'Timidity is not a strategy': If the Liberals lose, it will be because they let Labor get away with an all-out attack on the aspirational Australians who usually vote conservative

Sky News AU

02-05-2025

Last weekend's Newspoll and the data that has emerged since seems to indicate that the answer to that question is 'Yes', given that, while voters don't believe the Albanese Government should be returned, they also don't believe the Coalition is ready for government.
This column, and so many others, have outlined how the Albanese government has presided over a litany of failures, yet the Liberals, if the polling is to be believed, have failed to take advantage.
The Liberals in their parliamentary position had nothing to lose, yet it appears their campaign strategists have approached this election like a team that is 1-0 up in a World Cup final with 20 minutes to go: they play safe.
In other words, timidity has been their strategy.
And, when that is your strategy, the inevitable happens.
Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, John Howard and Tony Abbott knew that election campaigns are no place for cowardice, no place for coasting.
They were unrelenting and much hungrier for victory than this Opposition has been.
They were prepared to brawl.
History shows us that voters will re-elect poor governments in the absence of a credible opposition.
It happened in 1993, when Paul Keating was able to raise enough doubts about John Hewson and the Coalition's policies to take voters' minds sufficiently away from the dire state of the economy.
The Albanese government has so many weak points in its plans – attacks on aspirational Australians, the cohort that the Coalition claims to represent – yet the Liberals have failed to take any advantage.
Several commentators have laid out just how insidious Labor's tax on unrealised capital gains in superannuation accounts will be for the roughly 2.5 million hard-working Australians affected, most of whom run small businesses, family farms and the like.
Its $3 million threshold will not be indexed with inflation (and Greens leader Adam Bandt wants it reduced to $2 million) which means it is deliberately designed to eventually apply to people on far more modest means.
The result will be to force many to liquidate assets or even borrow money to meet their liabilities.
An all-out attack on this tax grab should have been front and centre by the Coalition, but hardly anything has been heard about it until now, when it is probably too late.
Again, Australian electoral history gives us a precedent.
In the 1998 election, the then-Labor opposition, led by Kim Beazley, in contrast to John Howard's GST reforms, proposed increasing capital gains tax retrospectively and taxing four-wheel drives.
The Liberals campaigned on this ruthlessly, successfully demonstrating it as a tax grab by Labor, which seemed to be punishing people who wanted to do better.
Those 'Howard-battlers' gave him a victory against the odds – and the polls – at the time.
The Voice referendum should have been the springboard for some serious consideration of Coalition policy platforms in order to fight a values-based campaign, one that says the Liberals are the party for all Australians, not just special interest groups.
For quite some time now, poll after poll has shown the overwhelming majority of Australians have had it to the back teeth with the omnipresent and tokenistic welcomes and acknowledgements of country.
As the son of migrants, it tells me I'm not welcome here and separates us by an attribute beyond our control, our ancestry, which Australians rejected 60 per cent to 40 per cent during the Voice referendum.
However, only this week has this divisive ritual become an issue, and one could be forgiven for thinking that Jacinta Price has been deliberately given a low profile during the election campaign by some Coalition campaign invertebrates.
Moreover, it should never have been so hard to make political hay out of an Albanese government that has seen living standards drop nearly eight per cent on its watch – the worst statistic in the developed world – and electricity prices skyrocket.
But if you can't be bothered taking a principled stand on something like net zero, which is the main driver of Australia's fall into the economic abyss, then don't expect to win any votes.
You can't win an argument you don't make.
It is not as if there hasn't been any lack of ammunition on this, and, at the time of writing, it was becoming clear that massive blackouts in Spain and Portugal this week were due to both countries' increasing reliance on wind and solar had left them vulnerable to the same.
By saying 'we will get to net zero, but not as quickly as Labor', all voters see is a poor imitation.
When faced with a choice between the original and a poor imitation, voters will pick the original every time.
Do voters deserve the governments they elect?
Probably.
But voters also deserve to be presented with a credible choice.
The Liberals have never won an election trying to be a Labor-lite poor imitation.
If the Coalition loses this election, it will be because its campaign tried to steer through the middle of its 'moderate/wet' and 'conservative/dry' factions and in trying to please everyone, ended up pleasing no-one.
Dr Rocco Loiacono is a legal academic, writer and translator. Earlier in his career, he spent a decade practicing as a lawyer with Clayton Utz, one of Australia's top law firms. As well as SkyNews.com.au, he regularly contributes opinion pieces, specialising in politics, freedom and the rule of law, to The Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun and The Australian