The swing’s the thing
I simply had no comeback to this, probably because this was pretty much the same line my Hungarian nanny regularly trotted out. In her eyes, Labor was synonymous with the evil communists who had robbed her peasant family of their land and enterprise, and hanged her first husband after the war. (The latter being at least one thing in their favour, she would happily concede.) My nanny’s assertion of the communists at work in Australia had so shadowy and menacing a feel that this alone was enough to make me secretly suspect its truth.
If Labor, when in power, happened to, say, raise the pension rate, my nanny would pocket the extra cash with an apologetic, “well, what’s mine is mine.” The Liberals’ GST policy provoked from her a startled “why do we need this?” but her preferences at the ballot box stayed the same. To me, this is fascinating psychology. Every election, the pundits attempt to read the mood of swinging voters; those mysterious, fickle folk in Western Sydney and elsewhere in the mortgage-belt. Still, it is the the vast majority of Australians who are rusted on to one side or the other and throughout a lifetime of voting will basically back the same horse each time, who really interest me.
Yes, there may be more swinging voters around these days than has been the case historically and the social earthquakes of the 1960s and 1970s broke the nexus between the voting patterns of parents and those of their children. And yet all the money and noise and intellectual effort expended during an election campaign is directed at what it is still a tiny group of citizens who are open to a change of mind.
Who can deny the smug pleasure of waving aside the how-to-vote cards proffered by the Other Team on your brisk and certain march to the polling station?
This sentimental faith is all the more interesting at a time when the parties themselves can seem ideologically scrambled. The Liberals reject a free-market solution to climate change; Labor tries to outbid the Opposition on tax cuts. Despite everything, Australians are still a bunch of true believers and believers generally. And I don’t accept that this choice is no more meaningful than ranking Kellogg’s against Uncle Tobys in the supermarket. Voting is primarily a question of the heart and our collective constancy merely reflects how lucky and stable a country this is. I always smile when reminded of some Serbian friends who are so on auto-pilot when it comes to election days they barely even notice who they’re voting for. “We vote for, you know,” the lady of the household once explained, “what are they called? Ah yes, the Workers’ Party!”
Of course, I probably shouldn’t employ the royal “we” quite so, err, liberally when it comes to Jewish voters. This is because the Jewish community has an arguably larger proportion of swinging voters than the general community because single issues, foreign policy on Israel chief among them, have particular potency. The academic research on political trends in the community appears to back the anecdotal impression that the Liberal Party has the edge with Jewish voters_ a trend that began in the 1970s when the Whitlam Government toned-down Labor’s support for Israel. It is a fluid thing, as we know: Bob Hawke brought some Jews back to Labor, John Howard won the hearts of some for his strong support of Israel, but alienated others by his stance on refugees and multiculturalism. And as many commentators have pointed out, the success of a politician such as Michael Danby suggests the individual candidate may be more important than the party.
I will never tire of the thrill of imagining what people do when they’re alone with a ballot paper. And if they simply do exactly as they have done many times before, that’s more than enough food for thought.