The #climateelection?
In 2019, the Australian climate movement was rocked by the outcome of that year’s Federal election.
Environmental groups had urged voters to make it the ‘#climateelection’. Students had gone out on strike in large numbers as part of a national #Schoolstrike4climate event ahead of the election. Progressive group GetUp! campaigned for action on climate change and mobilised ‘9,433 volunteers’, knocking on ‘36,315 doors’, making ‘712,039 phone calls’, and handing out ‘798,900 how to vote cards’. Further, it created digital ads that were seen ‘15,238,418 times’.
Multiple polls had predicted a Labor win (see here and here). Yet the Liberal-National coalition led by Scott Morrison prevailed.
Labor had made at least some strong statements about climate change, including a reference to a climate ‘emergency’ in Shorten’s closing speech of the campaign. Labor ran advertisements on climate change on TV, calling out the failure of conservative politicians to address the crisis while warning of the ‘chaos of a Morrison-Palmer-One Nation government’.
This was an election where the climate movement broadly expected its message would be backed by voters.
Public support for climate action as an over-riding priority was being tested.
The reality that a conservative government was returned to power in 2019 raises major questions about political communication and social movements’ ‘theories of change’.
‘The Bill Australia can’t afford’
It was a clear, consistent message, relentlessly argued.
It definitely had an economic edge, however much of its power also came from its attack of the Labor leader’s credibility – see below.
Carbon Tax, Death Tax’
The Liberal Party circulated a video titled ‘Carbon Tax Death Tax’ (Liberal Party of Australia, 2019. Senator Jane Hume, 2019; see also Frydenberg, 2019).
The video featured Bill Shorten denying the (untrue) rumours that Labor planned a ‘death tax’, and portrayed this denial alongside Julia Gillard’s promise not to introduce a carbon tax.
These ‘death tax’ rumours were circulated widely on social media (Koslowski, 2019; AAP FactCheck, 2019) and gained significant traction amongst members of the public.
Labor Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen commented after the election, ‘A death tax is not our policy. I got more feedback about death taxes than anything else. It was the single biggest problem for us and it’s pretty hard to deal with when it is not your policy. You can say that all you like but if people are convinced it is your policy, then you’ve got a problem’.
It was the single biggest problem for us and it’s pretty hard to deal with when it is not your policy. You can say that all you like but if people are convinced it is your policy, then you’ve got a problem’.
Cultural power mattered
It “should” have been a #climateelection. Instead, in the imagination of large sections of the public, it was about other things. Chris Bowen’s quote above about the gap between reality and public perceptions is telling.
Arguably, in 2019, Labor led with an idea-driven policy agenda whose merits were overwhelmed by the cultural force of Morrison’s campaign. Labor made itself a large target in policy terms, while Morrison had little to say about policy, instead leading with a message that relied on fear and symbolically painting Shorten as untrustworthy. Here, Morrison was reinforcing existing problems with Shorten’s political image.
Was Morrison the kind of leader who voters would trust to manage the economy? Was Shorten the kind of leader who (in the minds of at least a significant number of voters) just might impose a ‘death tax’?
The hoped-for #ClimateElection appeared to become, to some degree, the ‘#We’re-not-going-to-risk-Labor-because-they-might-tax-us-to-death-and-also-we-don’t-trust-Bill-Shorten’ election. It was certainly about economic self-interest, but as well, it was about:
- the images and stories which conveyed a sense of what mattered in the election
- questions of who could be trusted; and
- perceptions of the character of political leaders.
The ‘drama’ of climate politics and the 2019 election result
Political narratives ‘enacted’ as drama
Veteran Australian political journalist Laurie Oakes observes, ‘The idea of politics as theatre is important’. Looking back on decades of covering Australian politics, he recalls the theatrical skills of politicians such as Keating, Whitlam and Costello and remembers Keating telling him of the ‘grand stage for the grand performances’. As Oakes notes, not every politician has a sense of theatre. Some – such as Turnbull, in Oakes’ estimation – are not ‘very good at politics’ – they ‘lack the skills’. Oakes asks ‘where are the contemporary politicians with the smarts or the talent to bring theatrical skills back to the political stage?’ (Oakes, 2017: pp. 2, 5, 6).
Whether the actors are politicians or social movements, the analogy of drama is useful for thinking about what is happening in politics.
Commenting on US electoral politics, Alexander and Jaworsky write:
Leaders do not offer policy to clear-eyed citizens who rationally evaluate its effectiveness and register their deliberative judgment through their votes. Political leaders project complex and multilayered performances to audiences…
Their book, “Obama Power” describes how Obama cast himself as a character in a drama with powerful protagonists and antagonists, the political task of sustaining a campaign’s dramatic tension, and how dramatic moments figured in shaping public responses to presidential candidates.
One useful question to ask when thinking about the 2019 election concerns the political consequences that result when voters do not trust the ‘characters’ in the ‘drama’ that politicians ‘act’ out.
The drama of climate change and the credibility of the ‘characters’.
Did voters trust Bill Shorten? If the election is understood in terms of a drama, featuring the key ‘characters’ of Shorten and Morrison, then ‘audience’ perceptions of these characters counts for a lot.
Smith and Howe (2015) offer valuable insights along these lines. They argue that the credibility of the ‘characters’ in the ‘drama’ of climate change is fundamental to the way audiences perceive the issues. Drawing on ancient distinctions made by Aristotle, they describe the interaction of:
- ethos (the moral character of the speaker),
- logos (speech or logical argument), and
- pathos (audience sympathy for a character).
They argue that
the combination of these dimensions… explains why audiences would spontaneously stand and applaud after screenings of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth… And it is the inability to fuse these dimensions that explains why so many other attempts to communicate climate change have fallen flat… Character can be the decisive factor in cultural performance. In this social drama, logos and pathos arguably exist in abundance. Ethos, however, is in short supply (p. 43).
In other words, there is no shortage of political arguments, however there is a need for more trusted figures in the debate. Importantly, Smith and Howe argue that when arguments and audience sympathies are contested, ethos comes to the fore:
When the limits of scientific knowledge are in question, “credibility contests” develop’… In important ways, the social drama of climate change that people actually get to see is a story about trust. In this sense, it is a story not just about science or nature but about how we know whom to believe—artists? politicians? children?’ (p. 46).
The implication is that when political debates are charged, it is extremely hazardous to entrust the task of leading the case for progressive climate policy (or national leadership) to an Opposition leader who was not widely trusted.
Smith and Howe cite the example of ‘Climategate’. At an early stage, climate sceptics were winning the public debate—or were at least making significant inroads that were damaging public trust in climate science. Climate scientists were being cast as villains who distorted their findings to fit their preconceptions or personal agendas, and it was only when a new story was told that the debate changed. Smith and Howe write,
Reading through the spate of post-Climategate commentary from both the Right and Left, it is remarkable how rarely the actual details of the controversy are debated. Much like the science itself, the scientists’ emails seem to have interested a small minority of inside players. What mattered to everyone else was character. What kind of people are these scientists, their defenders and their critics? What makes them tick? This… is the central question wherever climate change becomes a social drama.
[In the face of an ‘environmental melodrama’ where climate scientists were cast as ‘skulking villains’], scientists and their defenders fought back with a… nonstory consisting of disconnected, itsy-bitsy justifications for each individual infraction. This checking-off-of-boxes response did nothing to restore trust. Only when they cast the scientists as the embattled protagonists of a romantic struggle against paranoid inquisitors were they able to stem the bleeding. (p. 142, 144)
There were plenty of ways in which Scott Morrison’s own character could have been placed in question during the election campaign, not least because of his consistent opposition to the Royal Commission into the banks, and his opposition to gay marriage. Yet these never became central to the election campaign in the way ‘the Bill Australia can’t afford’ did. There was no sustained and effective challenge to the character of Scott Morrison from the Labor side.
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Note: there were certainly other important ‘characters’ and cultural contests in the campaign. Helen Haines won as an Independent in Indi, and former Olympian Zali Stegall, vanquished Tony Abbott in his own seat. Kerryn Phelps, another Independent, came close to retaining Malcolm Turnbull’s former seat of Wentworth. Former Liberal Julia Banks did not unseat Greg Hunt, however she significantly reduced his margin. In a sign of hope for the climate movement, all strongly advocated action on climate change. These results relied on many factors, and solid community-based campaigns were clearly essential to the results. It is also worth looking also at the cultural and ‘theatrical’ contests in each case—including contests over character—as a dimension of what these candidates achieved and how they achieved it.