Update - Patient Moved to Intensive Care

The week leading up to the Wentworth by-election could hardly have been worse for Australia’s coalition government. The upshot is loss of their safest seat, not to the Opposition but to a local independent candidate, albeit one with an established national profile. Dr. Kerryn Phelps is a past president of the influential Australian Medical Association. Along with six hundred other medical practitioners, she recently signed a petition urging the government to bring to the mainland all children incarcerated on Australia’s offshore island detention centres in order to deal with the mental and other health crises that years of detention without end have produced. This was one of the key issues that exercised the voters of Wentworth, a staunchly Liberal Party voting electorate in Sydney’s wealthy Eastern suburbs.

However, this issue and event alone would not normally shake the foundations in a seat that the party had held complacently since the Second World War. The seventeen percent two-party swing needed to lose would normally have survived. But this time was different. A significant share of that buffer had been built up by the recently resigned member for Wentworth, Australia’s most recent ex-Prime Minister. Malcolm Turnbull had seized the premiership three years earlier in displacing Tony Abbott, who had been elected in 2013, defeating Kevin Rudd’s Labor government a few weeks after Rudd has displaced Julia Gillard who four years earlier displaced Kevin Rudd. You get the picture. Counting the Leader defeated at the 2007 general election, John Howard and the newly minted Scott Morrison, the Australian political system has produced a conger line of eight Prime Ministers in eleven years, seven if you don’t double-count Rudd. Next year promises a ninth. The good burghers of Wentworth had had enough. Added to their anger at the loss of a popular local member and grown used to calling that member Prime Minister, enough of them bestowed their primary votes on the well-respected local independent. With the Labor and Green parties running dead in order to reduce the chance that Australia’s unusual compulsory exhaustive preferential system would Knock Dr. Phelps out of second place to the Liberal candidate on primaries, the remorseless arithmetic of preference flows lifted her to a modest but definitive victory.

This has been a disastrous blow to the prestige of the newest Prime Minister, Morrison, and reinforced the low morale of coalition MPs, especially those in marginal seats looking forward a few short months to the next general election. It also creates immediate tactical political problems for the government that is now one seat short of a majority in the House of Representatives and must now navigate the shoals of minority government. Six cross-bench independents collectively could now join with the Opposition parties to pass a motion of no-confidence in the government and bring on the election when the government is in its weakest position. This is highly unlikely given the disparate and disorganized nature of the independent grouping and the promise of most not to do any such thing. But it is the case that in order to pass any new legislation the government will need to secure the support of at least one of the independents, each of whom will be in a strong position to extract benefits for his or her pet projects and/or electorate. This may be no bad thing for a government that has already managed to pass most of what it has been possible to get through a hostile Senate and a party room at war with itself. The government has little left in the ‘to do’ basket. Keeping its head down and coasting to the next election may be its best hope.

Unfortunately for the Morrison government, a quiet life is unlikely to eventuate. In retrospect, Wentworth may be seen to be the tipping point. A surprising by-election reversal has often been the harbinger of tectonic political change in Australia; Labor’s loss of Bass in 1975 is a case in point. Too many of the issues and mistakes that surfaced during the Wentworth campaign remain to haunt the government. With a recent backdrop of internal squabbling over major unresolved policy challenges like climate change, energy prices, wage stagnation, population and migration, the image of a government unable to govern hands the Opposition an inside run to the election. The poor record of the Liberal party in getting women into parliament and onto the front bench has been rendered critical by the claims of bullying and intimidation attending the bruising change of leadership that consigned Malcolm Turnbull to the political dustbin – and an early sojourn in New York. Finally, the legitimacy of the new regime has been tarnished by the failure of Prime Minister Morrison during and in the lead-up to the by-election. To been seen to address the party’s ‘woman problem’, he spruiked the preselection of a woman candidate – unsuccessfully. The candidate chosen by the local preselectors, Dave Sharma, had impressive credentials and the nominal backing of Turnbull, who chose not to publicly support him in the crucial last days of the campaign when his son came out to urge voters to vote for Dr. Phelps.  In a move that was universally seen as a last desperate and cynical throw of the dice, Morrison – with an eye to the large Jewish minority in Wentworth – proposed to open a discussion about moving the Australian embassy to Jerusalem. This was tossed into the mix in the last week, seemingly without discussion with Cabinet colleagues and foreign policy experts. It was, to use the phrase introduced by a vanquished predecessor, ‘a captain’s pick’. All in all, it symbolized a government in disarray. The final irony came when Prime Minister Morrison warned Wentworth voters voting against his government lest they create the instability of a minority government. The voters, of course, were painfully aware that it was the government that had indulged in a long campaign of internal warfare between the moderates and hard right of the party that had fed the instability resulting in the demise of their local member and the calling of the by-election.

Dogging the government has been the unanswered question, often asked during the Wentworth campaign – why was a popular Prime Minister leading the Opposition leader and closing the poll gap torn down? This question will reappear from time to time like Banquo’s ghost. Looking ahead, it’s difficult to see the government under new leadership and now in minority clawing back enough trust to win in May 2019 or whenever the election is called. Of course, governments suffering by-election results have gone on to win before. In this case, however, the scale of discontent, even disgust with politicians and the continuing lack of resolution of key issues like climate change places the coalition in a seemingly unwinnable position. Its economic narrative has run out of steam with the final defeat of its tax cuts for big business. The pressure that has built up to get the children out of detention, super-charged by Wentworth, looks like bringing the parties together to find an immediate compromise – the New Zealand solution. This has the unfortunate outcome – for the government – of neutralising, at least partially, the most effective club to beat Labor with – namely border security and stopping the boats – although arguing over the details of sending asylum seekers to New Zealand looks like a strategy designed to keep the issue weaponised for the government. However, as happened in 2001, the current government’s best hope may be for a new Tampa or major terrorist attack to appear over the horizon.