Western Australians are likely to greet their task on February 6 with some anguish. They will not merely be selecting who should govern the state for the next three years, but will be acting as a jury.
How to you find the defendant: guilty or not guilty, they will be asked. As a question of justice it might be easy to send Brian Burke down, but Brian Burke is no longer in the dock. In his place stands Carmen Lawrence. Sending her down for the sins of the former Premier and his cohorts offends one sense of justice. But all accounts Dr Lawrence is well-liked and well-respected. Few politicians achieve that. She has consistently rated highly in opinion polls. The latest had her approval rating at 61 per cent. It is well-earned. Dr Lawrence has cleaned up the mess left by the boys with diligence and integrity. True, she got caught in October technically misleading Parliament over the Western Women financial collapse. But that seems to have been accepted as an honest mistake. And last month, she was cleared of what seemed to be a petty attack over travel expenses.
Her determination to clean up the mess left by WA Inc has won her admiration. In the next month she hopes to spell out her policies for the future. In a presidential election she would lick her opponent, Richard Court who hovers in the opinion polls in the high 20s. But it is not a presidential election. There are not two names on the ballot paper.
Moreover, the judgment will not be restricted to Carmen Lawrence, her performance over the past three years and her plans for the future. Inevitably, WA Inc will be an issue. The Liberals will make it one. They will invite the voters to find Labor guilty.
No doubt many voters would like to find Labor guilty. They would like some way of venting their fury and the dishonesty and profligacy of those involved in WA Inc. And it will cause them great anguish to find that the machinations of politics provide that the only chance they will get to do that will be to vote against a woman who has rightly earned their respect as Premier over the past three years.
This phenomenon is not peculiar to Western Australia, though it is best illustrated there. In Western Australia the members of the old Labor Government were most culpable and the new broom was the most competent. Victoria and South Australia, though similar, are not in the same league. Voters in Victoria, for example, had little compunction in throwing out Joan Kirner in favour of a little liked or respected Liberal leader in Jeff Kennett. Presumably, South Australians will do the same thing.
In the West, however, if Dr Lawrence goes down (as the preferred-party polls show she will) it will cause a certain amount of sadness and perhaps guilt.
Aside from her own performance, Dr Lawrence will be drawing on the Kennett experience with some comfort. She will argue that punishing Labor for the distant past would be a mistake. The distant past should be forgotten and electors should make their judgments solely on the future. After all, she would argue, her setting up (admittedly under pressure) of the WA Inc Royal Commission and her commitment to implementing its recommendations will ensure that it will not happen again. The individual perpetrators are gone.
It will be a persuasive argument, but will not be bought by all. Clearly, some voters will think that the events of WA Inc cannot be allowed to sink into the mire of the criminal justice system where smart lawyers will get many individuals off and where others will get slaps on the wrist. Many voters will seek at its basest revenge or at its purest a form of public expression of moral disapproval. Despite the lapse of three years, it is doubtful that Dr Lawrence can escape it. Given the tiniest swing (1 per cent) needed to tip her out, it is difficult to see her surviving.
What a shame the wrong person is in the dock _ a female Simon of Cyrene.
Jeff Kennett influence will not be restricted to Western Australia. He will influence voters in the federal poll, too.
Indeed, Kennett is one of Labor’s best assets at both state and federal level. His influence on voters’ minds has been profound. With some clever help from John Hewson and Paul Keating, he has turned voters’ minds away from making judgments about the past, to making judgments about the present and the future.
No longer do voters concentrate on saying look how Labor stuffed things up: record unemployment, unpayable foreign debt, state banking systems destroyed and so on. They still say those things, but they worry about what might come next: no job security, leave loadings taken away and so on.
The importance of the Kennett factor is this: before Kennett, Labor could only play scare tactics, now it has a real example to point to. The tragedy for Dr Hewson is that it was so unnecessary. Mr Kennett could have had nearly all of his radical reforms, and in place by January 1 without all the aggro. All he had to do was preserve existing entitlements.
The aftermath of the Victorian election marked a turning point in Federal opinion polls. The Coalition was clearly hurt by Mr Kennett’s antics.
The question remains as to what effect the Western Australian election might have federally. If the Liberals win, Federal Labor will naively hope that Labor’s guilt is purged. Revenge for the excesses has been assuaged and we can concentrate on the future rather than worry about the past. Not so, on two counts. First, Western Australians might feel they have punished the wrong person and therefore still want revenge on Labor, and Paul Keating is far easier to feel vengeful against than Carmen Lawrence.
Secondly, the Kennett factor will be replaced or at least watered down by the Court factor. Richard Court as Premier is unlikely to behave in the brash way Jeff Kennett did. He is more likely to introduce his industrial-relations policy more gently.
One can just hear John Howard, for example, saying that he will be taking the Court approach rather than the Kennett one. Western Australia would provide a living example of how Jobsback is meant to work, or at least a less theatening one than Victoria’s example.
If Dr Lawrence wins, Federal Labor will take great comfort, quite wrongly. Clearly it could be put down solely to the Lawrence factor. If Labor wins in Western Australia, there could be no other reason for it other than Western Australians want Carmen Lawrence as their Premier, despite her party, not because of it.
Federal Labor does not have a leader as well-regarded. Indeed, to the contrary. Paul Keating has been reviled for years, though he has made extraordinary gains since becoming Prime Minister. He is just less unpopular than Dr Hewson.
There are two schools of though on the influence of state elections on Federal ones. Some say the influence is large; others say it is small. There are oodles of examples to prove either. Some states defy the federal trend. In 1975 Labor’s Don Dunstan won in South Australia and in 1976 Neville Wran won in NSW against the federal anti-Labor trend.
More important than who wins and who loses, is what happens after the election. Does the new Premier make a gander of himself or a goose of herself? Then does this flow through to federal voting trends in that state. When Nick Greiner, a Liberal, was feeling the winds of unpopularity in NSW Labor did better federally in NSW than in Victoria which was still Labor.
It may be that when politicians are disliked generally, for example, in economically tough times, it is better for a Federal Government to have its opponents in office in the states. In good times, it might be better to have political friends in office in the states.
Western Australia is an interesting case, though. Over the past 20 years several elections have been held there immediately before a Federal election. The remarkable thing is that the voting pattern in the state elections has been mirrored in the subsequent federal election.
Thus the arguments about state influences on federal polls will continue. Suffice it to say that human behaviour is beyond prediction. There may be trends, and some of the masses may follow them some of the time. Hip pocket nerves might be stimulated by different parties at the same time and broad philosophies might attract some of the people all of the time. Circumstances are myriad and change all the time.
One circumstance that is different in Western Australia from the federal scene, however, is perception of leadership. Carmen Lawrence is seen as a trustworthy repairer unconnected with the appalling dishonest mess of previous Labor administrations. Though no dishonesty has tainted Federal Administrations, Paul Keating is seen as a man attempting to fix a mess of his own creation. There will be no guilt or sense of injustice about passing a verdict of guilt upon him for the mountain of foreign debt or despair or unemployment.
His only likeness with the plight of Carmen Lawrence is the necessity for him to put the conjurer’s hankerchief over the past and distract the voters into believing he can deliver in the future.