Greens v Labor in the Inner City

COMMENT – BY ADRIAN ROOK

We are still yet to learn which party will form the government. Yet the result is already being regarded as a success for Labor and a failure for the Coalition – even if they do manage to clinch a second term.

The Labor Party managed to surprise pundits on a number of fronts during the vote tally, performing better than expected in some key marginal seats. One area which has also surprised some is the performance of Labor in their inner-Sydney stoush with the Greens. During the campaign there was heavy speculation placed on the performance of the Greens in the seats of Grayndler and Sydney.

The evidence was there to support this speculation: the Greens held the seat of Balmain in the New South Wales elections last year, as well as picking up the seat of Newtown. The platform of no federal funding for the Westconnex project was seen as leverage over Labor, who would not make the commitment to renege on the promised Commonwealth funds.

Despite this, the results in these seats are disappointing for the Greens, as they failed to improve their primary vote count. In response, the Greens have highlighted the bad blood between themselves and Labor, with NSW Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon claiming “Labor’s scare campaign to frighten voters to win back votes from the Greens with the repeated false claim of a Greens-Liberal preference deal had an impact on us”.

It is likely Senator Rhiannon overstates the impact of negative campaigning. Both Labor and the Greens engaged to some extent in negative campaigns against each other, which is expected of political parties vying for the same seat at an election. The outcome is better explained by looking to the advantages that Labor had in these seats. There are three main issues which emerge when taking this approach.

The first is the popularity of both Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek. Albanese has held his seat for two decades, having first been elected in 1996. Tanya Plibersek was first elected in 1998. Both are highly respected and widely seen as two of the most popular Labor party figures. Gaining name recognition for alternative candidates with an incumbent MP of twenty years is always a hard task. Unseating those incumbents whilst they retain a high level of personal popularity is even harder.

Secondly, Labor had an advantage in terms of both its campaign resources and its campaign efficacy. A campaign that consisted largely of volunteers talking directly to voters at their doorsteps, or by telephone is a consistent feature of Labor campaigns. The Greens are at a disadvantage to Labor, as they have fewer members that are able to mobilise for this sort of campaigning.

But it is likely the final issue which pulled the most sway with voters. That issue is the trajectory that the campaign took in the final weeks. The focus on hospitals and Medicare was clearly a strategy that paid its dividends, both in marginal heartland seats like Sydney and Grayndler.

As The Age’s economics editor Peter Martin noted in his column, the campaign on Medicare was successful because voters were already anxious about cuts to health spending. The idea of a GP co-payment, a freeze to the indexation of Medicare rebates and a decline in the level of Commonwealth funding for hospitals contributed heavily to the success of this campaign. Support also came from the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners in their TV advertisements opposing the Medicare rebate indexation freeze.

It was hard for both the Coalition and the Greens to combat this strategy. Voters generally prefer Labor when it comes to health. Whilst the WestConnex project will be a key issue in the inner city for some time, it was probably not as much of a vote changing issue at this Federal election as the Greens had hoped.