Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra

Whatever the result on May 3, even people within the Liberals think they have run a very poor national campaign. Not just poor, but odd.

Nothing makes the point more strongly than this week’s release of the opposition’s defence policy.

As events played out, its Wednesday launch in Perth was overshadowed by the death of Pope Francis on Monday. But regardless of that unforeseeable event, the timing was extraordinarily late. Early birds had started voting at pre-poll places on Tuesday. The popularity of pre-polling means that, for many voters, the tail end of the formal campaign is irrelevant.

The Coalition regards defence and national security as its natural territory. It is pledging to boost defence spending to 2.5% of GDP within five years – $21 billion extra – and to 3% within a decade. The policy set up a contrast with Labor.

So why leave its release until the campaign’s penultimate week? The opposition’s line is that it wanted to see what money was available. Dutton said, “It would have been imprudent for us to announce early on, without knowing the bottom line”. The explanation doesn’t wash. If defence is such a priority, it should have been towards the front of the queue for funds.

That wasn’t the whole of the problem. The announcement consisted literally of only these two figures, wrapped in rhetoric. It didn’t come with any meat, any policy document setting out how a Coalition government would rethink or redo defence.

Shadow minister Andrew Hastie was at the launch, but he has been hardly seen nationally in recent months. He says he’s been working behind the scenes, and also he has a highly marginal Western Australian seat (Canning) to defend.

But Hastie, 42, has been underused. From the party’s conservative wing, he is regarded as one of the (few) bright young things in the Liberal parliamentary party. He has been touted as a possible future leader. Given the general weakness of the Coalition frontbench, wasting Hastie has been strange.

A captain in the Special Air Service Regiment who served in Afghanistan, Hastie has seen his share of combat. In 2018, he expressed the view that women shouldn’t serve in combat roles, saying “my personal view is the fighting DNA of close combat units is best preserved when it’s exclusively male”.

This week he was peppered with questions about his opinion (questioning triggered by a similar view being expressed by a disqualified Liberal candidate). But the issue is a red herring.

Hastie, a former assistant minister for defence, says he accepts the Coalition’s position that all defence roles are and should be open to qualified women. In the Westminster system, the obligation is for ministers to adhere to the agreed policy – that doesn’t mean someone might not have a different personal view.

Putting together an election campaign requires judgements at many levels, ranging from how big or small a target to be, and the balance between negative and positive campaigning, to candidate selection and which seats the leader visits.

The length of the formal campaign is in the prime minister’s hands. Anthony Albanese has sensibly kept this one to the typical five weeks, but a couple of past PMs made bad decisions, by running very long campaigns: Bob Hawke in 1984 and Malcolm Turnbull in 2016. Both lost seats, while retaining power.

While keeping the formal campaign short, Albanese was canny in hitting the road as the year started with a series of announcements. That gave him
momentum and some clear air. This also became more important when Easter and the Anzac holiday weekend intruded on the formal campaign. The Coalition looked dozy in January.

In the event of a Coalition loss, the nuclear policy will be seen as a drag. In campaigning terms, it has been a bold throw of the dice, although admittedly not nearly as bold as the Coalition’s sweeping Fightback blueprint for economic reform in the early 1990s. That looked for a while as if it might fly, but was eventually demolished by Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating.

Elections are not conducted in vacuums. Context can be important, and it has been particularly so in this campaign.

As has repeatedly been said, Donald Trump hovers over these weeks, and it’s the Coalition that is disadvantaged. This is not just because Dutton struggles to deal with the government’s barbs that he is Trump-like – more generally, some voters who might have been willing to change their vote appear to be thinking now is not the time.

If the Coalition defies the current apparent trend to Labor and scores a win in minority government, critics of its campaign will be eating humble pie. Seasoned election watchers remember the salutary lessons of 1993 and 2019, when the polls were wrong. In those elections, the government was returned.

Dutton and Nationals leader David Littleproud have both suggested the Coalition’s internal polling, which concentrates on marginal seats, is better for it than the media’s national polls.

If Labor loses this election, it will be left wondering how an apparently textbook campaign failed to nail the votes.

If the Liberals lose, their post-mortem reviewers will home in on various faults. One will be the policy lateness (not just the defence policy), meaning voters didn’t have time to absorb the offerings. Another will be the fact some policies were not fully thought through, or road tested. The consequences of the foray on working-from-home should have been anticipated. “Shadows” have often put policy preparedness behind going for a political hit on the day.

Even now, the opposition is struggling when quizzed about its plan to cut 41,000 from the public service. Dutton says the numbers will only go (by attrition or voluntary redundancy) from those working in Canberra. The Coalition also says frontline services and national security areas will be protected.

A source familiar with the public service points out, “If you sacked 41,000 in Canberra, you would decimate the national security bureaucracy and if you exempted national security you would barely have 41,000 public servants to sack”.

If the Coalition has a disastrous loss, with few or no net gains, the criticism of its campaign will be scarifying. If it loses by only a little, the critics will say that a better planned and organised campaign, preceded by a lot more policy work, might have pushed it across the line.

To be successful, an opposition needs a great deal of elbow grease, and so far the Coalition doesn’t look as though it has used enough of that.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Gabriele Gratton, UNSW Sydney

Pundits and political scientists like to repeat that we live in an age of political polarisation. But if you sat through the second debate between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition leader Peter Dutton last Wednesday night, you’d be forgiven for asking what polarisation people are talking about.

While the two candidates may have different values, as Albanese said, the policies they propose and the view of society they have put forward in this campaign don’t differ so much.

Why so similar?

On housing supply, Dutton promises to help local councils solve development bottlenecks. The PM says his government is already starting to do the same thing.

To tackle the cost-of-living crisis, one wants to reduce the government’s cut of petrol prices. The other is having the government pay for part of our energy bills.

What about the future of a multicultural Australia? One party says they’ll cap international student numbers to lower immigration. The other is trying to do precisely the same. (Even though the policy may be irrelevant to near-future immigration and have little impact on housing costs.)

Surely, you might think, many Australians must have more progressive ideas than those Albanese is proposing. And surely many Australians would like more conservative policies than those Dutton is coming up with.

If that’s the case, you’re probably wondering: why are the two leaders focusing their campaigns on such similar platforms?

Lining up the voters

More than 70 years ago, the same questions motivated the work of economists Duncan Black and Anthony Downs. In fact, social scientists had been fascinated by these questions since the Marquis de Condorcet, a philosopher and mathematician, first attempted a mathematical analysis of majority voting at the time of the French Revolution.

Black and Downs both arrived at a striking conclusion: when two candidates compete to win a majority of votes, they will converge their electoral campaign on (roughly) identical policies, even when the voters at large have very differing policy preferences.

Their argument, sometimes referred to as the Median Voter Theorem, goes as follows.

Imagine we could line up all 18,098,797 Australian enrolled voters from the most progressive at the extreme left to the most conservative at the extreme right. Then, a choice of electoral platform by a candidate may be imagined as the candidate placing himself somewhere on this ideal line up of voters.

Now imagine Albanese were to propose a strongly progressive platform and Dutton were to opt for a strongly conservative one. Naturally, those voters “closer” to Albanese’s platform will probably put Labor ahead of the Coalition in their ballot. Similarly, those closer to Dutton will put the Coalition ahead.

Let us imagine that in this situation Albanese would secure a majority of seats. What could Dutton do to win? The answer is: move a bit to the left.

In doing so, Dutton would win over some voters who were previously closer to Albanese than to himself. Meanwhile, all the voters to the right of Dutton will remain closer to him than to Albanese. The net result would be simply a swing in favour of Dutton.

The problem of where to set up shop

In 1957, Downs realised that the problem of choosing where to place your platform to attract more voters has the the same mathematical form as the problem firms face when choosing where to place their outlets to attract more customers. Harold Hotelling, a mathematical statistician and economist, had studied the firms’ problem in 1929. So Downs could simply apply Hotelling’s mathematical tool to his new political problem.

Downs showed that, as Dutton and Albanese compete for voters, they will end up converging to the same platform. One that does not allow for a further move that can swing voters. This platform will be what social choice scholars call a Condorcet winner, meaning more than half of voters would choose it over any other platform.

In fact, there is only one such platform: the policy preferred by a voter who is more conservative than exactly half of the voters and more progressive than exactly half of the voters. The voter exactly in the middle of our idealised line-up. The median voter.

A centrist equilibrium

When Albanese and Dutton are both proposing the median voter’s preferred platform, they both have about the same chances of winning the election: 50%. However, neither can do anything to improve their chances.

In this situation, if Dutton were to move a little more right, he would simply lose to Albanese some of the voters just to the right of the median voter. If Albanese were to move a little more left, he would lose to Dutton some of the voters just left of the median voter.

They are in what game theorists call a Nash equilibrium: a situation where neither of them can gain by changing their strategy.

Not literal, but still illuminating

Downs’ result should not be taken literally.

Politicians may have inherent motivations to promote certain policies, beyond just winning votes. And sometimes political leaders can offer new views of society, changing how voters think about what a just and prosperous future should look like.

However, at least with leaders like Albanese and Dutton, and in the presence of a (mostly) two-party system like in Australia, Downs’ model shows us what the democratic electoral process tends towards: parties that compete to appeal to the most median centrist voters.

Gabriele Gratton, Professor of Politics and Economics and ARC Future Fellow, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.