ANDREW CARSWELL: A Coalition election loss shouldn’t mean burning the house down

If the polls hold and May 3 delivers the expected result, beware the Coalition catastrophists.

They’ll be the ones flicking the lighter in their fidgety hands, desperate to burn the house to the ground and begin the rebuild. They’ll be the ones scheming, agitating and conspiring in backrooms, floating leadership contenders, adamant of the need to propagate a purge. The heroes of hindsight.

But if Peter Dutton does fall short of being able to cobble together a misfit army of crossbenchers to form a minority government, perspective will be required; an art often lost in the emotional turmoil of election night.

The Coalition is attempting to defy history, putting forward an unpopular leader, standing him on a platform of limited policy foundation, fighting a ballot paper full of enemies on the left and right, with diminished campaign capabilities on the ground, and banking on disillusionment with the other side to do the heavy lifting.

It was always a high-risk wager. Even before Donald Trump came in like a wrecking ball, and decimated the conservative brand globally, making Dutton’s already colossal task near insurmountable.

If an against-the-odds Coalition victory was going to be arguably its greatest electoral accomplishment and the biggest achievement from an opposition since 1931 — as pundits openly suggested just weeks ago — then the complete opposite cannot be said if such lofty feats aren’t realised. Big breaths, people.

There is no question that a returned majority Albanese Government would be an abject failure for the Coalition. And while that fate can no longer be ruled out given improved electoral positions Labor are seeing in battleground States of Victoria and NSW, it remains improbable. It is tighter than the published polls suggest.

So pushing a first-term Government into a kaleidoscope of a minority government, would be a significant accomplishment for a Coalition burdened by such aforementioned afflictions, and with history not on its side.

When did this probable outcome suddenly become so insufficient?

It is certainly not burn-the-house-down territory.

Such a result will be a solid platform to build on, even if the gains are more modest than the early expectations set when the Coalition’s primary vote was in the high 30s. Crucially — and this perhaps answers the previous question — those expectations were set by the Opposition themselves, which is partly why pundits are now framing the prospect of a narrow Labor minority government as a failure; the Coalition struggling to clear their own high bar.

Pushing Labor into a minority government should have been the goal, given that was the more realistic outcome.

If the result on May 3 is worse than expectations for the Coalition, the focus must turn to addressing core deficiencies that are clearly causing Australian voters to baulk at the Coalition when it’s crunch time. That nagging feeling of: “nup, not quite the alternative I was looking for”.

This has nothing to do with conservative values being on the nose. Pre-Trump, the deeply conservative leader in Pierre Poilievre was set to win this weekend’s Canadian election, on the back of a groundswell of young voters who liked the cut of his jib, and his promises to address housing affordability. Pre-Trump, the conservatives in the UK and fringe-right Nigel Farage had a new Labour government on the ropes within weeks of tenure.

Trump’s tyranny, deceptively dressed up as conservatism, drove a dagger in the heart of a concerted global conservative revival.

Dutton, yet another potential victim.

It is also more than personality. Tony Abbott was elected as prime minister, and the Australian public certainly didn’t have a raging crush on the bloke.

It is process. It is policy development. It is preparedness.

In seeking to keep the Liberals and National together and disciplined, policy development was sacrificed on the altar of unity. A noble objective, but a decision that atrophied policy muscle.

Beyond its rightly ambitious plan to go all-in on nuclear power, the Coalition had done little to craft a broader policy platform and vision that would present it as a credible alternative government.

When that time for policy development eventually arrived, the election campaign was mere days away. Policy announcements seemed hurried, the modelling hadn’t been done (see gas reservation policy), mistakes were made, and shadow ministers were contradicting each other.

To outsiders, it had all the hallmarks of an Opposition that thought it would slip quietly into power on the back of incompetent incumbency, without the need to showcase a grand vision of its own. Without doing the work.

There are lessons here, win, lose or draw. And that is still an outcome the public is grappling with.

But either way, whatever the flavour of minority government, the Opposition will be better for the experience.

Just no need to get the matches out yet.

Andrew Carswell is a former adviser to the Morrison government.