The Election: Week Four - The Battle of Rooty Hill
"I have a happy habit of covering bizarre and often confounding elections." With a sentence pregnant with possibility, this blog came into the world at the start of the 2007 Australian federal election.
Three years ago, of course, the race was actually fairly easy to call. It was not confounding at all. There was an overwhelming sense that the former Prime Minister John Howard had out-lived his political usefulness; that he had "done his dash," as one voter rather memorably put it. With Kevin Rudd presenting himself as a risk-free alternative, a plausible prime minister, he started the race as the clear front-runner and ended it well in front. His election never seemed in doubt.
But it is the 2010 campaign to which the words "bizarre" and "confounding" can truly be applied. Certainly, it is a lot trickier to read and predict, partly because of the sense that voters are not hugely impressed with either Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott, and partly because there is not an overwhelming issue or theme which has come to dominate the race.
Both parties have struggled to present a compelling and easy-to-understand overall message. Moreover, the micro-messages which have been peddled have often been lost in the pantomime of the campaign - even if its great panto villain, the former Labor leader Mark Latham who has been recruited as a reporter for Channel Nine, doesn't quite follow the normal stage direction of "he's behind you" but tends to confront his prey head-on. As someone noted this morning on the wireless, he is a bull who comes with his own china shop.
My sense going into this week was that Julia Gillard would get her campaign back on track, partly because the press was itching to write a comeback narrative. And sure enough, she started it well enough. There was a poll which showed that Labor had nudged ahead again. She seemed to be back to her "it's a good day for redheads" best during a well-received appearance on the ABC programme QandA, an Aussie version of Question Time. The next evening, she received another boost from Tony Abbott's broadband blunder on ABC's 730 Report, which fitted Labor's narrative that he's a middle-aged fogey rooted in the past.
But then came the big set-piece event of the week, The Battle of Rooty Hill, a town-hall style event held in the emphatically Aussie setting of the Rooty Hill RSL, a Returned and Services League club in the western fringes of Sydney. In the heartland of the famed 'Howard battlers," the blue-collar working families who once voted Labor but went Liberal during the Howard years, it was Abbott who was judged to have connected with the audience. Given the vital importance of Sydney's suburban fringe, which is the home to many of the battleground marginals which the Liberals simply have to win, getting the battle honours at Rooty Hill was a notable achievement. It put Tony Abbott back in the race.
At times of political uncertainty, when the mood of the nation is hard to gauge, it is often worth finding out what the Aussie bookies make of it all. They are predicting a Labor victory, presumably because they think that something approaching normal rules will eventually be applied. As we have noted many times before, Australian voters tend to give first-term governments a second chance (they have done so since the early 1930s), and the economy is, by international standards, in robust shape - even if many families face cost of living issues.
From spending quite a lot of time this week in quite a few marginals, my sense is that many voters want to mete out some kind of punishment to the Labor party, for ousting Kevin Rudd and for messing up things like the home insulation programme. But it is a mood of irritation and frustration rather than outright anger. They are not waiting with baseball bats in hands. It speaks of one of Tony Abbott's main problems: it is hard to harness a mood of bewilderment and confusion, and to fully engage voters who seem unimpressed with this entire electoral spectacle.
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