Michelle Grattan: Coalition’s reason for timing of defence policy doesn’t wash

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 things 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 Coalition regards defence and national security as its natural territory. It is pledging to boost defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP within five years — $21 billion extra — and to 3 per cent 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 policy document setting out how a Coalition government would 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 WA 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. 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 judgments 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. He was canny, however, in hitting the road as the year started with announcements. That gave him momentum — and also became more important when Easter and the Anzac 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 PM 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 he’s 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. Peter Dutton and Nationals leader David Littleproud have both suggested the Coalition’s internal polling, concentrating on marginal seats, is better for it than the media’s national polls. If Labor loses, it will be left wondering how an apparently textbook campaign failed to nail the votes. If the Liberals lose, their post-mortem 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 that some policies were not fully thought through, or road tested. “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 public service jobs. Dutton says the numbers will only go (by attrition or voluntary redundancy) from those in Canberra. The Coalition also says front line 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: Coalition’s reason for timing of defence policy doesn’t wash

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