The eternal dream of both parties is to raid the other's base. To find an issue that doesn't antagonise your own, or the mortgaged voter in the middle, but distracts the other side to the point of apparent civil war.
John Howard had it with border protection in 2001 because it sent more of Labor's blue-collar voters his way than he lost in Liberal cosmopolitans. By the end of this weekend, Kevin Rudd will know if climate change carries the same potency in reverse; if the Liberal partyroom battles of the past fortnight trigger a voter revolt where it can be properly measured, at the ballot box.
The Liberal base in opposition is more complex than Labor's because the Liberal Party, traditionally, does not lose office by big margins. Labor's grassroots remains essentially urban. The Liberals, by contrast, have a broader geographical reach with two rusted-on constituents: the higher income and tertiary-educated urban voter and the lower-income regional voter. The affluent postcodes have given the Liberals their institutional clout. It is where moderate and conservative leaders alike are drawn. It is also where the money comes from.
The poorer postcodes outside the cities give the Liberals their mass appeal. Big business and small business, doctor and cocky. The problem at the end of the Howard era was the largest Liberal bloc across all seats was grey -- men and women aged 50-plus. Suddenly the party felt old.
Today's by-elections for the safe urban Liberal seats of Bradfield, in Sydney's inner north, and Higgins, in Melbourne's inner east, will pit the Liberals against the Greens. Newspoll shows that among some younger voters, the Greens are almost as popular as the Liberals.
The most recent surveys taken during the course of the September quarter found the Liberal primary vote among women aged 18-24 was at minor party status of 24.5 per cent. The Greens were close behind on 21.6 per cent. Labor, meanwhile was on 43.6 per cent.
It was a similar story for women aged 25-34: the Liberals were on 29.1 per cent, the Greens 9.1 per cent and Labor at 51.9 per cent. This is Malcolm Turnbull's bequest to Tony Abbott: poor man status among young women.
The picture among young men in only marginally better, with the Liberal primary vote at 26.2 per cent for those aged 18-24 and a more viable 37.7 per cent for those aged 25-34.
Any protest vote against the Liberals today can go to the Greens or to the ragtag of independent candidates. Some on the Labor side may be regretting the missed opportunity to win either seat in their own right because they aren't running. But they will be consoled by the fact any primary vote swing against the Liberals will be read, perhaps unfairly, as a rebuke for Abbott.
"Because of recent events the result of this Saturday will be close," the Liberal candidate for Higgins, Kelly O'Dwyer, wrote in a personal letter to voters this week. The letter carries no Liberal Party logo. The phrase "Liberal candidate for Higgins" is in italics and has the smallest typeface on the page. The reader's eye is directed away from her party to the text and to her signature at the end. You could easily mistake it for a letter from a friend. It is one of the more telling pieces of campaign literature the Liberals will produce in a blue-blood seat.
Higgins, like Bradfield, voted yes for the republic in 1999. On this issue, Liberal cosmopolitan voters had more in common with Labor's inner-city base than they did with the Liberal stronghold in the outer suburbs and the party's second base in the bush. But the republic never split the Liberals because Howard allowed a free vote on what was, essentially, a second-order issue. The Liberals also were in power at the time.
Climate change is different because the Liberals, in opposition, were forced to choose between revolt and co-operation. Academic Judith Brett is reluctant to characterise the Liberal brawling of the past fortnight as a fight for the party's ideological soul. She sees it more politically, with the back bench and the party base rolling Turnbull because they feared an electoral wipeout next year.
"Abbott is attuned to the electoral realities and electoral possibilities, whereas Turnbull was wanting to see them [the party] as players at the table," Brett, the head of the politics school at La Trobe University, tells Inquirer.
That is, Abbott views climate change as an issue that could be turned against Labor in regional seats, or at least used to protect Liberal and Nationals seats. Turnbull, by contrast, was seeing the Liberals as a conduit for striking a better deal for their city and rural business interests.
To Labor insiders, the Liberals are behaving as Labor had in the wilderness years of Kim Beazley and Simon Crean when they opposed for opposition's sake. It kept the base happy to hate Howard, but it never got Labor any closer to power. There was the consolation of state government, which Labor began to dominate from the second term of the Howard government. But they were wasted years.
Contrast Labor against Howard with the Bill Hayden opposition between 1977 and 1983, when Labor reinvented itself after the trauma of the Whitlam years. Here was a party preparing for its next term in government by dropping its socialist baggage.
The Liberals did a similar thing in the 80s, when the dries and wets fought over economic policy. It mirrored the debate running on the Labor side, the pivotal question being how much of the old protection order should be dismantled. Howard noted in office that the arguments he had in opposition contributed to his government's longevity. Because the arguments had been settled in favour of the dries, there was a unity of purpose. But this unity had the bonus of being bipartisan.
Labor had faced the same dilemmas in government under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating: where to draw the line on deregulation.
Climate change may be one of the great challenges of the century, but Labor and Liberal are looking at it through completely different frames at the moment. The government is governing, the opposition is opposing. If it were Labor in opposition, this wouldn't rattle the base. But the Liberal base includes climate change believers, and businesses that want to get on with emissions trading, as well as sceptics and outright deniers.
The polls consistently show that two-thirds of voters want action on climate change, and that urban Liberal voters have roughly the same attachment to the issue as urban Labor voters. This is a risk issue on which to bet a mainstream party's immediate future.
The insurrection against Turnbull's leadership began with the outcasts, renegade MPs who played bit roles in the last Liberal government and who have no realistic expectation of being ministers in the next Liberal government. Applauding Abbott at his victory press conference were, among others, Wilson Tuckey, 74, Alby Schultz, 70, and Bronwyn Bishop, 67.
On one level, the electoral base that Abbott is appealing to is the same one that Howard targeted on border protection. Before the 2001 election, the bush had been in revolt over the GST. Before then, Pauline Hanson had struck a nerve with her politics of complaint.
Brett says Howard could afford a leakage of base support from the urban Liberals because he wasn't threatening their economic interests. Abbott's attack on climate change involves a more radical calculation, she says, because the economic interests of the urban Liberals would be threatened in the long run if the opposition can't represent them when legislation is drafted.
This is the crucial shift in tactics, from operating a government in waiting that looks after its top-end supporters to running a protest party. Labor never faced this choice between insiders and outsiders because opposition seemed to suit its urban base.
Labor at the end of the Hawke-Keating era could count on the loyalty of capital city voters and virtually no one else. Outside the big smoke, only Wollongong and Newcastle stuck as the rest of the eastern seaboard moved to the Coalition.
Tellingly, Labor held no seats along the Queensland coast when Howard came to power in 1996.
Blue-collar workers, migrants, teachers and nurses; this was the Labor base, and the echo from it kept the party out of power in Canberra for almost 12 years.
But demography was nonetheless moving in Labor's favour. Australia, remember is a cosmopolitan nation that has become both more diverse and more city-centric.
Interstate migration has been sending Labor base voters from Sydney and Melbourne into conservative Brisbane and the south-east corner of Queensland.
Labor hasn't lost a general state election in Queensland since 1986, a winning sequence unthinkable a generation ago when Joh Bjelke-Petersen dominated.
Overseas migration is, in turn, changing the face of the Liberal city electorates in Sydney and Melbourne. The Chinese and Indian-born voters who helped oust Howard from his seat of Bennelong, in Sydney's inner northwest, are also rising in Higgins.
If the Liberals are remaking themselves in Labor's opposition image, then they risk becoming a party of outsiders in a nation that is booming.
The lessons of the republic referendum a decade ago are easy to overstate. But it was the first example of the two Liberal bases, the city and the bush, at odds.
The anti-republican campaign pitted the ordinary Australian against the elites, the voter against the politician. It was a populist insurgency that did not mention the institution it was defending, the monarchy.
Abbott was one of the architects of the strategy, and this week he suggested he might reprise it for the coming federal election.
TODAY'S by-elections were called long before the Liberals fractured over climate change. The contests serve as a reminder of what the party is losing in governing experience. Bradfield is being vacated by Brendan Nelson, the former minister and the first opposition leader after the 2007 election; while the ex member for Higgins is former treasurer Peter Costello. Turnbull says he will serve a full term, but his seat of Wentworth, in Sydney's inner east, will be in Labor's sights whether he stands or not at the next election.
The paradox of the base vote is it can never define the nation. It can sustain a party out of office, but it doesn't deliver power. For the Liberals, the clash between the urban and the regional on climate change marks the first point in its history that bush has dictated terms to the city.
In the past, the Nationals served this purpose in Coalition governments. But the Liberals now hold more regional seats than the Nationals, which is why the conservative response to climate change is being argued on two fronts -- between Liberal and Liberal and between the Liberals and the Nationals.
The republic didn't rattle Liberal unity in the same because they had power when the referendum was held. The ironic proof of this was the ease with which Turnbull, head of the Australian Republican Movement and a former Howard critic, was able join the Howard government at the 2004 election.
By last year, Turnbull was party leader in opposition.
But don't mistake Abbott's ascendancy this week as the triumph of the monarchist over the republican, or even the social conservative over the progressive.
Abbott is a local member for a yes seat, Warringah. At 52, he is one month younger than Rudd. Even if Abbott suffered Howard's indignity of losing his seat over the issue of climate change, it could still be the best call if the benchmark is saving the Liberal base in the bush. Abbott can afford to lose a seat or two in the inner city. There were only 42 yes seats in 1999, 17 Liberal-held and 25 Labor, out of a then parliament of 148. By 2007, three of those Liberal seats had switched to Labor: Adelaide, Howard's Bennelong and Deakin in Melbourne's east.
Labor won't claim a landslide by raiding this Liberal base because the greater of the two Liberal diehards reside in the bush.
At the 2007 election, the Liberals lost 12 provincial and rural seats to Labor.
The Australian Electoral Commission lists 64 seats in total in this category, out of a parliament of 150. Labor holds 29, the Liberals 23 and the Nationals nine, while the other three are independent.
Abbott has reasoned that the Liberals have more to gain in the regions by opposing Labor on emissions trading than it has to lose in urban areas. Herein lies the rub of oppositionism. The Abbott Liberals blocked the compromise emissions trading scheme that Labor negotiated with the Turnbull Liberals because the regional base demanded it. Monash University academic Paul Strangio says this put the Liberals where Labor used to be, where party members told MPs how to think.
"The conservative climate change sceptic camp justified their insurrection by the claim that they were listening to and acting on a grassroots insurrection against the ETS," Strangio tells Inquirer.
"Whatever the validity of that claim, it was one that seemed to jar with a consistent defining organisational principle of non-Labor politics [and one that non-Labor has consistently used to critique Labor]; that is, that the parliamentarians are free agents."
Elections aren't won in either side's heartland but in the suburbs. If the ETS is the jobs killer that Abbott thinks it is, why did he deny himself the opportunity to prove it? Labor got back in the game only when Howard over-reached on Work Choices, when the policy moved from the theoretical to the everyday. Abbott is challenging the Prime Minister on Rudd's home court, the symbolic. If action on climate change is still on the to-do list at the next election, Labor can appease its base and appeal to the middle without having to take a dollar off either. Back in Higgins, O'Dwyer has a simple message for the locals: she is a believer.