Victoria’s titanic leader sunk

21 October 2019

 

This period marks the twentieth anniversary of one of the most shocking events for the Liberal Party.  It was quite a shock in Victoria, where it happened, if not elsewhere in Australia.  One has to wonder if the Liberals have really recovered from it after such a long time.

I refer to the unexpected downfall of Jeff Kennett, who’d been Victorian Premier and a seemingly unbeatable leader, around this time in 1999.

Kennett became Premier after winning an election in October 1992.  At the time, the Labor Party had been governing in Victoria for ten years, but with the State economy in very poor shape, it copped a caning.  Kennett introduced some very unpopular policies that he considered necessary to get the economy into shape again, and for some time public anger over his policies was massive.  But within a few years of the implementation of those policies, Kennett began to win back the respect of voters.  As such, when the next election came in 1996, the outcome was another big win for Kennett.  He remained very popular for years after that.

But while Kennett became particularly popular in Melbourne, the loss of many jobs and services around regional Victoria caused much angst, and there seemed to be little coming its way.  The Kennett Government was perhaps in a familiar position for many governments – doing much good in the capital cities but doing not as much in regional areas.  Indeed when Kennett called an election in 1999, with him and the Liberals seeking a third term in office, Melbourne voters had largely warmed to Kennett, but rural Victorians felt as if the benefits from the improving economy weren’t coming their way.

It’s worth noting that at that time, during the late 1990s, much of Australia had witnessed the rise of controversial politician Pauline Hanson, whose supporters were thought to come mostly from the bush.  But her support seemed somewhat confined to Queensland and New South Wales and Western Australia.  Victorian voters, apart from in some rural areas, didn’t really warm to Hanson.  But they were in revolt, albeit with different figures to get behind.

In the 1996 Victorian election, the Liberals lost one regional seat to Independent candidate Russell Savage.  The following year, the Liberals lost another regional seat to Independent candidate Susan Davies in a by-election.  Savage and Davies probably had little impact on Victorian politics in their early years.  But history shows that things wouldn’t stay like this.

It was in September 1999 when Victorians next went to the polls.  Kennett was considered unbeatable.  Almost nobody thought that he and the Liberals could lose, especially because Labor was still thought to have significant baggage from its last time in power.

But the election result was a shock.  The Liberals lost a large number of regional seats, and ended up losing their majority.  Quite simply, nobody saw it coming.

A major shock, though, wasn’t in Liberal-held seats in the bush to Labor.   There was a surprise in a seat held by the Nationals, Gippsland East, with Independent candidate Craig Ingram managing to win that seat.  He and Savage and Davies suddenly became kingmakers in the Victorian Parliament.

Kennett had to try to negotiate with them in order to remain in office.  But they were likely to demand changes to things that Kennett had done while Premier, which made Kennett’s job difficult.

Ironically, the overall election outcome was delayed for several weeks, because of the death of a sitting MP just before the election.  If candidates die just before polling day, supplementary elections can be held in the seats that they’re meant to contest, several weeks after general elections.  They work like by-elections.

If the Liberals had won the supplementary election, which was held in an outer Melbourne seat, they might’ve been in a stronger position when having to deal with the Independents.  But Labor won that supplementary election, and that virtually finished off Kennett and the Liberals.  Sure enough, the Independents made a deal with Labor, which took power with Steve Bracks at the helm.

Kennett resigned from politics after this shock.  The Liberals didn’t win another election until 2010, and even then the win was a narrow one.  They then were ousted from office after a single term.  Labor now looks solid in Victoria now.

Interestingly, Ingram had been a campaigner in the Gippsland area for restoring water to the Snowy River, which had been dammed as part of a massive scheme for irrigation and electricity generation decades earlier.  After Labor obtained power in Victoria, a deal was done to release water to bring health to the Snowy River.  Nowadays, this comes back into mind whenever I hear people advocating similar schemes to turn rivers inland, as a means of tackling drought.  Turning back any river might see characters like Ingram win seats in elections.

Given that Ingram campaigned to put water back in a dammed river, this issue could’ve been something that ended the career of a formidable political leader, in the form of Kennett.  He could’ve been described as Victoria’s titanic leader, but among a bush revolt and other things, he was arguably sunk by a dammed river – if you’ll pardon the pun.

The defeat and departure from politics of Kennett around this time two decades ago would’ve shocked many.  Few like him will be in politics again.

 

Exile of Liberals aborted

18 October 2019

 

The narrow majority of the Liberal-National Coalition Government in New South Wales sometimes slips people’s minds.  After winning an election in March, when many observers had tipped it to lose its parliamentary majority, if not lose office altogether, the significance of the election win almost overshadowed how close that victory was.  Only two Lower House votes stand between its clear majority and the need for crossbench support.

But recently we were reminded of that narrow majority when Parliament voted on changing laws regarding abortion.  It caused a split in the Liberal Party, and came close to taking away that majority.

The abortion vote was set up as a conscience vote, meaning that all MPs had rare freedom to vote as they personally saw fit, regardless of where their parties stood on the issue.  Mind you, the Liberals don’t force MPs to vote for or against things here – Liberal MPs are always free to vote against their colleagues if they wish.

If anything, conscience votes show divisions a lot more clearly in the Labor Party, because it usually doesn’t allow its MPs this degree of freedom.  Whereas Liberal MPs can freely vote against their party if they wish, Labor MPs are automatically expelled from their party if they vote against it.  If they oppose something, their only option is to abstain – in other words, to decline to vote.

Nonetheless, the abortion debate upset some Liberal MPs, including Tanya Davies and Kevin Conolly, who threatened to go to crossbench as a result.  Such a move by those two MPs would’ve cost Premier Gladys Berejikilian her majority.  They ended up staying in Liberal ranks, but it was a close call.

However, I doubt that Berejiklian would have lost too much if Davies and Conolly had gone to the crossbench.  The idea of one single issue upsetting MPs enough for them to go to the crossbench sounds a bit rich, at least by itself.  I think that even if Davies and Connolly had gone to the crossbench, Berejiklian would still have their support on every other issue.

Is abortion really a major issue in the constituencies that both Davies and Conolly represent in Parliament?  I wouldn’t have thought so.

Davies and Conolly both hold seats in the outer western suburbs of Sydney, after winning them in the Coalition’s huge election win in 2011.  They might well have won them at a time when Labor, in office since 1995, had more or less imploded under the weight of age and incompetence and corruption, especially in its later years.  But they kept holding their seats at subsequent elections, and people like them had much to do with the Coalition’s electoral success.

Sydney’s outer west doesn’t usually elect Liberal MPs.  When Davies and Conolly won their seats in 2011, there’d been one other Liberal from there for just under one year, Stuart Ayres.  In the middle of 2010, Ayres won a by-election for Penrith, making him the first Liberal MP from Sydney’s outer west for fifteen years.  Then Davies won Mulgoa and Conolly won Riverstone in 2011.  All are still there today.

It was in March 1988 that Sydney’s outer west elected Liberal MPs, namely Anne Cohen and Guy Matheson.  Like in 2011, the Liberals swept through this region with Labor losing office after over a decade there.  Matheson lost his seat in 1991, but Cohen held on until losing her seat in 1995.  The Liberals didn’t win another seat here until Ayres won the Penrith by-election.

In terms of whether abortion is that big an issue in Sydney’s outer west, the idea doesn’t sound credible.  People out there would probably care more about long commutes to work and the cost of living in their homes, than about abortion.

Nothing suggests to me that Davies and Conolly, despite their aborted departure to the crossbench, disagree with their colleagues on other issues, such as schools or hospitals or transport or crime, which would resonate in suburbia.

This makes the whole issue surrounding Davies and Conolly appear to be much ado about nothing.  Even if they’d gone to the crossbench, you’d have considered them Liberals merely in exile.  Given how the abortion debate upset them, this might be a case of the exile of a couple of Liberals being aborted – if you’ll pardon the pun.  Their support on everything else doesn’t look like changing.