Mining the Heartland

The true message from eden-monaro is that elections are won by appealing to the quiet australians. BY NICK CATER.

Six months ago we were told that the summer bushfires marked a paradigm change, the point at which the reality of catastrophic climate change would force a laggardly Liberal government to lift its game.

To the ABC’s Laura Tingle, it was Scott Morrison’s “Hurricane Katrina moment”.

For Greenpeace’s David Ritter it was Morrison’s “Chernobyl moment”. Like George W Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, Morrison faced a crisis of legitimacy from which he would be unlikely to recover.

Writing history on the fly is one of the intellectual left’s more irritating habits.

Turning points in history are more easily identified with hindsight and their meanings seldom correspond to those that were attributed contemporaneously.

If last summer’s bushfires must be ascribed with political meaning, it was the moment a relatively new Prime Minister realised his leave entitlement must be cancelled for the next 2½ years while he got on with the demanding task of leading a government. It is a job most Australians seem to think he has been doing rather well through a series of mutating crises. His party’s strong showing in the Eden-Monaro by-election demonstrated the broad respect he commands among fair-minded Australians.

Labor’s excuse for its poor showing is COVID-19; that exceptional times like these favour incumbents. Voters who would otherwise be in favour of radical change opt for safety instead. The biggest flaw in this patronising view is the assumption that voters are feckless and helpless creatures who look to governments to organise their lives. Few, if any, do.

The real explanation for Morrison’s success is more prosaic.

The swing to the Coalition in towns and suburbs bordering the ACT is a trend that can be traced across several elections.

Once it was considered public service land, a place where bargain-hunters went to find cheaper housing or live out their dreams as part-time farmers.

In recent years, however, these areas have come to look more like the rest of the nation, the territory of quiet Australians. New residential developments, unencumbered by land taxes imposed by radical spendthrifts in the ACT Legislative Assembly, have proved popular with mainstream Australians.

In the ACT, 37 per cent of adults had university degrees at the time of the 2016 census while only 8 per cent have trade certificates.

Across the border in Queanbeyan, the figures are 23 per cent and 12 per cent, close to the national average.

For those who wish to find meaning in Saturday’s by-election, it lies not in the rhetoric of bushfires, climate change or pandemics.

The message is far simpler, that the only place from which to win elections is the centre. It was the territory occupied by John Howard and Tony Abbott and now recaptured by Scott Morrison.

It was the ground the party risked losing under Malcolm Turnbull, whose appeal was felt more strongly by graduate professionals in inner metropolitan seats.

Eden-Monaro may no longer be considered a bellwether seat, but the results in the blue-collar booths of Queanbeyan remain as good a gauge as they ever were of the prevailing political winds.

Liberal Gary Nairn put up a strong showing in the Labor booths of Queanbeyan, Queanbeyan North and Queanbeyan South in Howard’s time, recording two-party results in the low 40s. The votes lost in those booths in 2007 returned when Tony Abbott was elected in 2013.

Under Turnbull there were swings of 5 and 6 per cent against the Coalition, reducing the Coalition to its lowest level of support since the 1990s.

Those votes came back to the Liberals with a vengeance at last year’s election, with further swings to Morrison’s candidate on Saturday.

Last summer, at the tail-end of a protracted drought and in the middle of a particularly nasty bushfire season, the delusion took hold that the politics of climate change was moving in Labor’s direction.

Morrison sensibly ignored the unsolicited advice from the likes of the ABC’s Andrew Probyn, who claimed that the PM was in a similar position to Howard during the millennium drought. “Howard found himself on the wrong side of the public mood on climate change,” he wrote.

“Similarly, Morrison and the Coalition have been left stranded by a rapidly shifting public sentiment. The tide’s gone out.”

Probyn was not the only one at the ABC to become emboldened by the bushfires, convinced that the alarmist interpretation of the evidence they have favoured for years was coming true.

Government ministers who had agreed to an interview found themselves facing an interrogation. Are you, or have you ever been, a climate denier?

When the PM appeared on 7.30 in January, Michael Rowland shared his frustration about an earlier interview with Communications Minister Paul Fletcher.

“I had to ask him three times to accept the link between climate change and bushfires, he didn’t go there,” he said.

Could it have been because the link between bushfires and climate change was not as strong as Rowland supposed?

That the bushfire season was not, as commonly claimed, the worst in Australia’s history?

And that the most important factor in the mega-fires was the abundance of fuel that had been allowed to accumulate on poorly managed land, as the bushfire royal commission is hearing?

The political challenges for Morrison posed by the fluctuating climate were real, but they were not as Probyn and his colleagues imagined.

The needs of Australians affected by bushfire or drought are more practical than theoretical. It favours an approach to crisis management anchored in the world in which people live, not the world that intellectuals imagine.