Do not fear. History is against this happening. Any late lip-service to what the people really want on these issues and others like population, health and education will only be death throes that voters will see through.

Let’s first go back 50 years in the US and then go back 50 years in Australia.

Fifty years ago this month, Richard Nixon was elected President. Stephen Ambrose, his biographer, wrote “American politics had sunk to depths not reached since the Civil War and Reconstruction. America’s political leaders, Johnson, Humphrey, Nixon and Agnew, and most of the others were just playing with people.”

Ambrose wrote: “If they had the slightest feeling for the death and destruction that was devouring Vietnam, if they any concern for the lives of American soldiers in Vietnam, if they had the least commitment to a decent respect for the opinion of mankind, if they had the vaguest concern to meet their constitutional obligation to promote domestic tranquillity, if it even occurred to them to strive to provide the conditions that would allow the American people to pursue happiness, they managed to ignore it all in their single-minded pursuit of personal political victory at any cost.”

Remind you of Australian politics now?

Now let’s look at the behaviour in the past 50 years of Coalition Australian Prime Ministers facing defeat.

The behaviour pattern is the same as that of Scott Morrison and his government right now.

First, to Billy McMahon in 1972.

He finally called the election for 2 December 1972, three years one month and a few days after the 1969 election. Practically and constitutionally, he could not cling on any longer because after that it would have been school holidays and lots of polling booths are a schools and it would have caused resentment to have an election at the beginning of the summer holidays.

The seething unpopularity of Australia’s immoral involvement in the Vietnam war at the behest of the US and the military-industrial complex was catching up with the Coalition.

McMahon announced Australian withdrawal late in 1971, not out of conviction the war was wrong, but because it was becoming a lost cause.

It was half-hearted and done slowly. Moreover, he did not end the detested military conscription, under which the young and vulnerable paid for the idiocies of the old and rich.

It was a death throe and the McMahon Government went down.

In 1983, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser called an early election as he watched the growing unpopularity of his government, particularly over the Tasmanian Government’s proposal to dam the World-Heritage-listed Franklin River for hydro-electricity. He seemed helpless in the face of growing concerns over the environment because the Coalition stood for states rights, development and industry.

Tasmanian Premier Robin Gray called the Franklin River “nothing but a brown ditch, leech-ridden and unattractive to the majority of people”. He said the state would run out of electricity by 1990 if the dam were not built.

As a sop Fraser offered Tasmania $500 million in development aid if it abandoned the dam.

It was too little too late, and not a determined conviction to stop the dam because it was wrong. A death throe. It took federal legislation by the new Labor Government to save the river.

In 2007, John Howard’s Coalition Government faced election, again with popular concerns about the environment, unfair industrial relations and the public health and education systems staring him in the face, yet contrary to the interests of big business.

Begrudgingly on 4 June 2007 he announced carbon-trading scheme. Again a death throe and Howard was defeated.

Usually Coalition Governments convince people to vote for them with tax cuts and assertions (often misplaced) that they can run the economy better. They rarely get it that lots of voters think beyond jobs and growth to fairness, the environment, human rights, and an overall vision of Australia society.

When Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton and News Ltd and Sky News commentators talk about the need to heed the Liberal Party base, you might think they are talking about voters. More realistically, they are talking about the big corporate supporters.

But they cannot be looked after to the extent that a majority of voters get turned off, as polls are showing. So the Coalition, facing electoral demise, is bringing the children back from Nauru, considering an anti-corruption commission and reducing immigration, but not out of conviction, the environment or making people’s lives better.

It is death throes again. Voters will see that like the Coalition’s eventual agreement to a banking royal commission – they were forced into it against their real will.

So Labor is to get a barely deserved second chance after less than six years, with voters fearing yet another round of self-indulgence and looking after mates.

It would be better if a batch of sensible independents and minor party MPs (not looneys or hard-right populists) held the balance. That way we might get a Federal anti-corruption body with broad powers; transparent and tough rules that restrict political donations and require accounting for public funding; rules that require government appointments be made on merit not mateship; a sensible population policy; and laws that favour broad, not sectional, interests.

Otherwise, it will be just another political cycle.

www.crispinhull.com.au