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Oh Yea!
The revolt of the workers.
Shaun Carney, The Age, 13th November, 2004
The Pines, a massive Housing Commission estate created in Frankston North in the
early 1960s, is not the sort of place you'd expect to sit reasonably easily in one
of John Howard's safest Victorian electorates. But you'd better believe it does.
The Pines - solidly, demonstrably working class, with a large segment of its
inhabitants on welfare - is in the federal seat of Dunkley, held since 1996 for the
Liberals by Bruce Billson. Billson, recently appointed parliamentary secretary for
foreign affairs and trade, knows a fair bit about the Pines. Although he grew up in
Seaford, on the other side of the natural dividing line of Frankston-Dandenong Road,
he went to high school there.
Billson's old school, Monterey Secondary College, was a polling place at last
month's federal election. In the past it hasn't been an especially happy hunting
ground for Billson, even if he's the only Monterey old boy to have gone into
politics. But that's all changing, just as Australia's political complexion is
changing.
Actually, that's understating the extent of the transformation. Australia has now
embarked on a new political era, and what has happened in Dunkley, which begins at
Seaford and follows the bayside shoreline south through Frankston and Mount Eliza to
Mornington, tells us a lot about what that era will look like.
When Billson, who is still only 38, first ran for Dunkley four elections ago, it was
held by Labor's Bob Chynoweth, who had taken the seat in 1993 by a margin of just
0.6 per cent. A subsequent redistribution rendered the seat a notional Liberal gain
by 2.3 per cent, so Billson was looking pretty good for at least one term in
Parliament when he fronted up in 1996.
The locus of power for conservative politics has moved from near the centres of big
cities to the outer suburbs and the regions.
But one or two terms looked like that might be it. After all, Dunkley was a classic
outer suburban marginal, a seat where voter sentiment was evenly balanced, from the
solid Liberal enclave of Mount Eliza to the equally solid Labor areas of Seaford and
Frankston North. In the previous 12 years, the seat had gone from Labor to Liberal
and back to Labor. Wasn't it going to stay that way?
Well, no. What's happened is that this classic outer suburban marginal is now held
by Billson by 9.4 per cent. It is a safe seat, safer for the Liberals than Peter
Costello's seat of Higgins - the relentlessly middle-class electorate based on
Camberwell, Malvern, Glen Iris and South Yarra, the former political home of prime
ministers Harold Holt and John Gorton.
Think about that. There are more Liberal voters, more supporters of the Howard
Government, living around the end of the Frankston line than in the comfortable,
settled, interwar eastern suburbs, full of professionals and other high-income
earners.
It is former Labor voters in the working class areas who have made Dunkley a Liberal
stronghold. On October 9, the big swings were in Labor areas. At the Monterey
Secondary College booths, Billson's primary vote leapt by 8 per cent, from 28.9 to
38.9 per cent. His vote after preferences jumped by almost as much: 6.2 per cent.
Billson still lost the booth 42 to 58, but that is an incredible result all the same.
And it is a phenomenon that has in no way been restricted to Dunkley. All over the
country, working class areas have been shifting perceptibly away from Labor and
towards the Liberals since the mid-1990s.
The process began most noticeably in the outer western and southern suburbs of
Sydney at the 1996 election when the relatively safe Labor seats of Lindsay and
Hughes fell to the Liberals. These changes were seen as an aberration, caused by
several peculiar factors - John Howard's personal popularity in his home town, the
presence of unassuming, hard-working female Liberal candidates.
Three elections later we now know that there was nothing aberrant about these
developments. Since Labor last won these seats in 1993, its vote has fallen by 15.5
per cent in Lindsay and 17.4 per cent in Hughes. In the neighbouring seat of
Greenway, which the Liberals took from Labor last month, Labor's vote has collapsed
by 14 per cent in the same period.
Elsewhere in NSW, Labor's vote in seats it held in 1993 with some comfort has fallen
along similar lines: in Robertson 12.4 per cent, in Dobell 12.7. The story has been
the same in Queensland: Leichardt has moved to the Coalition by 11.3 per cent,
Herbert by 9.5, Forde by 13.
With each election, the Coalition's margins have increased. Clearly, there is a
profound and seemingly inexorable shift in electoral sentiment going on here, one
that suggests very strongly that the locus of power for conservative politics has
moved from near the centres of the nation's big cities to the outer suburbs and the
regions.
What should be really distressing for the ALP is the way in which the Liberals have
managed to harvest Labor votes. While Labor has pursued a hapless and ultimately
self-defeating strategy of siphoning off the votes of disaffected Liberal supporters
via the Greens, the Liberals managed - especially at last month's election - to take
votes directly from Labor in working class and lower middle-class districts. The
experience at the Monterey booth in Dunkley is a good example; the biggest swings to
Bruce Billson were in the lowest-income areas.
The debate within the ALP about how it managed to go backwards when facing a
Government that was seeking a fourth term is a long way from conclusion. But it
seems crucial for the Labor Party to understand just what has been happening and how
ineffective its responses have been.
The notion of the pendulum, where political attitudes swing one way and then
self-correct by swinging back in the other direction, appears seriously flawed.
While Labor has been waiting for the swing, the Liberals have turned Labor's old
marginals into safe conservative seats and Labor's previously safe seats, such as
Holt and Banks, into marginals.
The nightmare scenario for the ALP is that the present political arrangement, which
finds Labor holding all the states and territories but with no reasonable hope of
taking office nationally for at least another six years, is the new orthodoxy.
What we know from recent state elections is that voters are not averse to voting
Labor. They'll do it when it's about overseeing the police and the roads and schools
and hospitals. But not, apparently, when it's about their incomes and their sense of
national or economic security. As political problems go, it doesn't get any bigger
than that.
Shaun Carney is an associate editor of The Age.
Originating file:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/11/12/1100227571881.html?from=storylhs
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