While Donald Trump is being widely cited as a reason/explanation for Anthony Albanese’s landslide victory on the weekend, that’s like blaming the icing for the state of a badly baked cake. In no particular order of incoherence…although allegedly being the party of low taxes, the Liberal opposition voted against Labor’s tax cuts. Liberal coalition leader Peter Dutton also offered a natural gas policy that even the industry and his major donors (e.g. Gina Rinehart) slagged off in public.
Dutton also touted a massive nuclear energy policy that he could never quite decide on how many hundreds of billions it would cost, how it would be funded, or how it could be made safe. Evidently, the voters in his own seat of Dickson took fright when Dutton told the media he’d be happy to have a nuclear reactor in his own neighbourhood. A former Defence Minister, Dutton also waited until last Thursday to release a defence policy costing an extra $21 billion, even though millions of early votes had already been cast by then.
In other words, Dutton’s glaring lack of personal charm was only part of the problem. Inexplicably, he trotted out his own son at the Liberals’ housing policy launch, in order to demonstrate how he knew first-hand just how tough it was for young Australians to get a foot on the housing ladder. Almost as one, the entire country screamed at Dutton – so why don’t you lend him the money, dad? In the final days, Dutton’s racist pivot back to Trumpian culture wars (by re-invoking The Voice referendum!) was the last gasp of an already doomed campaign.
The Liberals have not only their leader. Almost an entire tier of emerging talent has been wiped out. Only a small band of survivors – Dan Tehan, Michael Hastie and Susan Ley) are likely to be contenders for the most thankless job in politics. A key part of the Liberals game plan was to use the cost of living issue to target the battlers in the outer suburbs of major cities. Melbourne’s outer suburbs were a special target, since Victoria has an unpopular Labor state government. Instead, the Liberals went backwards in outer Melbourne, losing seats like Menzies and Deakin.
In Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, and Perth, the Liberals lost seats. The task of re-building under a new leader will require the Liberals to (somehow) reconnect with a younger, more urban nation. This was the first Australian election where Gen Z and millennial voters outnumbered the boomers, who are now the Liberals sole remaining, reliable voter base.
The boomers are also the main audience in Australia that’s receptive to Trumpian culture wars messages. As with Winston Peters here, the Liberals fell back in the dying days of the campaign on pandering to populist resentment of immigrants, indigenous people and those allegedly all powerful woke elites. Clearly, there’s only going to be a small, ageing and declining audience for that brand of grievance politics.
Landslide?
That said, was this landslide to some extent, the by-product of a flawed electoral system? Labor won 85 seats but with only 34.7% of the first preference votes on the night. Conversely, the Liberal coalition took a drubbing and won 36 seats, with 31.7% of the first preference votes. In other words, the two major parties are now the first choice of only two thirds of the electorate. Contrast this with, say, the federal election of 1996, when the two major parties attracted 86% of the vote.
Today, and at an accelerating rate, voters are looking for something, anything other than what Labor and the Liberal-led coalition are serving up to them. This distrust of the party machines means that increasingly, politics is becoming localised. This is why the electorates who voted for the teal (blue-green) independents in 2022, voted for them all over again this time.
In line with the hostility to political parties, the Greens also had a bad night, losing key seats to the red wave around Brisbane, and ending up with a couple of seats at best, despite winning over 12% of the first preference vote. (In the Senate, the Greens still have enough seats to give them some ability to obstruct bad policy.)
While comparisons are being made to last week’s election in Canada – an incumbent government making a successful comeback, the opposition leader losing their seat etc- the Trump effect was far more genuine and immediate in Canada. A better comparison IMO, would be to last year’s UK election, where Keir Starmer won a landslide victory without enjoying much affection or support from voters, who put Starmer in power despite Labour having an incredibly low share (only 33.7%! ) of the total votes cast.
In the UK voters have since turned on the Starmer government very quickly once it has become evident that nothing much has changed, since Starmer is offering largely the same as before. Similar neo-liberal economic settings, similar hard line on welfare, similar reluctance to fund essential public services, and a similarly open cheque book on defence spending.
Will Albanese be willing – let alone able – to use the mandate he has just been given, and make a significant difference to the well-being of ordinary Australians? That would require radical change, and Albanese is not a radical politician. His honeymoon is likely to be brief.
Thinking local
In the meantime, is anyone in the NZ Labour Party looking at Albanese’s victory on Saturday night and thinking…why weren’t we able to do the same thing to Christopher Luxon in 2023, as Albanese has just done to Peter Dutton? Our Labour Party should be asking itself that question. Only three years after being elected in 2020 in a remarkable landslide, Chris Hipkins managed to lose heavily to a ramshackle centre-right coalition led by someone just as inept, and just as inherently un-likeable as Peter Dutton, shaven head and all.
Footnote One. Sigh. If only Jacinda Ardern and Hipkins had held their nerve, had fearlessly promoted policy consistent with the party’s historical values, and had confidently used the mandate that voters had given them three years earlier. Albanese won by doing all of those things. Here, Labour meekly let its opponents define it – so much so that even our world beating Covid response that saved thousands of lives is now remembered mainly for its shortcomings.
Some 18 months down the track, Hipkins is still unapologetically at the helm. Instead of getting straight back up off the canvas and fighting on behalf of the people it left vulnerable… Labour has chosen to bide its time, and be an almost invisible opposition. IMHO, this has been a tactical failure of Duttonesque proportions. When a brand is toxic, you need to be pre-emptive, and change it – not leave it on the shelf in the hope that people will forget and forgive, and be willing to be disappointed all over again.
Fiona Apple’s heart of gold
Besides her talents as a writer and live performer, Fiona Apple can also be a brilliant interpreter of the work of other artists. Case in point…here’s her thoughtful version – recently recorded for a Neil Young tribute album – of that old, done-to-death chestnut, “Heart of Gold”:
And in a completely different genre, here’s her live rendition of Cy Coleman’s classic “I Walk a Little Faster…”: