The reason the Coalition lost the Victorian state election was not because it wasn't left-wing enough. And it wasn't because of Tony Abbott. It was because Labor had policies that were more relevant to more people — and Labor communicated the benefits of those policies more effectively.
It's a myth that Victoria is more "progressive" than other states. And it is a myth that to be elected the Victorian Coalition has to pretend to be like the Labor Party. These are myths up there with "Tony Abbott is unelectable". Abbott won the 2013 federal election, and came within inches of winning the 2010 election. If a few things change, Abbott will prove himself electable again.
Writing in The Age after the election, the veteran and astute observer of Victoria, Tim Colebatch, said: "The Coalition wins in Victoria only when it presents an attractive moderate alternative, as Dick Hamer did in the 1970s and Ted Baillieu in 2010, or when it fans a sense of crisis requiring radical change, as Jeff Kennett did in the 1990s."
Leaving aside the fact that in the early 1990s Victoria actually was in crisis — Kennett didn't have to invent it or "fan" it — Colebatch's analysis doesn't explain what happened on Saturday.
The Baillieu/Napthine government couldn't have been more moderate, yet it still lost. The Victorian Coalition enthusiastically supported federal Labor's health and education policies, fought against restoring freedom of speech, and banned onshore gas exploration. While during the election campaign the Coalition (correctly) identified the industrial problems likely to emerge under a union-dominated state Labor government, it was the Baillieu government itself that in 2011 refused to direct the police to remove unlawful union pickets. The Coalition was so moderate it even banned solariums.
On this page on Thursday, Mark Latham wrote that Daniel Andrews "campaigned as if he was running to be mayor of Victoria". Latham's right. And the point to note is that not much of Labor's campaign in Victoria was moderate or progressive.
AVOIDING TALK OF CLIMATE CHANGE
During the campaign Labor did everything it could to avoid talking about the great progressive cause of the moment — climate change. In fact the ALP was attacked by the Liberals for not being sufficiently supportive of renewable energy. Labor's key promises, such as paying paramedics and firemen more, and removing 50 railway level crossings, were not particularly progressive.
In reality, the evidence that Victoria is a "moderate" state is thin. The argument traditionally relies on the vote in Victoria at the 1999 republic referendum, and Victorians' support (or lack thereof) for parties like One Nation.
It's often claimed that Victoria was the only state to support a republic. In fact what happened is that on election it looked like the "yes" vote in Victoria would be more than 50 per cent. But when counting was concluded, Victoria was like every other state in rejecting the republic.
And it is just as feasible to claim the Victorians don't like populist parties because they're seen as an interstate phenomenon as because Victorians don't support their policies. At last year's federal election, the national Senate vote for the Palmer United Party in Victoria was higher than in NSW.
In truth, the Greens vote in Victoria is not very different from the rest of the country either. The Greens' vote for the lower house at the last state election in NSW in 2011 was 10.28 per cent. On Saturday in Victoria the Greens vote in the lower house was 11.02 per cent.
What is different about Victoria is that about 75 per cent of the state's population lives in a single city, Melbourne. This is a higher concentration in a single metropolitan area than any other state except South Australia. In NSW 64 per cent of people live in Sydney; in Queensland the figure is 48 per cent.
In Victoria the effect of this demographic concentration is that the impact of the Melbourne media, particularly the ABC and The Age, is magnified. What Victoria's state election has just demonstrated, though, is that what worries the ABC and The Age are not the things that decide elections in that state — no matter how much some people might wish it to be otherwise.
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