A state result with national implications

Suddenly the "blame game" is a live issue, argues David Burchell FOR DAYS commentators have been digging over the auguries of the NSW election, looking for clues to the federal poll later in the year. Yet in one respect the NSW election simply tells us something we already knew: that the NSW Liberal Party is an inadequate vehicle for the winning of elections. It’s an enduring mystery how the same state Liberal Party that runs election campaigns like this one can produce federal ministers of the calibre of John Howard, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. Maybe there’s a Darwinian explanation: if you can survive the NSW Liberal Party and thrive as a politician, you must be a particularly well-adapted specimen of the species homo politicus. As it has for many years, the electoral map of Sydney - at the state level, at least - continues to resemble a map of two rival principalities. Twelve of the fourteen Liberal electorates in the city lie north of the harbour and the Parramatta River. Pretty much the entirety of the city’s west, south, south east and inner city lie in Labor hands. The Liberal Party’s notorious Sydney Problem remains, much as it did ten or even twenty years ago. And they seem no closer to cracking it. However, this leads me to the second lesson to be learned out of the NSW election - and it’s less obvious and familiar than the first. For - at least until this election- the federal Coalition could have boasted fairly enough to have cracked the Sydney Problem at the national level. The last decade has seen the entrenchment of a division in many voters’ minds between the political and social responsibilities of state and federal jurisdictions. Ordinary voters in the outer suburbs of our major cities still see themselves as Labor-aligned on health, welfare and service issues - all the key areas of state responsibility. But over the long economic and housing boom over the last decade, and especially since the jihadist spectre emerged in 2001, many of the same people have come to see themselves as mildly conservative on economic and national security issues. This is why the service-deprived but house-proud and striving citizens of Penrith in Sydney’s outer-west have returned Liberal members of parliament at each of the last four federal polls, and yet continued to elect Labor MPs with healthy margins at each state poll over the same period. Indeed, last Saturday Penrith was one of the few NSW electorates to record a significant swing towards the ALP. If I were the PM, that result would have me worried. No doubt NSW Premier Morris Iemma was merrily stirring the pot when he claimed on the weekend that the federal government’s IR legislation, Work Choices, was the key factor in returning state Labor for a fourth term. In fact it’s too early to say yet exactly how important a role IR played in the NSW result. Yet Iemma was right about one thing. Work Choices has succeeded in unhitching the federal-state division of roles that’s served the Coalition so well over the last decade. Following this division the federal Coalition has succeeded in presenting itself as a force for stability and predictability, and a prudent foil to the more open-handed social policies of state administrations. The IR laws are scrambling up this picture. Instead they seem to present the PM as a kind of industrial adventurist, performing an arcane laboratory-experiment upon a nervous citizenry. This leaves the state premiers free to present themselves, not as policy spendthrifts, but rather as voices of prudence and caution, trying to ameliorate the effects of this new industrial experiment. These simple facts points to the spark of genius behind Kevin Rudd’s otherwise doleful rhetoric about “ending the blame-game” between state and federal governments. If Labor is to reign once more at the federal level, it has to present itself both as the party of economic management and service delivery, of prudence and compassion. It has to persuade the good burghers of Penrith - and their cousins elsewhere across our wide suburban expanses - that state-federal relations work better as a partnership than as a separation of powers. And persuade them to give once again at the federal level the votes they’ve continued to offer Labor in state polls. Howard is certainly no Peter Debnam. Yet he has begun to seem a somewhat ‘riskier’ proposition than previously. The bell that tolled for Peter Debnam in Penrith could be starting to tinkle faintly for John Howard across the bleached front yards of the nation. • David Burchell teaches in Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, and is associate editor of APO. This article first appeared in the Australian Financial Review. Photo: NSW Premier Morris Iemma. AAP Image/Sergio Dionisi