Towke happens to agree with the latter point:“I’m not saying he is racist.”
So why should Morrison worry politically now that the race card is being played against him?
In federal elections past,Liberal leaders have benefited even when the detail of race debates raise questions about their honesty. Labor’s internal polling of the 2001 election showed John Howard’s government improved its position when it emerged in the final days of the campaign that asylum seekers had not thrown their children into the water.
Surely,the race card still has some residual value for Morrison now?
But he doesn’t actually think that way anymore,if he ever did. Morrison entered parliament in 2007 in the very year that the NSW Liberal Party had its private epiphany on race. They lost a state poll they expected to win earlier that year,to Morris Iemma’s tired Labor government,and in November Howard’s Coalition government fell,with the prime minister losing his seat Bennelong,in Sydney’s north-west.
Bennelong’s increasing diversity,supercharged by the first wave of skilled Chinese migration from the mainland,provided a demographic warning to the NSW division of the Liberal Party. They could not win back office at a state level if they remained on the wrong side of Sydney’s Eurasian identity.
The new state opposition leader Barry O’Farrell began reaching out to ethnic communities,through their local media. He was armed with an insight about where the voters that mattered to the Liberals got their news. As one source explains it,the Chinese media in Sydney had a wider audience thanThe Daily Telegraph newspaper. The insight is lost on many players on the Liberal and Labor side in NSW,who believe that theTele,and by extension Sky News,still run the state.
The proof of the new power of the ethnic vote began with the O’Farrell landslide of 2011,and culminated at the last state election in March 2019 when the state Liberals had the confidence to play the race card on behalf of a minority at the expense of a white politician. They waited until the final days of the campaign to strategically leakthe anti-Asian comments that the then opposition leader Michael Daley had made at a Politics in the Pub function in the Blue Mountains the previous September. The voters that mattered in the end weren’t the Anglo-Celtic aspirationals who Daley had been talking to at the time,but the Asian-Australian aspirationals who heard his charmless words on the eve of the election.
Morrison,as every Australian voter would know by now,has never really outgrown his first important job in politics as director of the NSW Liberal Party between 2000 and 2004. He would have absorbed the two-way lesson of 2007,that what might have worked behind the scenes in a preselection fight for Cook was counter-productive in a seat like Bennelong.
As immigration minister to Tony Abbott,and treasurer to Malcolm Turnbull,he had a direct hand in making Sydney even more diverse. Now as prime minister he has a simple equation before him. To hold onto to power,he has to stop Labor from taking ethnically diverse seats such as Reid in Sydney’s inner west,and Chisholm in Melbourne’s east.
That’s why Towke hurt him. His old rival just pulled a “Daley” on him,bringing up an alleged version of Morrison that swinging voters across Sydney,and in Melbourne and even parts of Brisbane,would find offensive.
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Sydney is no longer the city that the Coalition can safely divide to its advantage between Labor’s ethnic seats in the inner west and the whiter seats of the outer west,and south,and the wealthy seats of the north and east. Skilled migration from China and more recently India have blurred the old lines between ethnicity and wealth.
This process has been a generation in the making. A parallel shift is underway in regional NSW which is limiting the PM’s options to offset any losses to diversity in Sydney with a play to old Australian values outside the capital. Here the problem from Morrison is climate change,an issue that the Coalition used to happily write off as a concern for city folk only.
NSW Liberal MP Catherine Cusack is no friend of Morrison’s. But her intervention this week accusing the PM of not just bullying,but politicising flood relief has the same potential to alienate swinging voters from Lismore to Wollongong as Towke’s accusations do across Sydney’s west and north.
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Morrison has developed a standard response when someone from his side of politics calls his character into question. They are upset because they didn’t get their way.
While voters tend to look the other way when politicians eat their own,it is another matter when the personality clash reveals a side of the leader that is prepared to divide people by ethnicity,or place. Morrison insists he is not that man,and the electoral map tells him he can’t afford for that perception to stick.