High-profile Liberal moderates in urban electorates — including Treasurer Josh Frydenberg — face an increasingly tough electoral challenge from independents. But they’re not counting on the prime minister for help.
With the election campaign past its halfway point, Scott Morrison is yet to campaign once in blue ribbon Liberal seats like Kooyong, Wentworth, North Sydney and Goldstein, despite the “teal wave” putting those electorates at real risk.
Instead it was initially left up to Frydenberg who was considered a stronger electoral asset in the cities to hit the hustings hard in Sydney. But the threat posed by independent Monique Ryan will keep the treasurer focused on the battle to retain Kooyong, the seat of Menzies and a Liberal Party heirloom.
Morrison won’t be filling that void, and his absence is a sign he could be a vote loser for the Liberals in their traditional heartland, just three years after leading the party to a “miracle” election win.
Clearly the press pack is starting to wonder about Morrison’s absence from those electorates; Morrison brushed away questions this morning: “I will go where I believe it’s best for our campaign, for me to go.”
The momentum behind challengers like Ryan, Zoe Daniel in Goldstein, Allegra Spender in Wentworth and Kylea Tink in North Sydney is driven by Morrison’s personal unpopularity, as well as concerns about climate and integrity.
So far the government has barely touched climate during the campaign, and Morrison has escalated his attacks on a proposed integrity commission saying such a body could lead to a “public autocracy”, comments which will only lower his standing in those seats.
Liberal strategists would also want to avoid the bad optics of encounters with angry voters, ever since the prime minister was heckled at a Newcastle pub days before the campaign kicked off.
Some Liberals fear that in a worst case scenario for the government they could lose all four seats — Wentworth, Kooyong, North Sydney and Goldstein. Analysis of Morrison’s campaign schedule so far gives some hints at the narrow path to reelection he’s hoping to chart instead.
So far he has held three press conferences in Parramatta, where the Liberals believe concerns about Labor’s Bellevue Hill blow-in Andrew Charlton could give them a shot. But he’s also done three pressers across two visits to Bass in northern Tasmania, a clear sign the government is concerned about its most marginal seat.
On the offensive front, the PM has visited Corangamite in Victoria (ALP +1%) twice. Suburban electorates like Blair (Queensland), Dunkley and McEwen (Victoria) are all considered Liberal targets.
Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is running a Nationals campaign so separate from Morrison that the two didn’t share a press conference when they were in Rockhampton together last week.
Joyce is even more toxic than the PM in the cities, a symbol of the government’s divisions on climate, coal and net zero which came to the fore last week. But his role in a fragmented Coalition campaign is to sandbag regional Queensland, particularly at-risk “coal seats” like Flynn and Capricornia.
Morrison and Joyce have spent time in the Northern Territory, where the government has ambitions of picking up Lingiari. Today he returned to the Hunter, where the government is sending a pro-coal message to three electorates with large mining communities.
An unexpected gain there would be a big coup, a testament to the enduring power of the government’s pro-coal message that’s causing it so much grief in the cities.
And if Morrison is able to cling to government while losing traditional urban strongholds, the face of the Liberal Party could be changed irrevocably.
