When Keith Wolahan realized something was wrong, his campaign team decided to make 2,500 phone calls to Chinese-Australians in his electorate. What came back was toxic.
Many voters of Chinese heritage in the seat of Menzies, in Melbourne’s east, detested the Morrison government’s language on the prospect of war. Some felt unsafe in the community. Others worried they would never see their family in China again.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton is dealing with a dual debate within his party room on how to win back Chinese-Australians and teal voters.Credit:James Brickwood
For weeks, then-prime minister Scott Morrison and defense minister Peter Dutton had been dialing up the rhetoric on China, claiming Anthony Albanese would “appease” Beijing in government.
With Menzies, which includes the suburbs of Doncaster, Box Hill North and Templestowe and has the third-highest percentage of Chinese-Australian residents in the country at 27 per cent, Wolahan knew he would be up against it. On May 21, he just held on to the seat for the Liberals, withstanding a 6.3 per cent swing.
In the seat next door, Chisholm, sitting Liberal MP Gladys Liu – the first Chinese-Australian female elected to the House of Representatives – was not so lucky, losing to Labor after a 6.9 per cent swing.
And in most other seats across the country there was a similar story. While some seats bucked the trend, there was generally an above-average swing against the Liberals in electorates with a high percentage of Chinese-Australians.
As former federal director Brian Loughnane and opposition frontbencher Jane Hume lead the review into the Liberal campaign, members are locked in a dual debate about how to win back Chinese-Australians, as well as voters who fled the party for one of the “teal” independents.
For many in the party, changing their stance on China would represent junking the Turnbull and Morrison governments’ biggest achievements: enacting landmark foreign interference laws; banning Chinese telco Huawei from the 5G network; and calling out Beijing’s human rights abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
With the Coalition largely failing to advance any major economic reforms while in government, they believe the reforms to national security laws and reorienting the China relationship to a more realistic footing are its legacy.
Despite a swing against the Liberals, Keith Wolahan was elected MP for Menzies at the May election Credit:Jason South
Wolahan, a former Army captain, doesn’t believe the Liberals should change any of their policies on China. But he does think the party needs to do a much better job of differentiating the Chinese Communist Party from Chinese-Australians.
“A lesson from the election is that language matters. Our disagreements are with the Chinese regime, not the Chinese people,” he says.
“The more Chinese Australians hear us make that distinction, the better. But it would be counter to our national interest if we were to conclude that there was something wrong with the foreign or national security policies of the Morrison or Albanese governments.”
loading
Liberal Senator James Paterson, the opposition’s spokesperson for countering foreign interference and a long-time critic of the CCP, echoed a similar line on the ABC’s Q&A show on Thursday night.
“We have to be very careful about our language,” he said. “We have to be very clear that we are saying that our dispute and our disagreement is with the Chinese Communist Party or the government of China. It is not with the Chinese people.”
But there are also questions about whether the Liberal Party’s grassroots engagement with multicultural communities is up to scratch, and whether some members are using the China angle as an excuse for their own lackluster campaigns.
When Liberal members gathered for their party room meeting in Canberra on Tuesday, August 2, opposition frontbencher Alan Tudge told his colleagues that China was a significant reason for the 7.3 per cent swing to Labor in his seat of Aston at the election.
Some of Tudge’s colleagues questioned his intervention. More than 50 per cent of voters in his Melbourne electorate are women and the former education minister spent the campaign trying to avoid journalists over questions about an affair he had with a former media advisor in 2017.
After Tudge’s comments, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton asked Liberal MP David Coleman to offer his thoughts to the party room. Coleman is one of the MPs who withstood the tide; his Sydney seat of Banks has about twice as many Chinese-Australians as Aston but he only suffered a 3 per cent swing.
loading
Coleman told the party room the main issue wasn’t the Morrison government’s tone but its policies. And given the policies were correct, he said “we can’t do anything about it” in a macro sense.
But Coleman said Labor was now in government and rightly adopting the same policies, so to an extent the situation would improve over time.
Instead of laboring on what divides them, Coleman suggested that Liberal MPs should focus on the issues that would bring back pro-business Chinese-Australians.
A similar debate is going on inside the party on how to bring back inner-city voters who left the party for independents, the Greens and Labor.
It is here where issues such as climate change, integrity and the treatment of women were a disaster for the party at the election.
While accepting that some of these issues need to be addressed, Dutton has been telling colleagues that the party should also take an ambitious package of economic reforms to the next election. According to the plan, this would focus the mind of traditional Liberal voters who saw no daylight between Morrison and Albanese on the economy.
loading
Some of the Liberals who were defeated by teal independents at the election had a phone hook-up on Tuesday night to begin discussing how to win the seats back. The call was organized by senior opposition frontbencher Paul Fletcher, who suffered a 12.3 per cent swing to an independent in his normally very safe seat of Bradfield.
It was very much a stocktake on the first steps that needed to be taken, including a realization of just how much they were outplayed in the ground game of analytics and campaigning.
They didn’t even discuss the policy changes that were needed to beat the teals.
After all, it is a long way back.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.