Life on the West Island - Cutting off your nose…

In choosing to campaign against the Voice on behalf of a shrinking part of the electorate, Dutton risks turning the party of Menzies, which governed Australia for 51 of the past 74 years, into a protest party of permanent opposition – George Megalogenis

One of the West Island’s most balanced and respected commentators has just published a thoughtful analysis of the outcomes of referendums and their effects on subsequent elections in an essay in The Monthly. George Megalogenis stays away from the emotive “Yes” and “No” arguments, and instead tries to draw some lessons from history and demographic trends.

His conclusion is that scary negative arguments – usually without any basis in fact - are always likely to result in referendums being defeated. This view is shared by the “No” campaign in instructing its volunteers that “when reason and emotion collide, emotion always wins; always wins.”

In considering the coalition’s decision to oppose the referendum, Megalogenis believes they are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. They had no real policy reason for doing so, only a hope that the loss of the referendum might damage Prime Minister Albanese’s public standing. He thinks that they have taken a decision which will damage their longer term electoral prospects:

The point made repeatedly to Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in his private discussions with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and in the solicited and unsolicited advice from Liberal colleagues, was that bipartisanship was in the Coalition’s interests. Opposing the Voice risked further alienating the former Liberal voters who threw out Scott Morrison’s government at the last federal election. They would hold Dutton personally responsible for the failure of the referendum. And those who vote against the Voice won’t necessarily mark their ballot paper for the Liberals ahead of Labor at the next election, due in 2025. “Yes” won’t forget, while “No” will move on. “If ‘Yes’ wins, he loses. If ‘No’ wins, he loses anyway,” is how a senior Liberal put it to me. It says something about the opposition leader that his friends and rivals would seek to convince him on the basis of the raw politics rather than any higher moral purpose.

Megalogenis has undertaken a detailed study of past referendums, the distribution of votes and the outcomes of subsequent federal elections. His essay runs to over 3,300 words, but is perhaps best summed up in his analysis of what has happened to seats which voted “yes” in the republic referendum. He identifies 17 Liberal-held seats in this category and reports that only five of the original rebel 17 remain in Liberal hands, four of which – Deakin and Menzies in Melbourne, Bradfield in Sydney and Sturt in Adelaide – are considered marginal and will be on the hit lists of Labor and teals at the next election.

By contrast, there were 25 Labor-held seats which supported the republic referendum, and 21 of those remain in Labor hands. None of the other four fell to the coalition. One went to The Greens and the other three were won by independents. This leaves the coalition in a position close to no-win in future elections, as Megalogenis reports:

The cities have shifted decisively to the left, and the voters driving this trend are educated women. The Liberal Party knows this, and it’s why two sharp sentences in its post-election review underline the potential for self-sabotage in Dutton’s approach to the Voice. First: “The Liberal Party now holds only four of the 44 inner metropolitan seats.” And second: “Of particular concern in the results is that in seats with high numbers of female professional voters, the Liberal Party only holds three of the top 30 seats where previously it held 15.”

The Coalition requires a net gain of 20 seats if it is to form a majority government. It won’t get there without the return of electorates likely to vote “Yes” for the Voice. But Dutton isn’t playing the long game of rebuilding the conservative side of politics in the cities. He wants to kill the Voice and shift the blame to Albanese for its defeat. His target audience is Labor’s blue-collar base in the outer suburbs and provincial towns, beyond the “Yes” zones of the capitals.

But this strategy is unlikely to deliver a net gain for the coalition: Peter Dutton can clutch at these straws, if he wishes, from examples of oppositions in the political wilderness that foiled a mighty incumbent’s cultural agenda. But in such cases the government of the day easily won the next federal election.

While the “No” campaign is relying on fear to triumph over facts in its opposition to The Voice, it is unlikely that fervent supporters of the referendum will forgive West Island Opposition Leader Dutton for turning his back on First Nations peoples and stoking latent – or even blatant – racism, especially in the very seats where he would need to regain seats lost at the last election. In doing so, he may well be cutting off his nose to spite his face.

Hence the final conclusion from George Megalogenis: In choosing to campaign against the Voice on behalf of a shrinking part of the electorate, Dutton risks turning the party of Menzies, which governed Australia for 51 of the past 74 years, into a protest party of permanent opposition.