without help from abroad.

Ever since the global financial crisis in 2008-09, and more so since the busting of our mining construction boom in 2013, our economy has been acting strangely, behaving in ways it used not to.

If Morrison and his Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, understand the way it hasn’t been back to business as usual, they’ve shown little sign of it.

If they haven’t yet got the message – perhaps because a politicised Treasury hasn’t been game to give them news they won’t like – enlightenment, in the form of being hit on the head by the bureau of statistics, may not be far off.

Ever since Treasury’s optimistic forecasts encouraged Labor’s Wayne Swan to claim to be delivering four budget surpluses in a row – a claim Frydenberg repeated in the April budget – the econocrats have just shifted forward another year their unwavering conviction that everything will soon be back to the old normal.

It hasn’t happened throughout the Coalition’s two terms. The economy’s just kept grinding along in second gear, failing to reach the cruising speed the econocrats profess to see coming.

It hasn’t happened because the economy’s productivity – output per unit of input - hasn’t improved as fast as it used to, and what little improvement we’ve had hasn’t flowed on to wages. It’s because wages haven’t grown faster than prices, as we’ve come to expect, that so many people are complaining about the cost of living.

What has concealed the truth from us is our rapid, immigration-fuelled population growth. The other rich countries’ populations haven’t been growing nearly as fast. This has given us a bigger economy, but not a richer one.

Of late we have had a partial – and probably temporary – rebound in the prices we get for our mineral exports. Combined with years of bracket creep, the boost to mining company profits (and their tax payments) has finally made Frydenberg’s budget look a lot healthier than the economy does.

Weak growth in real wages (plus continuing bracket creep) mean weak growth in the disposable income of Australia’s households. Which, in turn, means weak growth in the economy’s mainstay, consumer spending.

All this became unmissable when the economy slowed to a crawl in the second half of last year. Predictably, the April budget took this to be little more than a blip on the onward and upward trajectory.

But all the economic indicators we’ve seen since the budget – weak inflation, no improvement in wage growth – suggest the weakness is continuing.

Another respect in which the economy has been behaving strangely is that employment – particularly full-time jobs - has been growing much more strongly than the modest growth in the economy would lead us to expect.

It’s this that Morrison and Frydenberg trumpeted during the election campaign as proof positive of their superior management of the economy. Fine. But the rate of growth in employment is slowing and the rate of unemployment, having fallen slowly to 5 per cent, seems now to be going up, not down.

With the election out of the way, the Reserve Bank won’t wait long before it cuts interest rates to try to give the economy a boost. The $1080-a-pop tax refund cheques after June 30 will also help, provided Morrison can get them through Parliament in time. More earnest prayer required, I think.

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Morrison's miracle election may turn out to be the easy bit

The great risk from Scott Morrison’s miraculous victory is that it will lead politicians on both sides to draw conclusions that worsen our politics and our policies. Bill Shorten offered us a chance to change the government and change the nation, and was answered with a firm No Thanks.

It’s a great win for the Coalition, but a loss for economic policy. The voters’ "revealed preference" is for more personality, less debate of the tough choices we must make to secure our future in a threatening world.

The first lesson the pollies will learn is that disunity doesn’t have to be death. Almost six years of fighting like Kilkenny cats can be forgotten during the eternity of a five-week election campaign, provided you put all the focus on the latest guy, and his predecessors are kept hidden.

The second lesson the pollies will learn is that the only safe strategy for oppositions is to make themselves a "small target", with only a few, popular policies, so all the focus is on the failings of the government.

Whatever policy changes you may be thinking of making, keep your intentions to yourself and don’t, whatever you do, seek a mandate for change.

Almost 28 years of continuous growth have rendered Australians a timorous nation. No national emergency, no need for change. As Kevin Rudd was the last Labor leader to understand, what voters crave is change without change. Promise it. (Since such a thing is impossible, deliver something else. Expect a backlash.)

Politicians have understood all this since Dr John Hewson (his PhD said: "knows more about economics than politics") used Fightback – "the longest suicide note in history" – to lose the unlosable election in 1993.

Labor forgot this because it wanted to be seen as less negative and destructive than Tony Abbott, and because, knowing Shorten lacked charisma, it decided policy substance was the best substitute. As it turned out, wrong.

In this era of unreal reality game shows, and multitudes of disillusioned, disengaged voters, the most successful politicians are those best at show biz. Morrison may not be the lovable larrikin Bob Hawke was, but he comes a lot closer than Hawke’s union mate did.

Morrison spent five weeks performing for the cameras to the exclusion of all others, and the electorate warmed to what it saw. Perhaps what Labor needs is a casting director.

The third lesson the pollies will learn is that the eternal reality of conflict between the classes must always remain covert. Any overt attack on privilege does more to fire up the defences of the well-off than to whet the appetites of those missing out.

In this country, the only envy that works is the downward variety. Envy the jobless for being able to eat without working, or the Indigenous for the extra help they get? Sure.

This government has spent its time beating up on boat people, public servants and those on welfare and, in the process, has gained more votes than it’s lost.

The well-off may have benefited from a lot more good luck (as I have) than it suits them to admit, but they are adept at convincing the punters than an attack on my five dollars is an attack on your five cents.

Labor fashioned a policy to pay for more of the spending on health and education voters genuinely want by reducing the tax breaks of the top 10 per cent (including the top 10 per cent of retirees), but almost every oldie was convinced they’d be a victim.

Same with the way the nation’s real estate agents put the frighteners on their tenants over negative gearing.

Highlight the conflict between the generations and you’re smacked by the demographic reality that voters get older every year, and the over-65s far outnumber the young.

In this election it was the Morrison government that made itself a small target so all the focus would be on Labor’s perceived policy losers.

Believing he had nothing to lose, Morrison staked everything on offering the world’s most expensive tax cuts.

But did he lie awake in the early hours of Sunday morning wondering how on earth he’d pay for them without the budget heading back into deficit? About the hugely optimistic forecasts of the economy’s early return to strong growth used to bolster his economic record? About the requirement that there be zero real growth in government spending per person over the next four years?

Morrison has no policy to control electricity prices, no convincing policy on climate change, no policy to halt the rising cost of health insurance, no policy response to any downturn in the economy, no solution to “cost of living pressures” and no plan to increase wages except yet more waiting.

The day may come when he decides winning the election was the easy bit.

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Where’s the money coming from? Ask me after the election

A key issue in this campaign has been whether government should be bigger or smaller. But that’s not the way either side has wanted to frame it. As usual, both sides prefer to be seen as offering more government spending and tax cuts and a return to big budget surpluses. In election campaigns, the rules of arithmetic are flexible.

A twist this time is that Scott Morrison is using his promised super-mega $300-billion tax cuts to support his claim that the Libs are always the lower-taxing party, whereas Labor is invariably the party of higher taxes.

But such massive tax cuts surely require big cuts in government spending? Oh, gosh no. Where did you get that idea? As he and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg have repeatedly said, they’re willing to "guarantee the essential services that Australians need and deserve".

For their part, Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen are promising to reverse a lot of the government’s previous alleged spending cuts in health and education, while more than matching the first stage of the government’s tax cuts and achieving bigger budget surpluses than it would. They would square this circle by "paying for our commitments by closing loopholes for the top end of town".

Only this week did Labor produce its detailed costings and figurings. We’ll come to that.

Apart from this week’s last-minute additions, all the government’s costings and figurings were outlined in the April budget, of course, and confirmed a few days later in the pre-election update.

Actually, this government has a rather chequered history on the unmentionable subject of whether government should be bigger or smaller. The obvious advantage of a bigger government is that it provides more of the services we love, and doesn’t skimp on their quality. The obvious advantage of a smaller government is less tax to pay.

When Tony Abbott came to government in 2013 determined to end debt and deficit ASAP, he pledged to do so solely by cutting government spending and avoiding any tax increases (apart from his temporary budget repair levy on high income-earners).

Trouble is, voters were so appalled by the sweeping cuts to health and education he proposed that his government’s standing in the opinion polls plunged, never to recover. The Senate blocked many of his cuts.

The episode revealed what economists call the "revealed preference" of voters (not what they say, but what they do). They may like tax cuts and hate the idea of new or increased taxes, what they really don’t want is smaller government.

In subsequent budgets, the Coalition pretty much abandoned the notion of cutting its way back to surplus (apart, of course, for its regular cuts in things most voters didn’t worry about – public servant numbers and payments to people on welfare).

It tried to limit the growth in government spending by following a rule that any new spending proposals had to be offset by equivalent cuts. Apart from that, it sat back and waited for "bracket creep" to raise tax collections to the point where the deficit disappeared.

Except for Malcolm Turnbull’s first budget, in 2016. Here he proposed to phase in a cut to the rate of company tax, and covered part of its cost by pinching Labor’s plan for huge increases in the tax on tobacco, and doing his own versions of Labor’s plans to tax multinational companies and reduce superannuation tax concessions.

In the end, most of the plan to cut company tax was abandoned, but the tax raising measures stayed – a point to remember when Morrison and Frydenberg try to give you the impression it’s only Labor that increases taxes or cuts back tax concessions (or increases taxes via bracket creep).

When Danielle Wood, of the Grattan Institute, looked more closely at Frydenberg’s budget, she found the government had fiddled the figures to exaggerate the extent to which it had limited the growth in government spending so far, and now was claiming to be able to limit its average real growth to just 1.3 per cent a year over the next four years – something no government has ever come close to achieving.

The ageing of the population and the huge demands this will make on the budget make it even harder to credit.

Now Dr Peter Davidson, principal adviser to the Australian Council of Social Service, has taken Grattan’s work and dug even deeper. He finds that, after you allow for expected population growth, real spending growth per person would be zero.

We’re told that, still in real terms, spending on tertiary education is expected to fall by 0.6 per cent each year, while spending on dental health, and on family payments, are each expected to fall by 0.7 per cent.

Spending on employment services is expected to fall by 2.5 per cent a year and on social housing by 2.7 per cent.

You may believe that would happen should the Coalition be re-elected, but I don’t. It’s possible Morrison has a dastardly secret plan to "do another Abbott" after the election, but it’s much easier to believe the government was just fudging the figures to make it seem it could afford big tax cuts as well as achieve big surpluses.

Meanwhile, Labor’s costings reveal that "closing loopholes for the top end of town" is a misleading way to describe its various cutbacks of tax breaks affecting high-income earners and plan to restore the Coalition’s budget repair levy for another five years.

But the costings are just that – costings of individual promises. Nowhere are we told what the various tax-raising measures add up to, nor what the various spending measures add up to.

We are, however, told that the former would exceed the latter by $17 billion over the next four years. Oh, well that’s OK then.

Bit too tricky for my liking. When it comes to the size of government, neither side wants to spell it out truthfully before the election. Thanks, guys.

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