This was the first election after the end of the late 80s/early 90s recession. The opposition Liberal Party was led by John Hewson, a former professor of economics at the University of New South Wales who succeeded Liberal leaderAndrew Peacock in 1990. In November 1991 the Liberal Party launched the 650-page Fightback! policy document − a radical collection of "dry", economic liberal measures including the introduction of a goods and services tax, various changes to Medicare including the abolition of bulk billing for non-concession holders, the introduction of a nine-month limit on unemployment benefits, various changes to industrial relations including the abolition of industrial award, a $13 billion personal income tax cut directed at middle and upper income earners, $10 billion in government spending cuts, the abolition of state payroll taxes and the privatisation of a large number of government-owned enterprises. All of this presented a vision of a very different future direction to the Keynesian economic conservatism practiced by previous Liberal/National Coalition governments. The 15 percent GST was the centrepiece of the policy document. Through 1992, Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating mounted a campaign against the Fightback package, and particularly against the GST. Keating described the GST as an attack on the working class in that it shifted the tax burden from direct taxation of the wealthy to indirect taxation as a broad-based consumption tax. Pressure group activity and public opinion critical of the GST was relentless leading Hewson to exempt food from the proposed GST. However the exclusions announced by Hewson led to questions surrounding the complexity of what precisely which food items would and would not be exempt from the GST. Hewson's difficulty in explaining this to the electorate was exemplified in the infamous birthday cake interview, considered by some as a turning point in the election campaign. Keating won a record fifth consecutive Labor term and a record 13 years in government at the 1993 election, a level of political success not previously seen by federal Labor. A number of the proposals were later adopted in to law in some form, to a small extent during the Keating Labor government, and to a larger extent during the John Howard Liberal government, while unemployment benefits and bulk billing were re-targeted for a time by the Tony Abbott Liberal government. The election-eve Newspoll reported the Liberal/National Coalition on a 50.5 percent two-party-preferred vote, with Paul Keating's personal ratings being significantly negative. For the first time since the 1966 election, an incumbent government had increased their two-party-preferred vote. There was an unusual circumstance in the division of Dickson. One of the candidates, an independent, died very shortly before the election, making it necessary to hold a supplementary election on 17 April. Following the return of the Labor Party to government, Keating announced the makeup of the Second Keating Ministry to be sworn in on 24 March, but kept the portfolio of Attorney-General of Australia open for Michael Lavarch subject to him winning Dickson on 17 April. He won the seat, and was appointed to the ministry on 27 April.
Aftermath and Assessment
Keating had run promising a tax cut, but he failed to deliver that promise and was defeated three years later in the 1996 Australian federal election by the Liberal/National Coalition led by John Howard. John Howard would go on to become Australia's second-longest serving Prime Minister. Speaking in 2019, Hewson was quoted as saying, "In 1993 and 2004, the governments of the day took away the wrong lesson...It was 'we’re invincible!' But the real lesson was 'actually, the people wanted to vote for the opposition, but the opposition scared them off'."
