Professor Haydon Manning has an opinion piece on the ABC website suggesting that Labor needs to move to the centre in order to win swing votes. His emphasis seems to be for Labor to differentiate themselves from the Greens by softening their rhetoric on climate change and preferencing the Liberals over the Greens in some seats.
To say that a party striving to form government should appeal to swing voters is a truism. In what is more or less a two-party system it is simply a mathematical fact that winning over swing voters is how elections are won.
However the fallacy is thinking that swing voters are grouped together neatly on a one dimensional political axis somewhere between the two major parties – the idea that they hold to some policy ‘centre’.
Consider the issue of climate change. In the UK, the first commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions were adopted in the early 90s by the Conservatives, before taking form under Blair’s – decidedly centrist – Labour government with the Climate Change Programme in 2000. This in turn led to the adoption of ambitious carbon reduction targets in the Climate Change Act of 2008. For Australia’s part, both John Howard and Kevin Rudd took their parties to the polls in 2007 with plans for an emissions trading scheme. There is nothing essentially left-wing about trying to address climate change.
But even if there were a stable and meaningful ‘centre’ there is no real reason to think that swing voters are clustered there. Swing voters are operating from low information. How else could the number of campaign signs influence vote tallies? But low information also means they have not situated themselves on a left-right political axis. They feel no need to hold a set of policy preferences that cohere with some predefined ideology.
I doubt the voters of regional Queensland would have minded a huge commitment of government money in public works projects or state-owned industries just because some city academic said that was technically socialism.
All of us, but perhaps especially people who see themselves as well-informed in some area, are susceptible to confirmation bias. I can only assume that Professor Manning is starting from his own ideal policy position for the Labor party and then rationalising the strategic strength of such a position.
But in my view, it is not that Labor needs to move back to the centre. Labor needs to bring the centre back to it.