Liberals and Power: The Road Ahead by Peter van Onselen

Author:Peter van Onselen [Onselen, Peter van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780522859188
Google: 3cySDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 6243685
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Published: 2008-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part III

Winning Elections

8

What the Issue Cycle Brings: The Liberals and Public Opinion

Andrew Norton

Elections may be the only polls that really count, but opinion surveys are the only polls that really explain. Voters bundle their attitudes on issues, people and circumstances in deciding which party to support. Election outcomes give us their decisions but not their reasons. We need opinion polling to see voters’ views on the various factors shaping their political choices. The Liberal Party’s leaders and strategists will look closely at survey evidence in deciding what they need to do, and in monitoring their success or failure.

Though the Liberal Party’s political fortunes in 2008 and beyond cannot be predicted with any precision, polling on issues reveals long-term aspects of Australian public opinion relevant to understanding the Party’s situation. Public opinion surveys consistently find that voters prefer the Liberals on some issues and Labor on others. The margin varies frequently, but the result rarely. Voters have well-established partisan issue biases in their political thinking.

While issue biases are stable, the political agenda changes over time. The electorate comes to see some issues as more important and others as less important. Though providing no guarantees of victory, since other considerations also influence voters, an issue cycle moving towards a party’s strengths makes its political task easier. It changes the bundle of considerations in its favour. The Liberals benefited from a surge in their issues in 2001, but otherwise issues on which Labor enjoys an advantage rose in the 2000s. By 2007, voters regarded Labor’s issues as their top priorities.

To win elections the Liberals need to assure voters that they are ‘safe’ on Labor-preferred issues. John Howard’s promise to keep Medicare helped him to office in 1996. The Brendan Nelson–led Opposition’s early disowning of WorkChoices is similarly designed to neutralise that issue. But the Liberals will not win future elections by showing that they are no worse than Labor. A Liberal victory will occur when the political agenda reverts to areas of Liberal strength at a time that they look like a competent alternative government.

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