Andrew Peacock became Australian Prime Minister in 1990

Teejay

Gone Fishin'
The POD is that the 1990 Australian federal election which was narrowly won by Labor, was instead won comfortably by the Liberal and National parties lead by Andrew Peacock who becomes Prime Minister. The Deputy Prime Minister would be National Party leader Charles Blunt, who in this TL retains his seat of Richmond (in OTL he was defeated in Richmond in the 1990 federal election).

For this to happen the Liberals would have needed to adopt negative campaign against the governing Labor party, which was on the nose with the voters around that time.

While the incoming Coalition government would have a majority of 20 seats out of 148 in the Lower House. They would not have a majority in the Senate where they only had 34 out of 76 seats, this force the Coalition to negotiate with either the Labor Party (holding 33 out of 76 seats) or the Australian Democrats lead by Janine Haines holding 8 out of 76 seats.

Thoughts anyone
 
A very interesting scenario.

I wonder if, given the situation in the Senate, we see an early election sometime in 1992 which would see the Coalition move ahead of Labor. Perhaps a double dissolution?

Hawke would undoubtedly go, but what about Keating? If the election loss is attributed to the economy, then that has PJK's fingerprints all over it. Who would lead the ALP in the absence of Keating, should he bide his time on the back benches?

John Hewson would be Treasurer in the first Peacock government - he was Shadow Treasurer since 1989 - but who would fill the other positions? Where does John Howard fit in all of this? A quick wiki search digs up the name of Ian Macphee for Foreign Affairs (IOTL he retired at the 1990 election). Blunt would probably take on Trade, as was the custom for National Party leaders in government.

Another effect of a Peacock win in 1990 is that Bill Hayden probably doesn't get his term as Governor-General extended by two years. There is also the matter of an Olympic bid by Sydney to consider. Would there be any consequential butterflies in this regard?

Finally, assuming a 1992 early election, does this Coalition government make it past 1995, or do we see a renewed Keating / Beazley ALP back in the Lodge?
 

Pangur

Donor
One possible result would be a Liberal party that is no where as far to the right as the one we have in the OTL
 
For this to happen the Liberals would have needed to adopt negative campaign against the governing Labor party, which was on the nose with the voters around that time.

Not so much.
When the election was held in 1990 the economy was still traveling along quite well.
If the election were held 12 months later then the Labor party probably would have been trounced because it was in 1991 that the economy really started to tank.

What would a Peacock government have been like?
Probably a rerun of the Fraser years.
I've voted Labor/Libs and Greens through my life but
I wouldn't have voted for Peacock.

At least with Howard he made some bold policy positions
so there was a clear difference between Libs/Labor and
it was up to the electorate to make a choice.
I can't remember a single "bold" policy position when
Peacock was in opposition, but then again my memory
may have been dulled by over the years :rolleyes:
 
Would Peacock really win big? I have my doubts. At any rate once the economy tanks he'll get the blame. Keating would probably become leader... and rings Peacock's bell pretty hard.

Policy-wise they'd govern fairly softly. According to Howard they didn't even have a health policy in 1990.

Other positions: no idea, I'd assume a similar makeup to whatever the Shadow Cabinet looked like at the time. No way does Howard get a senior position given their mutual emnity.

1993: If the economy's still in the tank then either Peacock finds a way to convince voters that he needs more time to turn it around or he gets ousted by Keating.
 
Not so much.
When the election was held in 1990 the economy was still traveling along quite well.
If the election were held 12 months later then the Labor party probably would have been trounced because it was in 1991 that the economy really started to tank.

Yes, indeed, the Recession We Had To Have comes along within the first year of a hypothetical Peacock '90 government.

That's the interesting thing.

1993: If the economy's still in the tank then either Peacock finds a way to convince voters that he needs more time to turn it around or he gets ousted by Keating.

What Peacock needs to do to guarantee his government's reelection for a second term is to go harder towards deficit spending than Keating did; the great irony of the Labor government in the early nineties (at least looking back at it from today) is they didn't react to the recession with fiscal policy until it was over.

But there's not much chance Peacock can go against the grain of his party, certainly not with Hewson as treasurer.

God, I shudder to think what their Great Big Idea would be, apart from just continuing stuff like the tariff white paper that had been coming down the line under Hawke. Privatising Telstra all at once at the bottom of the market?
 
Probably treading water. I can't see a wet PM and dry treasurer agreeing on an economic Big Idea. What does the Cabinet look like? Howard's out but Reith in?

So Keating's in come '93. Peacock quits and since Hewson's caught up in the wreckage Howard seems the only option.
 
No way does Howard get a senior position given their mutual emnity.

I'm not so sure.
Howard was the policy architect and standard bearer of the Liberal Dries and the time.
To leave him out would be to invite factional warfare within the Liberal Party.

When Howard was PM he was canny enough to include a fair representation of Wets in his Cabinet.
 
What Peacock needs to do to guarantee his government's reelection for a second term is to go harder towards deficit spending than Keating did; the great irony of the Labor government in the early nineties (at least looking back at it from today) is they didn't react to the recession with fiscal policy until it was over.

1991 was a very bad year for the Labor party.
Most of their energy was consumed on the Hawke / Keating succession battle.

When Keating eventually became PM he released the "One Nation" program (no connection with Pauline Hanson ;)) in early 1992. The recession had probably bottomed at that point anyway.

One of the great lessons of the "One Nation" program was that fiscal spending on infrastructure takes a long time to actually flow through to the real economy because of planning and lead times. Most of the money from the Keating program didn't hit the streets until the economy was already recovering, which exacerbated inflationary forces and lead to the interest rate "min-shock" of the mid-90s that didnt do their re-election chances any good.

Hence, when the GFC ("Global Financial Crisis") hit in 2008, Treasury advice was to Go Households, Go Big, Go Early and arguably the lessons from the "One Nation" failure may have saved Australia's bacon.
 
Howard wasn't even a member of the Shadow Cabinet at the time IIRC. If Howard's out then presumably Reith is the senior dry alongside Hewson in Cabinet. Plus would Howard even want to serve in a Peacock cabinet given how mutually uncomfortable it would be?
 
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Howard wasn't even a member of the Shadow Cabinet at the time IIRC. If Howard's out then presumably Reith is the senior dry alongside Hewson in Cabinet. Plus would Howard even want to serve in a Hewson cabinet given how mutually uncomfortable it would be?

Howard was a Shadow Minister under Hewson IOTL wasn't he?
Hewson didn't have the political "horse sense" of Howard, but policy
wise his positions were not that different to Howard so I think the two
could have easily worked together.
 
just fyi

the Howard autobiography "Lazarus Rising" is worth a read.
Of course nobody writes a bad autobiography so certain things
have to be taken critically.

But John Howard was in cauldron of Australian politics during a very
important and transformative piece of Aussie political history.
He was in parliament from 1974 (Whitlam government) through to
2007 so he has first hand insights into a lot of major events.
 
I was wondering what kind of swing would be needed to give a 20-seat majority as stipulated in the original post. Using this website as a starting point, I took 2% off the ALP and added 2% to the Coalition across the country, in every seat - a very unscientific approach, as swings in national elections are never uniform. I chose the low-end 2% swing as Labor would presumably campaign around the personal popularity of Bob Hawke.

Labor would lose eight seats they won in 1990. The Liberal Party picks up five (Petrie, Canning, Cowan, Stirling, Hawker), the National Party keeps three seats they let go of in 1990 (Page, Richmond, Kennedy).

In this simulation, Fisher is won by 57 votes by the ALP and Swan (Kim Beazley's seat at the time) by 113 votes.

Overall, the Coalition wins 77 seats (Liberal 60, National 17), the ALP 70 and one independent. The Liberals gain 17 seats, the ALP loses 16 and the National Party limits their losses to 2 seats.

That's a majority of six with a 2.93% swing to the Coalition and 52.1% of the two-party preferred. It would be the smallest swing to change governments in Australia since 1972, when the ALP had a 2.5% swing and gained 8 seats in the "It's Time" election.

This isn't to suggest that a 20-seat majority in 1990 is implausible, just to say that it is a little harder to achieve without a bigger, unexplained swing.
 

Teejay

Gone Fishin'
I was wondering what kind of swing would be needed to give a 20-seat majority as stipulated in the original post. Using this website as a starting point, I took 2% off the ALP and added 2% to the Coalition across the country, in every seat - a very unscientific approach, as swings in national elections are never uniform. I chose the low-end 2% swing as Labor would presumably campaign around the personal popularity of Bob Hawke.

Labor would lose eight seats they won in 1990. The Liberal Party picks up five (Petrie, Canning, Cowan, Stirling, Hawker), the National Party keeps three seats they let go of in 1990 (Page, Richmond, Kennedy).

In this simulation, Fisher is won by 57 votes by the ALP and Swan (Kim Beazley's seat at the time) by 113 votes.

Overall, the Coalition wins 77 seats (Liberal 60, National 17), the ALP 70 and one independent. The Liberals gain 17 seats, the ALP loses 16 and the National Party limits their losses to 2 seats.

That's a majority of six with a 2.93% swing to the Coalition and 52.1% of the two-party preferred. It would be the smallest swing to change governments in Australia since 1972, when the ALP had a 2.5% swing and gained 8 seats in the "It's Time" election.

This isn't to suggest that a 20-seat majority in 1990 is implausible, just to say that it is a little harder to achieve without a bigger, unexplained swing.

I assumed that the Coalition would win 53% of the two party vote, which was 3% higher than they got in the OTL 1990 election. Overall the swing would have been 4% to the Coalition nationwide. Also the heavy swing to the Coalition which occurred in Victoria in the OTL 1990 election, would have occurred nationwide.

Mind you the Labor party's primary vote in the OTL 1990 election fell by 6.4% nationally. However the Coalition's primary vote dropped as well by -2.6%, although the Liberal Party vote remained more or less the same. So a different 1990 campaign would have seen those votes Labor lost not go to the minor parties (and back to Labor by preferences), instead going straight to the Liberals. So my calculation of a 4% swing to the Coalition nationally, could have gone as high as 6%.

Also reading through Paul Kelly's The End of Certainty: The Story of the 1980s, Kelly described how sky high interest rates in 1990 were really "burning" through the electorate and also the Labor party really feared a negative campaign highlighting them by the Coalition in the forthcoming election. Kelly cites Labor internal polling in the months before the 1990 federal election which shown the party was going to lose the forthcoming election very badly.
 
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