This was the worst campaign I have ever seen run by the ALP.
Ever.
This was an election where all of the ALP’s problems over the last 6-8 years came home to roost.
There was no central theme. The campaign material was ugly, late out, badly written, and largely unrelated to anything voters actually cared about.
The central campaign was a shambles, courtesy of a complete disconnect between the Parliamentary Labor party, party office, and the lay ALP membership.
On a day when speculation ran rife that WA had lost the nation’s biggest resource development project, the Inpex Liquefied Natural Gas project in the Kimberley valued at $25 billion, Alan Carpenter announced yesterday he would be closing the bars at Parliament House.
That announcement, aimed at wedging Colin Barnett over his predecessor Troy Buswell, was pretty typical of how this election has gone in the first two weeks and might explain why at the halfway mark of the campaign Labor finds itself in a tight contest against a crisis-ridden Opposition that only settled on a leader the day before the election was called.
Barnett may be obsessed with Brian Burke, but the Labor campaign is a little too fond of the Buswell jokes they had prepared to let them go this quickly. There are many valid points to be made about Buswell’s continued political success, in particular the effect it’s had, and will continue to have, on women in the Liberal Party, which translates to the women whom they seek to govern. But stunts like this impress nobody, and they belittle the real issues that Buswell’s behaviour brings to light. The problem with Buswell, and the boys’ clubs on both sides, is not that there are bars in parliament house.
I suspect none of the major parties federally or in any of the states and territories could entirely escape the accusation of being a “boys club”, but I’m very interested to see – for the first time I can think of – gendered cultures within a political party being raised as an election issue in Australia. The WA Labor Party is running a radio ad which you can listen to here. The ad highlights the disparity in female representation between the two major parties, and it’s reminds voters of some of the appalling behaviour associated with former leader (and current Shadow Treasurer) Troy Buswell. But aside from the ikkiness of the boy culture exposed by Troy “I did not have intercourse with that quokka” Buswell, there’s clearly something in the accusation – the way that “star” candidate Deirdre Willmott was casually elbowed aside to accommodate the resurrected Colin Barnett really seems to have been appalling from a story in the weekend Fin Review quoting Willmott at length. Apparently Barnett met her two days before, and mentioned nothing, and she wasn’t told what was going on even before the press conference at which Buswell resigned. A range of other female Liberal MPs resigned from the party in the last term, and some are recontesting, with independent Liberal Liz Constable being co-opted into a frontbench role by Barnett to try to soften the damage.
I’d be watching any gender breakdown in the polls in WA very carefully.
Elsewhere: More from William Bowe aka The Poll Bludger for subscribers in Crikey.
Discussion of the Northern Territory election results continues to be framed in terms of its possible implications for WA, where Alan Carpenter also went early. There are at least two problems with this narrative – first that there’s no evidence but only supposition that the NT result was directly related to an early election (and it’s worth pointing out that after all the insta commentary, it’s now being recognised that the result was the second best Territory Labor had ever attained in terms of primary votes). Secondly, I’ve always felt that argument by historical analogy is at best risky – as patterns that might form the basis for prediction are hard to discern just from political history in the absence of quantitative data. It becomes riskier when you start assuming that what appears (and it only does appear) to be the case in one jurisdiction can unproblematically be the basis for an inference to what might occur in another. The number of qualifiers I’ve felt obliged to use here might be a bit of a clue to the logical force of any such arguments.
Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that politicians think this way, and often seek to learn from campaigns and tactics that appear to have worked elsewhere in the past. There’s a whole mini-industry now, for instance, of importing Australian political consultants to work on and direct British campaigns. One thing I’m surprised no one (to my knowledge anyway) has mentioned is the fact that Alan Carpenter is obviously taking a leaf or two from Peter Beattie’s campaign book.
In a fit of predictability, incumbent Labor Premier Alan “I used to be a credible journalist, don’t you know” Carpenter is promising “vision, leadership, and stability” – the last one of the three, at least, might play to Labor’s strengths.
Resurrected Liberal leader Colin “Don’t mention the canal” Barnett is promising that he’s not Troy Buswell. And doesn’t at all look like the kind of bloke who could be caught sniffing chairs.
The first night is all about predictability – Barnett is claiming that the snap election has been called because Labor is running scared (of him, presumably). Carpenter is denying that the snap election has been called to take advantage of the leadership turmoil in the Liberal ranks.
Despite some rustlings of dissent from the local commentariat – local political commentators are largely calling the move a political mistake – a call based largely, I suspect, on the idea that if Barnett isn’t as thoroughly unpopular as Buswell was, the Libs should therefore cruise to an easy win.
There may be something to that view – certainly Buswell was regarded in WA with the kind of amused contempt that makes it difficult to get any political traction, and it is entirely possible that WA electors have forgotten exactly why it is they didn’t vote for Barnett last time. And there is no doubt at all that Carpenter isn’t held in the same regard as Geoff Gallop, and certainly doesn’t have the same campaigning experience as his predecessor.
But when you consider the raw mechanics of Carpenter’s decision, it starts to look like a potentially very good decision indeed.
Continue reading ‘Day 1 of the WA State Election…and we’re all bored already.’
…so the Poll Bludger reports. Looks like Alan Carpenter is taking a leaf out of the Peter Beattie book and dashing to the polls while the opposition is still mired in leadership confusion and disunity.
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