The Coalition and Clive Palmer didn't win their own election culture war

It's three years since an emotional Anthony Albanese surprised everyone — including his then minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney, who was in the crowd at the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL — by announcing that his first item of business as prime minister would be to implement, in full, the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

True to his word, Albanese took the Voice to a referendum vote a year-and-a-half later. Even though it did not have bipartisan support. Even though electoral history was frantically waving its arms to warn of near-certain failure.

The aspiration of the Voice was that — if successful — it would change the course of the parliament's relationship with Australia's First Peoples.

But it failed. And that failure nearly destroyed one leader, then ultimately destroyed the other, in a tangled mess of political consequence that once again reduced the interests of Aboriginal people to an asterisk or afterthought, beyond expanding the range of racist sentiment and discourtesy thought acceptable in modern political debate.

The PM's courageous and costly choice

To the political consequences first.

There is no question that Albanese's decision to persist with the Voice referendum blew a large hole in his first term. His devout intention was to buck the long trend of national leaders paying lip service to reconciliation, then disappearing at the first whiff of political grapeshot.

This was both a courageous decision and a costly one.

The loss of the referendum coincided with the beginning of Labor's long slide in the polls, and thoroughly stripped the new prime minister of his new-prime-minister smell.

The person for whom the Voice referendum did work quite well, meanwhile, was Peter Dutton.

Keep in mind that Dutton became leader of the Liberal Party after the 2022 election mainly by virtue of unavoidable circumstance.

The unavoidable circumstance was that there was no-one else.

The 2022 election — if condensed into a Post-it note — consisted of mainstream Australia rejecting a blokey leader with a hardline immigration background and a broad streak of climate scepticism.

Unfortunately, the depredations of that very election on the ranks of the Liberal Party meant that was the only type of guy they had left in the cupboard, so Dutton took the reins.

But he was intelligent in the way he built trust within his party. Under pressure to oppose the Voice referendum straight out of the gates, as the National Party did in November 2022, he held his own counsel for another four long months and maintained a public preparedness to negotiate.

Only when the Liberal Party was decimated in the Aston by-election of April 2023 did he commit the party to the No campaign.

And when the referendum was soundly defeated in October, the legend of Dutton's strategic mastery began to take root, and was further nourished by steadily improving polls over the course of 2024.

A lesson from the Trump playbook

It wasn't just the defeat of the prime minister's referendum that set Liberal strategic noses a-whiffle. It was that some of Labor's safest seats registered a strong "no" vote, and this fed a growing view that the path back to power for the Coalition was not via the begging of forgiveness from its old voters in "teal" seats, but via the impatience of stressed Labor battlers in the commuter belt with their prime minister's fixation on "woke" issues like reconciliation.

In these seats, there was also ripe anger about poor services, high tolls, housing shortages and the rising cost of absolutely everything.

In the United States, these factors meshed powerfully with anti-woke and anti-immigration sentiment to produce a second presidential term for Donald Trump.

The extent to which the Coalition relied on the belief that the same pattern would work here is obvious from the shape of Dutton's campaign.

After the referendum, the ABC's Antony Green compiled a chart of seats where Labor secured a high primary vote at the 2022 election, but a low "yes" vote for the Voice.

The list of seats where the gap was highest reads like the tour itinerary for the Dutton campaign bus. Hunter, McMahon, Paterson, Watson, Whitlam and Dobell in NSW. In Victoria, Gorton and Hawke.

These are the seats to which Dutton referred when he assured reporters that the Liberal Party's private polling showed a path to victory that no-one else could see.

In the early part of the ABC's election night broadcast, LNP senator James McGrath maintained his confidence that there was a "goat track" on a "knife edge" through such seats.

Of these poor goats, nothing has been heard since. On the night, the Liberal Party did not secure increased support in a single one of these seats, let alone win any of them.

How could the polling have misinterpreted things so badly?

Here's where we are obliged to inspect the sausage-making techniques behind political polling.

It's not workable or affordable to run a poll that asks every single person of voting age what they think about issue X or Y. That is what an election is, and they are terribly expensive. So pollsters ask a representative sample of people instead. And if the sample isn't representative, they use "weighting" — including demographic tendencies they've observed from past elections — to help them eliminate distortion.

The Freshwater company is the pollster used by the Coalition, and it is also used by the Australian Financial Review (which urged a vote for the Coalition on Saturday). Its published polls were the most optimistic of the companies in the field (it had Labor leading the Coalition 51.5 per cent to 48.5 per cent in its final published prediction).

In a news story by Michael Read on Monday, the AFR reported that: "Freshwater used a person's vote at the Voice referendum as a demographic characteristic when it weighted its survey responses."

In other words, it wasn't as straightforward as "Labor voters in commuter-belt seats have told us they are annoyed by woke agendas on reconciliation." It was that to some extent that assumption was baked into the process.

Here we begin to see the problem.

When you're worried you might be losing an election and you're short of navigational experience, these bat signals from pollsters can take on a disproportionate significance, and the strength of this feedback loop is evident from the final week of the campaign.

Eight days out from voting day, the Welcome to Country preceding the Dawn Service at Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance was interrupted by loud booing. Prominent neo-Nazi activist Jacob Hersant was escorted from the scene.

Both Albanese and Dutton condemned the disruption in the strongest terms, but by Monday Dutton had diluted his objection to incorporate the view that while interrupting the service was wrong, welcomes to country were too common and did not belong at ANZAC Day services.

"It divides the country, not dissimilar to what the prime minister did with the Voice," he said.

Under questioning, he broadened his criticisms to include Qantas, whose acknowledgements of country on descent to Australian destinations he described as "over the top".

This gelled with millions of dollars' worth of Clive Palmer paid ads, billboards and unsolicited texts advising voters that "you don't need to be welcomed to your own country".

Souped-up polling isn't the only reason why a mainstream Australian political leader was able to convert "I condemn the actions of this neo-Nazi" to "but he maybe had a point, didn't he?" in one fluid move, and the space of a weekend.

Or why, in the final week of an election held in a country where Indigenous people's experience of housing shortages and financial stress is far sharper than that of their non-Indigenous countrymen, we found ourselves in a spirited discussion about whether or not it's annoying when a Qantas crew member takes 10 seconds to identify the approaching landmass as Gadigal or Wurundjeri land.

Who are the winners from these thought bubbles?

Not Dutton, as was so memorably demonstrated at the weekend. Not Palmer, who told the Daily Telegraph he spent $60 million on his Trumpet of Patriots campaign, which daubed these sentiments on billboards and banner ads to what appears to be a large round of voter indifference.

Legacy media and the outdoor advertising sector benefit immediately from relieving Palmer of his extra funds, though it's unclear what readers will make long term of their favourite media outlets readily ventilating an oafish misrepresentation of this continent's oldest continuing tradition of courtesy between human beings.

Are they the winners? Hard to say.

The Australians who lose from all this, however, are easy to identify.

They're the same ones who lose every time.