Relieved winners ignore the whiff of the loser
by Alan Ramsay
Sydney Morning Herald
14 October 1998
A million Coalition votes have gone missing.
Labor lost office and Paul Keating lost the prime ministership when 60,000 Labor voters defected in 1996. This election, with the ballots of 88.3 percent of Australia's 12 million enrolled voters counted, John Howard is still 1,090,845 votes short of the sweeping victory that made him Prime Minister 31 months ago.
This is the true measure of the closeness of the election result and the Government's diminished standing irrespective of the number of seats won by either side. And although the figures aren't final, the Government's loss of primary votes will far exceed Labor's corresponding loss of support in 1996.
The Electoral Commission is unsure how many votes remain to be counted. Yet it seems that many thousands of voters who supported the Coalition in 1996 may simply have ignored the election, particularly in NSW and Victoria. The commission believes blocks of voters are still being checked or recounted before they are entered in the central computer by State electoral divisions. At the same time it concedes the national voter turnout could prove one of the lowest since compulsory voting was adopted in 1924.
WE won't know for sure until early next week.
What we do know is that as of 3.22 yesterday afternoon, after an election count just hours short of 10 full days, the Howard Government had the dutiful distinction of having polled the worst Coalition primary vote since Menzies founded the Liberal Party more than half a century earlier.
In the 22 Federal elections since the Liberal Party was formed in 1944, the Coalition has never, win or lose, polled as poorly as the Howard Government did 11 days ago. Yet the Government still won, and this morning, in the Liberal's party room in Canberra, John Howard's depleted followers will formally re-elect him, unopposed as party leader and prime minister, just as they will re-elect Victoria's Peter Costello unopposed as his deputy. Some will do so grudgingly, if not resentfully. Others will do so with an open mind on the political mood of the next six to 12 months. It is enough for the moment that the Government has been returned. Thus nobody will today speak the unspeakable.
Yet John Howard's leadership will remain an open question, now matter how much his supporters publicly hype his "courageous" election victory or privately traduce his ambitious young deputy's leader ship aspirations. While Costello is content to bide his time and keep his counsel, one supportive colleague observed yesterday: "Every cell in his body is carnivorous".
So is the tenor of the Liberal Party establishment, particularly in Victoria. After 13 years in the wilderness, they do not intend to stand by and allow John Howard to do in the Government's second term what nearly proved terminal in his first.
The voting trends behind the election results confirm their attitude.
While the Coalition's number of primary votes is massively fewer than in 1996, its percentage share of the national vote (39.7) is its worst in the 54 years history of the Liberal Party.. The Liberal primary vote. At 33.9 percent, is its poorest since the McMahon. Government's losing vote in 1972 (32 percent) and worse than that achieved by either Andrew Peacock in 1990 (35 percent) or John Howard in 1993 (37.1 percent).
That National Party primary vote. At 5.5 percent, is its worst since the early 1920s. The inroads by One Nation explain much of the loss, but even after preferences the Australia wide swing against the Coalition (44.9 percent() was only marginally better than the anti-Labor swing (5.1 percent) that defeated the Keating Government.
The national swing away from the Coalition in primary votes (7.5 percent) was greater than the swing against Labor (6.2 percent) in 1996 and greater even than the swing against the ousted Whitlam Government (6.5 percent) in 1975. No Government in at least 60 years has suffered such a haemorrhaging of direct electoral support and managed to survive.
Kim Beazley's Labor Opposition lost the election solely on preferences in a handful or key marginal seats, just as the Peacock Coalition Opposition did in 1990. In the count to date, Labor has polled almost 50,000 more primary votes than the Government and 240,000 more votes after preferences.
Confirmation of the lower voter turnout would simply emphasises how many people did not want to vote for any of the major parties. One inn every five who did vote supported the minor parties or Independents, the most emphatic electoral boycott of the established party system since the early 1940's.
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