Electoral Studies (1993). 12:3, 253-256

Notes on Recent Elections

The Australian Federal Election of 1993

CLNE BEAN AND GARY MARKS

Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia

To the surprise of many, the Australian Labor Party won a record fifth consecutive federal election on 13 March 1993. Labor had just scraped home in the previous election, three years earlier. Since then the Australian economy had experienced a recession and unemployment had risen above 11 per cent, a level unprecedented since the Great Depression. The most successful leader in the party’s history, Bob Hawke, had been replaced by the less popular Paul Keating and after ten years in office the government was beginning to look tired and short of fresh ideas to deal with difficult social and economic circumstances. Yet, Labor’s primary vote in the election improved substantially and it ultimately won with an increased majority of seats, despite a number of very close results in individual constituencies which meant the final parliamentary majority was not certain for sometime after the election.

Background

The scene for the 1993 election was set with the release late in 1991 of a wide- ranging policy package by the opposition Liberal and National parties, entitled Fightback.! The conservative coalition partners had been criticized for their lack of policy detail in the campaigns leading up to their defeats in the 1987 and 1990 elections. The Fightbackl package represented a bold attempt to take the moral high ground, by spelling out detailed policy proposals and asking the electorate to accept the necessity of a range of tough measures, designed ultimately to make the Australian economy more internationally competitive in the longer term. The centre-piece of the package was a controversial new goods and services tax (GST), to be levied at the rate of 15 per cent on virtually all goods and services. John Hewson, the leader of the opposition since March 1990, was a strong personal advocate of the GST and initially appeared to relish the prospect of attempting to sell the introduction of a new tax to the electorate.

On its release the Fig&back! package met with a generally positive reaction, if only because it contained a coherent set of detailed policy initiatives. This response did little to bolster the standing of Prime Minister Hawke, who had been gradually

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losing the confidence of his party over the previous twelve months. In December 1991 Keating narrowly defeated Hawke in a caucus vote for the leadership, after an unsuccessful challenge six months earlier. Keating had been treasurer for most of the Hawke government’s term of office and was not considered to have the personal vote-pulling power of Hawke. On the other hand, he was regarded as having the economic, political and debating skills to make life uncomfortable for the opposition.

In the early part of his prime ministership, Keating concentrated less on the coali- tion’s policy proposals and more on his own policy programme, published under the label of One Nation. However, as 1992 wore on and the recession bit deeper and unemployment became more and more of a political headache for the govern- ment, Keating. increasingly began to steer debate towards a critical scrutiny of Fightbackl, especially the GST. Ignoring the fact that the GST would replace a number of existing taxes and that he himself had proposed a similar tax back in 1985, Keating exposed the political vulnerability of an opposition trying to win an election by promising a new tax. He identified particular weaknesses-such as the proposed imposition of GST on basic food items and Hewson’s apparent reluctance to countenance any changes to the policy-and hammered such themes remorse- lessly. Social service and church groups also criticized the GST on equity grounds and fmally, in December 1992, Hewson was forced to make a number of changes to Fightbackl, most notably to drop the GST from most foodstuffs.

The Campaign

By the time the election was called, on 7 February, it was clear that the campaign was going to be fought more on the opposition’s policies than on the government’s record, due to a combination of Keating’s ability to set the agenda and the opposi- tion’s unusual and high risk strategy of deliberately setting out to sell a detailed- and in places quite ‘radical’-policy platform as its principal means of winning government, rather than taking the politically more expedient course of focusing on the government’s deficiencies as the centre of its campaign for office. Furthermore, the economic indicators were no longer all bad for the government by then. The economy had come out of recession and was starting to grow steadily again and inflation had fallen virtually to zero. Unemployment remained at around 11 per cent and was the government’s most obvious weakness, but most voters were probably well aware that no political party had a fast and sure recipe for curing that problem.

After a positive response to the reworking of Fightback!, the opposition entered the election campaign ahead in the opinion polls and remained in front until close to the election. Although Labor appeared to be closing the gap as the campaign wore on, until the last day or two the trend looked to be not quite strong enough to save the government from defeat. The fact that Labor’s own strategists were pessimistic may have prompted Keating’s increasingly negative campaigning over the five weeks and his explicit appeals to voters to make the election a referen- dum on the GST. Keating claimed that the opposition’s policies, particularly the GST, would change Australia’s way of life for ever. Supported by television adver- tising, he invoked images of everything becoming 15 per cent more expensive. (The coalition’s own advertising, showing ordinary people meeting ghastly fates at the hands of the Labor government, was hardly more positive, however.) Keating- aided by the media-also played on complexities and uncertainties in the proposed

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scheme and his final message just before the election was: ‘If you don’t understand the GST, don’t vote for it’ (with the addition that anyone who did understand the GST certainly wouldn’t vote for it!).

While the GST was undoubtedly the policy issue given most attention during the campaign, a number of other issues featured as well. Unemployment levels in partic- ular and the delicate state of the economy more generally (especially the question of whether the recovery was more apparent than real) were frequent topics of debate, although the obvious lack of short-term solutions from either side may have rendered them less significant in the end than might otherwise have been antici- pated. Industrial relations was another hotly debated issue, again largely in terms of the opposition’s policy proposals, in particular plans for workplace reforms and the introduction of individual employment contracts. The opposition’s plans to restructure Labor’s public health system, Medicare, also featured prominently along with issues of child care and family support, as the government tried to increase its support among women by promising improvements to these services. On the other hand, despite the emergence of a Green political party, the environment, which had been a major focus of the 1990 election campaign, hardly featured this time, with the two major parties focusing the debate on core aspects of economic and social policy.

During the campaign there were three televised debates between the two major party leaders (only two of which had originally been scheduled). The first debate saw both leaders in a restrained mood but in the later ones Keating displayed more of the aggressive style for which he is renowned as he sought to attack Hewson’s policies and deflect criticism of the government’s record on economic management. A feature of Hewson’s campaign were the large and rowdy public rallies he addressed in different parts of the country. The apparent success of these older- style election campaign meetings inspired Hewson to hold more and more of them towards the end of the campaign. Keating preferred more controlled public appear- ances and meetings with the media and, while Hewson’s meetings gave the impres- sion of an open style of campaigning, Keating claimed that it was in fact a clever device for avoiding close scrutiny of the coalition’s policies. Public opinion polls suggested that neither leader was a potential electoral asset to his party.

Results

Owing to a number of factors, the fmal outcome was always likely to depend on the net balance of conflicting movements in different states. The recession had hit some states harder (for example, Victoria and South Australia) than others and certain state governments had faced serious political embarrassment in recent times (particularly, in Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria). Voters in Tasmania, Victoria and most recently Western Australia had had the opportunity to vent their anger against unpopular state governments in the months prior to the election, while voters in some other states had not. In Victoria, an unpopular Labor govem- ment had been replaced in October 1992 by a coalition government that had quickly made itself equally unpopular with the electorate by the speedy introduc- tion of harsh economic and industrial reforms. Elsewhere, Queensland had a relatively popular Labor government, New South Wales had a relatively unpopular coalition government, Tasmania an unpopular Liberal government, South Australia had a very unpopular Labor government and Western Australia had replaced a Labor

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government with a coalition one only a few weeks before the federal election. Also, following the 1990 election and the subsequent partial redistribution of seats in 1991, there was a concentration of highly vulnerable marginal Labor seats in certain states, while the coalition was similarly vulnerable in others.

The result hinged on whether the Labor Party could make enough gains in Tasmania and Victoria to offset expected losses in South Australia and Western Australia, while more or less holding the line in New South Wales and Queensland. In the event, the government made bigger than expected gains in Tasmania and Victoria, while losses in South Australia and Western Australia were minimal. Labor also fared well in New South Wales and despite losing votes in Queensland, actual seat losses were also very small in that state. In sum, the Labor Party substantially increased its share of the first preference vote from the 1990 election (from 39.4 per cent to 44.9 per cent) and also increased its seat majority, to thirteen over all others in the House of Representatives (see the table of results p.286).

In terms of votes the big loser was the sixteen-year-old Australian Democrats. Its largest ever vote in the House of Representatives in 1990 was replaced by its small- est ever vote in 1993 (from 11.3 per cent to 3.8 per cent). A good deal of that vote probably went to Labor and some would have gone to the Greens, but the Greens themselves did not fare as well as they may have anticipated either. However, just as the Democrats’ surge in 1990 did not see them rewarded with seats in the House of Representatives or with additional seats in the Senate, so on this occasion they appear likely to end up with their strength in the Senate (where they got 5.3 per cent of the vote, down from 12.6 per cent in 1990) more or less unaltered. By contrast with the fortunes of small parties in the lower house, and despite the fact that both major parties improved their primary vote in the election, two indepen- dent candidates were elected to the House of Representatives thus doubling the number of such victories in general elections since 1949. Ted Mack retained the seat of North Sydney that he had won in 1990 and Phil Cleary, a popular local football coach, won Hawke’s former seat of Wills in Melbourne (which he had earlier won in a by-election only to be later disqualified on a technicality). The junior partner in the coalition, the National Party, achieved a net gain of two seats even though its vote sank to a record low.

The most common explanations for Labor’s victory in the immediate aftermath of the election revolved around the impact of campaign issues, such as the GST in particular, as well as industrial relations, and health care and family support issues and the associated courting by Labor of the women’s vote. Whether and to what extent these and other factors were significant will have to wait for detailed analy- ses of survey and other data in the months to follow. In the bloodletting within the coalition parties that followed the unexpected election defeat, Hewson was retained as Liberal Party leader but the GST was banished from the coalition’s policy platform, since the difficulty of selling a complex new tax system from opposition to an electorate confronted with a barrage of negative messages about it from the government clearly rated in the assessment of party members as the major obstacle they had faced in the campaign. It is sobering to note that in other democracies in which a goods and services-type tax has been brought in, it has always been intro- duced by a government without indicating at a prior election that such a move was imminent.