Australia: Social Upheaval Likely in the Lucky Country After Saturday's Election

Aaron Timms

Australia probably figures low on most people’s list of the countries likely to suffer political and social upheaval as a result of the crisis unleashed by Thursday’s Brexit vote in the UK. Strong economic fundamentals, a successful and generous immigration program, friendly relations with the growing economies to its north: the Australian story over the past decade, as for much of the 115 years since federation, has been a spectacular success. Australia, the world’s 12th largest economy, was one of the only developed nations to avoid going into recession during the financial crisis of 2008–2009. The IMF expects GDP growth to reach 2.5% this year and hover around 3% for the next two years. By the standards of other advanced economies, Australia is a tiger.

Why, then, are the polls neck and neck as Australia heads to an early federal election this Saturday, with many voters indicating they will lodge a protest minor party vote? Australian voters, it must be said, are a fickle, indecisive lot — in the last nine years, after a decade of comparative stability under the steady, starchy administration of John Howard, they’ve chewed through four different prime ministers, with three of those changes coming in the last three years. To outsiders this might seem like ingratitude, but there are now signs that the social fractures and growing inequality that have done so much to alienate large swathes of the population in other advanced economies, such as the US and the UK, are creeping into Australian society.

Predata puts the odds of a large civil protest in Australia at 40% over the next 14 days. There’s been a steady uptick in this prediction level over the past few weeks; ten days ago it was 35%, while historically the mean prediction level before a protest is just 15%, as the chart below demonstrates.

It’s difficult to predict exactly what types of protests we’re likely to see, or which groups will be behind them, but we can say that the events in Predata’s Australian protest set usually involve some dimension of the argument over immigration, refugees and border security. These are, of course, the same concerns that led a majority of British voters to stun the world with the decision last Thursday to exit the European Union. To be clear, the protests in Predata’s event set have not been uniformly mass participation events: some have been smaller rallies by far-right nationalist groups such as Reclaim Australia, other have been bigger pro-refugee events. But together, they are part of the same story: an increasing polarization of Australian society over immigration, refugees and border security, amid growing income inequality and a widening gap between the country’s glittering inner cities and its ragtag suburbs and small towns.

National security concerns have been unusually peripheral in this election campaign. Labor law reform, another perennial campaign theme in Australian federal politics, has been similarly absent — which is perhaps even odder, given it was a stoush over industrial relations in March that provided Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull with the trigger to call Australian voters to the polls.

Instead, the two main parties have conformed to type for much of the campaign’s eight weeks to date. Turnbull’s ruling Liberal-National Party coalition has stressed the importance of strong leadership on the economy, while the Labor opposition has vowed to “put people first;” mostly this has boiled down to a pledge to protect Medicare, the national healthcare system, from privatization.

In recent days, however, the to-now placid and dozy rhythm of the campaign has suffered a shock. First, Turnbull exploited an obscure argument between unions and firefighters in the state of Victoria to reboot his party’s industrial relations message, casting union intransigence on a new workplace agreement for volunteer firefighters — in unapologetically unsubtle and grandiose terms — as “an assault on what is the very best of the Australian spirit.” Then Brexit happened, handing the coalition the perfect pretext to bang the drum of stability — on both the economy and national security. Indeed, there’s been a very deliberate messaging shift from the government since Thursday’s vote: where previously the Liberal Party’s motto was, “The plan for a strong new economy,” at Saturday’s official campaign launch the PM spoke against a backdrop that simply said, “Stable Government.”

If elected, Turnbull plans to introduce three pieces of legislation to advance his anti-union agenda; the first and most important of these involves a push to revive the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner, a defunct statutory watchdog for the building industry. But it says everything about the uncertainty of the polls ahead of Saturday’s vote that the risk of industrial action over the next few weeks is strikingly low: Predata puts the likelihood of a labor strike in the next 14 days, which historically averages 22%, at just 5% (see below). Either unions are expecting a Labor victory, or they are lying in wait, should the coalition be re-elected, ahead of the real industrial relations fight due later in the year, once parliament reconvenes.

Whereas industrial relations is unlikely to swing many votes on Saturday, Brexit could. Brexit is not some distant concern for Australians; it is a major global economic shock which has the potential to significantly impair Australia’s growth prospects. But there is a broader point. Australia retains exceptionally close ties to the UK, and the two countries share much in history, politics, culture, sporting obsessions, social outlook, economic thinking, and sense of humor; 5% of Australia’s total population was born in the UK, and people-to-people flows between the two nations continue to thrive. Australians have also played a leading role in the last two decades of UK politics: Tony Blair took most of the inspiration for New Labour from the Australian Labor Party’s renaissance through the 1980s and 1990s under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, while Lynton Crosby, an Australian political apparatchik, has been the force behind the Conservative Party’s return to power in England. Australia and England share an uncommon political and social kinship; what happens in one country, broadly speaking, often mirrors events and trends in the other.

How the two main parties’ leaders handle the Brexit bombshell in the days ahead could have a decisive impact on the election. “Sharemarkets go up and down all the time, but that’s not an argument not to change the government,” Labor leader Bill Shorten told reporters this weekend when asked how post-Brexit volatility, especially in financial markets, might affect Saturday’s outcome. Turnbull offered his own take hours later, announcing with a clenched jaw: “Now more than ever Australia needs a stable coalition majority government, with a strong economic plan.”

If Thursday’s vote in the UK teaches us one thing, it’s that voters can surprise with their willingness to take risks; instability and fear of the unknown don’t necessarily favor the status quo. This Australian campaign has had a significantly cooler temperature than the last few months in UK politics, however; the stakes are lower and there’s been none of the venomousness that blighted the Brexit campaign. Turnbull and the coalition are still likely to benefit from the advantage of incumbency in this suddenly more uncertain global macro environment.

But it’s the way they spin global uncertainty that could unleash the passions hinted at by Predata’s civil protest predictions. Already there are signs the coalition will use Brexit as a pretext to prod voters’ fears over stability and national security in the final week of campaigning; senior coalition figure Peter Dutton has been mobilized over the weekend to hammer this single issue home.

Passions in Australia run high on border security and refugee policy; at least two elections in recent memory — those of 2001 and 2013 — were fought almost exclusively on national security. This is a pattern that favors the coalition, which has always been seen as stronger on border protection (no surprise, then, that the Liberal-National alliance triumphed in both 2001 and 2013). But the passions aroused by the vote in the UK and the revived domestic campaign focus on national security will stoke a more restive national mood in the months ahead, regardless of the outcome on Saturday. Right-wing nationalist and anti-immigrant voices could seize on the precedent of Brexit to push their agendas more aggressively in Australia — in particular by coopting the Brexiteers’ “take back control” message.

The path ahead for Australia promises, as Predata suggests, a likely uptick in protests and rallies from both nationalist groups and pro-refugee organizations, but it also suggests a broader shift: more polarization between the inner cities and the rest of the country, a more strident tone to the political conversation over immigration and national security, and more and deeper division on the big questions of how Australia should relate to the rest of the world.