Still in denial, the major parties risk learning nothing from Election 2016

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The major parties are now reaping what they have sown. Warnings about the need for budget repair and taxation reform fall on deaf ears, with voters more inclined to believe in populist solutions, writes Mike Steketee.

Excuses, excuses. The Liberals have had no end of them since their near-death experience on Saturday.

Prime culprit is a dishonest scare campaign by Bill Shorten on Medicare. Well yes, it was indeed dishonest: there is no evidence that a Coalition government would privatise Medicare, if that means handing it over holus bolus to the private health funds, as the Fraser government did, if for no other reason than, at the next election, it would make Saturday's setback look like a triumphal march.

"Save Medicare" became the catchy slogan for Shorten playing to Labor's strengths, since it is seen consistently as the better party to manage health. It helped remind voters of the Abbott government's attempt in 2014 to introduce a GP co-payment (aka forcing people to pay to go to the doctor) before abandoning the idea. Labor didn't get around to mentioning that the Hawke government did exactly the same in the 1991 budget before also backtracking.

Both sides have jumped to conclusions, based on anecdotal evidence, that Mediscare was the decisive issue in switching votes from the Coalition to Labor. The hard evidence awaits detailed post-election research. One thing we do know is that the reduced vote for the Coalition has not translated directly into an increased vote for Labor, as you might expect if people were convinced that a vote for Labor was necessary to "save Medicare".

At time of publication, the Coalition primary vote was down 3.5 per cent from the 2013 election to 42 per cent, but Labor had increased its vote by just 1.8 per cent to 35.2 per cent. That total, by the way, is the second lowest, after 2013, that Labor has recorded in a federal election since 1934, when the party was split. Shorten may have looked like a winner on election night and behaved like one since, but in reality he does not have all that much to crow about.

Not that he was the only one practising post-election denial, not to mention arrogance. On election night, Turnbull could think of no-one to blame but everyone else, in particular the Labor Party and the voters - a situation that it took him another two news conferences to largely remedy.

By Wednesday Scott Morrison was arguing that the reason the Coalition was vulnerable to an "outrageous scare campaign" was that it had run such a positive campaign itself, somehow overlooking its scare campaigns on refugees and Labor's negative gearing policy. As for the future, it was carry on regardless, other than "assuring people about our performance in health."

The Government, which he was expecting would be re-elected with a majority, would go ahead with its budget, including the $48 billion in company tax cuts that was part of the Coalition's "superior" economic plan. Contrition? Lessons learnt? Not a bit of it.

At some stage, Turnbull and Morrison will have to face up to the fact that they ran a very poor campaign that saw a first-term government with a prime minister who was supposed to be popular taken to the brink of defeat.

As he did in the republic campaign that he led in 1999 and in his brief term as opposition leader, Turnbull has displayed a tin ear when it comes to politics.

He seems to take the old fashioned view that people will follow him because he is the leader: that a slogan of "jobs and growth" speaks for itself and that the logic of a $48 billion tax cut for companies, including multinationals who already pay little tax, should be self-evident.

Conservatives argue that the election result proves that Tony Abbott is a better politician than Turnbull. In terms of raw, brutal effectiveness, they have a point.

As a leading monarchist in the republic referendum, Abbott out-manoeuvered Turnbull with a misleading attack on the "politicians' republic", striking a chord with voters who wanted a direct say in choosing a president and voted against the model on offer. In 2013, Abbott won the election in a landslide with the help of the mother of all scare campaigns against a carbon tax - a campaign that was, to use the Coalition's current terminology, full of lies.

But Abbott's judgment deserted him when he decided that success meant he could get away with anything, like blatantly breaking a long list of his pre-election promises, including not cutting spending in health, education and welfare benefits. This election saw the culmination of this squandering of political capital.

Both Turnbull and Shorten based their campaigns on appeals for voters' trust but this most precious of political commodities already had been exhausted. Negative campaigning, epitomised by the scare campaigns against the carbon tax and on Medicare, can work in the short run but it comes at a greater cost in the long term.

This campaign demonstrated that, to the extent that voters are prepared to believe anything that politicians say, it is that their opponents will be even more devious and untrustworthy than they are. In election campaigns past, the standing of major party leaders often rose during election campaigns, as you might expect of politicians trying their hardest to impress voters.

On this occasion, they hardly shifted at all from what were already low levels. In Newspoll, Turnbull's net satisfaction (satisfaction minus dissatisfaction) improved from -11 per cent to -7 per cent and Shorten's from -19 per cent to -15 per cent. In Fairfax Ipsos, Turnbull's net approval was the same at the end of the campaign as the beginning, namely +8 per cent, while that from Shorten improved from -11 per cent to -8 per cent.

The major parties are now reaping what they have sown. Warnings about the need for budget repair and taxation reform fall on deaf ears. Voters are more inclined to believe in populist solutions.

One way to break out of this downward spiral would be to do what voters want more than anything else of their politicians - co-operate in the national interest. Inconceivable? It is what John Howard did as opposition leader, when he supported many of the Hawke government's economic reforms, such as tariff cuts and financial deregulation - initiatives that most now agree changed Australia for the better.

In Germany, the two largest parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, govern in a so-called grand coalition, despite having their roots in quite different ideologies. Australia's tradition of adversarial politics - two sides fighting pitched battles against each other - probably makes that unachievable. But Shorten, no doubt reading the mood of voters, has said already he is prepared to work with the Liberals, though showing no sign of being willing to make concessions of his own. The Coalition is being equally pigheaded about the sanctity of its policies.

If both parties remain in denial, they will have learnt nothing from this election.

Mike Steketee is a freelance journalist. He was formerly a columnist and national affairs editor for The Australian.

Topics: government-and-politics, federal-government, business-economics-and-finance, federal-election