Flight of the conservatives

Disaffected conservative voters drifting to the minor parties are more of a threat to the Coalition than the teal independents. By Nick Cater.

It’s a shame Anthony Albanese has been working so hard to lose the seat of Hunter. Labor’s candidate is the kind of bloke he needs in the party room.

Dan Repacholi is a five-time Olympian and Commonwealth Games gold medallist who has been inducted into the Cessnock Hall of Fame for his services to shooting. He’s a qualified fitter and turner who has worked in coalmines and managed a medium-sized business.

He is reputed to be a larrikin, which counts in his favour, even if the pornographic social media posts were not his best idea. But he has apologised for those, so let’s move on.

Labor’s decision to slap a carbon tax on coalmines has given the Nationals the chance of winning Hunter, a seat that has been in Labor’s hands since 1910. In Bob Hawke’s day it was capable of delivering a primary vote for Labor in the 60s. At the 2019 federal election Joel Fitzgibbon scraped in on preferences with a primary vote in the 30s.

Given Albanese’s weak support for coal and a dismal campaign, Sportsbet’s odds of $3.25 on the Nationals’ James Thomson seem rather long. The Coalition has been exploiting Labor’s weakening grip on its blue-collar heartland for 30 years, leading some to predict that Labor eventually would be hemmed into inner-suburban seats. It is not as simple as that, however.

At this election, the Liberal Party has found itself stretching to reach both sides of the same cultural divide that afflicts Labor. Woke, the generic descriptor that denotes a certain viewpoint on almost everything from masks to electric cars, polarises opinion in both parties. The weirder it has become in the eyes of less sophisticated folk, the harder it will be to build a church broad enough to accommodate everyone who identifies as Liberal.

If Scott Morrison wants to remain Prime Minister beyond next Saturday week, he must strike a chord that resonates in both the Hunter and Hunters Hill. It was never going to be easy since the quiet Australians he successfully recruited last time have turned grumpy after more than two years of Covid-19 restrictions. They are expecting more hard times with rising mortgages and inflation. Counterintuitively the Liberals hope the worsening economic outlook may work in their favour, highlighting the risk of handing over the Treasury benches to Labor.

The Opposition Leader has helped by stoking those fears, packing a punch to the Coalition’s deceptively low-key slogan, “It won’t be easy under Albanese.”

Morrison could not have wished for a better opponent than a charisma-challenged candidate who’s hazy on the detail of the little on which he’s willing to campaign. The last time Labor was two weeks away from winning government, Kevin Rudd was being high-fived by school kids and his approval was in the 60s. Albanese is getting slapped around by the press pack and his approval rating is in the low 40s.

Yet he still looks most likely to form the next government, albeit with the help of the Greens and possibly some teal independents since the chances of Labor winning eight seats to form an absolute majority are slight.

If things go the way the bookies expect, Albanese will owe his victory not to Labor’s strengths but to the developing fault-lines in the Coalition’s base.

The woke independents are not the biggest threat. While they are likely to win some Liberal voters, most of their support comes from voters who previously have voted for Labor, the Greens and other independents. To claim that Zali Steggall is the prototype for a franchise of independents more cuddly than the Coalition and less nutty than the Greens is to ignore the extraordinary circumstances of the 2019 contest in Warringah. As Simon Holmes a Court soon may discover, you get only one Tony Abbott in your life.

The biggest threat to the Coalition is not the defection of doctors’ wives in Wentworth but disaffected conservatives peeling off to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, the United Australia Party and independents. One Nation polled 20 per cent in Hunter last time and a similar vote this time could be enough to get Repacholi over the line with preferences, particularly if the UAP does well.

The conservative vote is not just fraying in blue-collar seats. On Saturday Clive Palmer addressed a sea of yellow-shirted UAP supporters in Mosman on the north shore in Sydney, right next door to Steggall’s campaign office, underlining the challenge for Katherine Deves in Warringah as she tries to bring the Liberal vote back home.

The UAP and One Nation have discovered a new cohort of supporters among the vaccine hesitant. Their numbers may be small, but in a contest this tight the leper vote may count.

It doesn’t help that the conservative revolt has been under-reported to the point of being ignored. The fascination with the teal campaign is most apparent on the ABC, where they find it hard to take One Nation or Palmer seriously and struggle to understand the conservative mind.

For the same reason, little attention has been paid to the Australian Christian Lobby, a growing force for conservatives, which is campaigning against Liberal candidates in some seats.

Morrison’s decision to stand by the religious discrimination bill is another indication he understands the challenge, even if the task of reconciling woke sensitivities and the deeply held values of the socially conservative Australian centre may seem insurmountable. His support for Deves when others in his party were calling for her to be disendorsed has not gone unnoticed.

It is tempting to make comparisons with John Howard, who kept the Liberals more or less together for more than a decade and possessed the ability of a kelpie to round them up when they strayed, as they did in 1998 to One Nation. The comparison, however, is unfair. Morrison is up against a philosophy far more radical than what we used to call political correctness. Social media and smartphones barely existed when Howard left office. Nor should we ignore the influence of Donald Trump or the Brexit vote, which have hardened battle lines around the world.

In the final weeks of the campaign Morrison will attempt to raise voters’ sights beyond the issues that divide Australians and towards their common interests. His success will not be whether his words move the Canberra press gallery but in whether they move the primary vote.