As the election nears, pollsters, commentators, party apparatchiks, lobbyists, political staffers and everyone else whose livelihood is affected by the outcome look at the tea leaves, interview their keyboards and crunch their numbers to get a feel of where the election is heading.
They wonder where the voters are heading. Where will they move. Will they shift to Labor, or back to the Coalition. Where will the voters preferences move to? The voters are seen like some vast school of silver fish in a David Attenborough-narrated croc doc, shimmering this way and then shimmering that way.
But maybe this view of the psephological world has it the wrong way around.
It is not the voters who ebb and flow. It is not the voters who latch on to some momentum and change their support fickly from one party to the other.
Perhaps it is the other way around. The voters are a bell-shaped rock. Across the populace, support for the range of political views from Trotskyist believers in state-owns-all to utter Friedmanite liberal economists is fairly constant. The range of political belief from deep-green every-tree-is-sacred to rampant white-shoe-brigade develop-anything-that-doesn’t move is also perhaps fairly constant.
The thing that moves is not the voting populace but the political parties.
Picture two geological seismic blocks, one sitting over the other. The top one moves and the bottom one is stationary. People commentating on opinion polls imagine that the voting population is the top block moving this way and that, and the party lucky enough to capture a surge its way wins government. We hear it all the time. “”Voters are swinging to Labor”, or to the Coalition. “”The swing (of the voters) in two-party-preferred terms is X per cent”.
But maybe the voters do not swing at all. Maybe the parties are the top movable plate and the voters are the immovable plate underneath.
When a political party moves too far to the left or the right it inevitably obtains less support from the immovable mass underneath.
A statement by former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser illustrates the point. Fraser has been painted recently as a born-again leftie who has gone off the rails and traitorously deserted the principles he held when he was Prime Minster at the head of a Coalition Government. No so, says Fraser. He argues that he has remained constant to his beliefs, but the political parties have moved off to the right. He says there is hardly an issue to which he is to the “‘right” of Kim Beazley. Labor has moved dramatically right, Fraser argues.
Insofar as there is a “”left” and “”right” these days, Fraser has a point. The parties move and the voters stay constant.
So instead of looking to the way the voters are moving in this election campaign, maybe we should be looking at the way the parties are moving.
I don’t think there is a single left-right continuum here. We also have a optimism-pessimism line; an insularity-outwardness line; and individualism-collectivism line and so on. As the parties move from side to side on these lines they sit over more or less of the natural, immovable bell curve of voter positioning on those lines. When a party moves to the extreme on any of these lines, it finds itself on the thin end of the bell curve of voters and therefore gets less support.
Bear in mind, for an Opposition or in-coming government, it is more a matter of perception than reality. In 1996 John Howard was seen as Honest John in the moderate centre. Without actions he was judged on his words.
A good example of a government moving ground while the electorate stayed stolid was Robert Menzies in 1961. He got a scare, just a Howard did in 1998. Menzies won by one seat and like Howard, got fewer votes than Labor. After the election, Menzies began adopting the very policies that Labor had put to the electorate in 1961. A Menzies Cabinet Minister is reputed to have complained, “”But why are we implementing Labor policy”, to which Menzies retorted, “”because 50 per cent of the people voted for the Labor Party.” Menzies won the 1963 election comfortably. Howard has also moved a little, with a new-found interest in petrol prices, privatisation, globalisation, social welfare. But maybe he has not moved enough. How easy it would have been for Howard to have kept the centre ground – bit of a concession on the republic and the stolen generation, a little less madness on the wharfs and he would have been in power for as long as he wanted. Instead he will be lucky to squeak back even with the best possible alignment of international forces.
Liberal leader John Hewson also did not learn the Menzies lesson. In 1993 Hewson he took his party off to the extreme while the voters stayed put – even putting up with Labor’s Paul Keating for another term.
Another example, of a party moving, rather than the voters was here in the ACT. In 1998 the Labor Party was seen as too ideologically left-wing and did not get much support. At that time the Liberals were fairly small-l liberal in the ACT. By this year, Labor under Jon Stanhope had moved to the centre. Sure, there are a myriad of other factors, but the stolid voters do not like the extremes.
On this score Liberal leader Gary Humphries could find himself in strife if he heads his party into the next election. He might find that his party has moved too far to the right for this town with the departure of Kate Carnell and no-one to lead the small-l liberal charge.
The masses may well call for “”strong leadership”, but often that is a call for political parties not to go off to extremes but to make a strong statement reaffirming their existing beliefs.
Many voters are rusted on to their political parties. The rest are wrong described as swinging voters. Those voters do not swing, nor are they dragged one way or the other. Rather the parties they vote for move in and out of voting range.