How to Win an Election

By Chris Wallace

The 2019 Australian election produced a surprise result showing, not for the first time, that every election is there for the winning—including the next one. Labor's surprise loss in 2019, like the Liberal and National parties' defeat in the so-called 'unloseable' 1993 election, showed how careful attention to basic political craft can yield big dividends—and how inattention to it can turn apparently certain favourites into losers. With the vast challenges of climate change and social and economic equity in the post-pandemic world ahead of us, Australia cannot afford any more costly election accidents. How To Win An Election spells out the ten things a political leader and their party must excel at to maximise the chance of success, and against which they should be accountable between and during elections. Better performance in even a few of the areas canvassed in this book can change an election outcome, so full attention should be paid to each of them, all the time, every time, without fail, Wallace argues—in real time, when it counts. How To Win An Election is a crucial insurance policy against overconfident leaders imposing learner errors on their supporters over and over.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781742244792

Chris Wallace

Chris Wallace is an anchor for CNN and host of Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?, a wide-ranging interview program on Max. Prior to CNN, Wallace was the anchor of Fox News Sunday for eighteen years where he covered every major political event. Throughout his five decades in broadcasting, he has interviewed numerous U.S. and world leaders, including seven American presidents, and won every major broadcast news award for his reporting, including three Emmy Awards, the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, and the Peabody Award. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Countdown Bin Laden: The Untold Story of the 247-Day Hunt to Bring the Mastermind of 9/11 to Justice and Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World.

Book preview

HOW TO

WIN

AN ELECTION

Dr CHRIS WALLACE is Associate Professor at the 50/50 By 2030 Foundation, Faculty of Business Government and Law, University of Canberra. She was a longstanding member of the Canberra Press Gallery where she worked for the Australian Financial Review, The Australian, Channel 7 and ABC-TV. Wallace is the author of several books including the biography Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew, The Private Don: The Man Behind the Legend of Don Bradman and Hewson: A Portrait. She is on Twitter @c_s_wallace and Instagram c_s_wallace.

For Christie – it’s up to your generation now.

HOW TO

WIN

AN ELECTION

CHRIS

WALLACE

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Chris Wallace 2020

First published 2020

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

ISBN9781742236872 (paperback)

9781742244792 (ebook)

9781742249292 (ePDF)

Internal design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Luke Causby, Blue Cork

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

CONTENTS

Prologue

1Elect a leader who can do the substance and theatre of politics

2Put frontbenchers who bring voters along with them into key portfolios

3Create policy winners, not losers

4Get excellent polling, focus on the primary vote

5Make regional variations work for you, not against you

6Negotiate better relationships with opponents on the same side of politics

7Neutralise hostile media and befriend unbiased journalists

8Do brilliant cut-through ads

9Be social

10Know every election is winnable

Epilogue

Notes

PROLOGUE

‘I have always believed in miracles,’ Scott Morrison declared in his victory speech on election day 2019. ¹ Was the Morrison Government’s surprise win over the Bill Shorten–led Labor opposition a miracle? Or was it an unnecessary loss by Labor, which after its narrow defeat in 2016 looked set for certain victory? What went wrong?

After elections people, even political professionals, mostly put the result down to one main thing. Our personal experiences, incomplete knowledge, self-interest, and media reports drive us to make snap, instinctive pronouncements.

Sometimes those singular judgements might be correct: one factor may be overwhelmingly important in the result. But many elections in Australia are so close that if even a few aspects of performance between and during them were better, they could have changed the outcome.

Two election surprises tell the story: the Morrison Government’s 2019 federal election win and the Keating Government’s victory in 1993. Two shock results in a quarter of a century might not seem many, but Australia has only had ten federal elections in that period, so that’s an upset every five elections over those 25 years. It takes historical perspective to bring their lessons to the fore.

^The House of Representatives was expanded from 125 to 148 seats.

#The House of Representatives was expanded from 148 to 150 seats.

*A minority government by six seats, supported informally in office by independent MPs.

°The House of Representatives was expanded from 150 to 151 seats.

Elections may still be very close without falling into the ‘shock’ basket. This table shows the immediate post-election parliamentary majority of the Australian government over the past 50 years, during which there were 20 elections.²

In seven of the 20 elections, the government held office with a single-digit majority of seats or was a minority government. That is, in one-third of elections held over the last half-century, the difference between winning or losing came down to just a handful of seats. One-third is a lot, certainly enough to back the claim that elections in Australia are often close. No one in politics – leader, MP, party official, staffer, candidate, aspirant, rank-and-file party member, activist, journalist, commentator, voter – should ever forget it.

This book is based on the idea that while antipodean electoral systems are the best in the world, well-functioning democracies should not produce as many ‘surprise’ election results as Australia has over the past quarter-century. Too often political parties do not optimise all the elements of effective politics between, and during, campaigns. To the losers, ‘surprise’ election losses are unnecessary election losses, producing a visceral anguish that glowers through to the next election and beyond.

The purpose of How to Win an Election is to make unnecessary election losses less common by showing how to avoid them. As mentioned above, better performance in even one or two of the areas canvassed in this book could lead to a different outcome, so full attention should be paid to each of them, all the time, every time, without fail – in real time when it counts.

This sounds obvious. Doesn’t that happen anyway? Isn’t politics full of professionals who know that? If this were so there would be fewer ‘surprise’ election results – and 2019 would have seen the election of the Shorten Labor Government.

I wrote most of this book in the summer of 2020 as bushfires raged up and down Australia’s east coast. Many people died. Thick smoke blowing in from fires to the east, west and south forced me to decamp temporarily from Australia’s beautiful bush capital, Canberra, where residents in the outermost suburbs were on alert as fire encroached from the blazing Namadgi National Park. Wildlife and flora were decimated on an unprecedented, almost unimaginable scale. Dwellings were incinerated. While bushfires engulfed south-eastern Australia with an intensity and longevity unseen and unheard of in our history, the Morrison Government dog-whistled climate denial and gaslit the nation about its energy and environment policies.³ Citizens were traumatised by the Great Conflagration’s ongoing human and environmental catastrophe, and the government’s callous disregard of it.

As the book went into production, Canberra was hit by an epochal hailstorm. Seventy buildings at the Australian National University where I worked as an historian were seriously damaged. Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Australia shut its borders to the world and several states shut their borders to each other. The economic slowdown already underway before the pandemic cascaded into a deep recession: unemployment rose sharply and entire industries were on their knees. Poorly designed policy interventions to keep the economy alive helped some people and not others, helped some sectors and not others, and the better initiatives like free childcare were hastily withdrawn while still crucially needed. As the publishing process drew to a close, with Australia still in lockdown, I began a new job at the University of Canberra from home, later visiting its largely studentless, staffless campus as the coronavirus lockdown slightly eased. The bushfires, hailstorm and pandemic were not a series of random, unfortunate events. They are facets of the pervasive global phenomenon of bigger and more frequent catastrophes than ever before as Earth’s interacting physical, chemical and biological systems reel under the pressure of human impacts in what scientists now call the Anthropocene.⁴

In this context Labor’s unnecessary 2019 election loss assumes its proper proportions. The fact Australia has to wait until at least the next election for a competent, far-sighted government to enact decent climate policies and address the deep social and economic inequities highlighted so starkly in the pandemic, matters absolutely.

While How to Win an Election is primarily concerned with helping Labor avoid unnecessary election losses like that in 2019, the lessons apply across politics. Moderate conservatives motivated to drag their parties from the absurd, destructive right-wing excess that contributed to 2020’s hellish summer are welcome to these lessons too. Australia needs Labor governments more often, and for longer, in the interests of better policy and government. It also needs sane, centrist conservative parties so that when the Liberal–National coalition is in office, as is inevitable in our democratic system, it does not reverse, neglect or actually worsen policies essential to our future; otherwise we have no future.

Politics is a lifelong engagement, for some more than others. My father taught me to read on the block-letter headlines of newspaper front pages. I delivered my first public political analysis as an eight-year-old at a neighbour’s backyard barbeque. I voted for the first time aged 14 when my briefly indisposed mother let me have her postal vote. I interviewed the then Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) president and future Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke, on ABC-TV as a 15-year-old. That same year I sat atop a Volkswagen Kombi van photographing deposed Labor prime minister, Gough Whitlam, at one of the massive ‘Dismissal’ election rallies. These were held in capital cities around the nation after he was ousted in a constitutional coup by the Malcolm Fraser–led coalition opposition. At 16 my English teacher took me to task for the iridescent ‘Fraser for Fuhrer’ sticker in Gothic font on my school briefcase (and in retrospect I realise he was right). At 17 I moved to Canberra to study politics and history at the Australian National University (ANU). After graduation I went to the University of Sydney to study political economy; it had become clear that to really understand politics you had to understand economics too. To support myself I worked part-time in Sussex Street organising the papers of the Seamen’s Union of Australia’s federal office for donation to ANU’s Noel Butlin Archive of Business and Labour.⁵

This was where my experience of politics began to complicate. Why didn’t the Seamen’s Union have any women members? And why, chatting about politics one day, did a Seamen’s Union official describe Bob Hawke as a ‘lying, right-wing, opportunistic bastard’? Weren’t they on the same side? Equally, struggling to survive on part-time wages and looking for a full-time job, why did neither of the two Labor MPs I applied for research positions with reply while the sole Liberal did, and gave me the job? And why did that