Fool me twice, shame on me

Saturday’s Labor victory was its biggest win since the Chifley era, with a lower primary vote (34.7%) than Bill Shorten (34.73%) in his 2016 loss to Malcolm Turnbull. It was a historical victory, with 8-15 seats gained for the ALP, while the Coalition is looking to have lost at least 19, including the Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s own seat of Dickson. Two seats in NSW, one seat in Western Australia, six in Queensland! In every state, LNP seats went to the ALP.

Among all the insights, among the about-faces from the press about the results from Saturday night, two things stand out: the quality of the Labor campaign team and the lack of prowess from the Coalition.

The Labor campaigning machine, led by Paul Erickson was a political force honed by ten years in opposition, and tested in the 2022 victory. The ‘faceless man’ took up the position as ALP National Secretary in 2019 as the party was painstakingly decoding the entrails of the monumental loss under Bill Shorten. It was Erickson’s imprimatur that crafted the small-target approach in the wake of the Shorten defeat, and his instructions that saw it take a low-profile centrist position to victory after a decade in exile. 

The Coalition tore a hole in its inflatable broad church when it axed Turnbull in 2017. In a coup that involved now unseated Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, the neo-right faction seemed to pop out of nowhere after Trump walked down the fabled escalator to announce his run for the presidency in 2015. The LNP transmogrified from a party of fiscal conservatism to a party of far-right US identity politics, and the right faction of the broad church knocked out the joists over the non-denominational liberal church, bringing it down on Malcolm Turnbull. By the time Scott Morrison was at the crease, and his party idealouges were rearranging the furniture in the dressing room, Labor’s careful incremental shift from 2019, its subsequent small target deliveries, and its never-interrupt-your-opponent-when-he-is-making-a-mistake sledging, saw the Coalition collapse, fail to recover, and Peter Dutton was the final tail-ender. 

Turnbull’s knifer, Scott Morrison, the man who arguably did the most damage to the deflated party of Robert Menzies and set up the inevitability of the drubbing on Saturday, carried the full complement of this MAGA-type conservatism. Competing in cheerleading as a youth, following an American-style evangelical version of Christianity, and possessing a made-in-the-USA-like ability to talk endless amounts of shit – Scomo morphed, along with a new breed on the right side of the broad-church, from a bloke who spoke about quiet Australians to one who quietly dreamed of an American conservative future. As Prime Minister he spoke like a President, but as a leader he modified the party in a ‘Hillsong’ styling, and took one of the biggest single term losses of government in Liberal party history. Anything short of a dramatic re-correction was suicide, but instead they got Peter Dutton.

‘On Saturday night, the Liberals said the party has to do some soul searching, but it has no soul to search,’ wrote Phil Coorey, a cogent objective analysis that has evaded him since the Blackberry era of journalism. After the drubbing, former anointed party leader Simon Birmingham, the last of the legacy moderates at the barely recognisable political Coalition to head to the door, made a poignant comment after the defeat: ‘The Liberal Party has failed to learn lessons from the past and if it fails to do so in the face of this result then its future viability to govern will be questioned’. WA Nationals Leader Shane Love described the result as ‘rock bottom’, telling the press, ‘It’s like (a) drug addict finally realising they have to change.’

After a decade of ushering the party of Robert Menzies through an unpalatable far-right US wet-dream, the mining magnates like Gina Reinhart and the foreign-owned media assets like Rowan Dean and James Morrow were out in force almost immediately, preparing another unmeasured dose of synthetic information-fentanyl and warning the Coalition to stay its course towards oblivion, urging it to to reheat the MAGA microwave dinner. This uncertainty is presenting in the struggle for the party leadership, as likely successors like Angus Taylor put Sussan Ley ahead to Teresa May the party while they figure out how many far-right buttons they are allowed to push without looking like a bunch of 4-Chan moderators. 

The Greens have been the biggest victim in this major party waltz. As the majority of the seats changing hands have been from blue to red, the Greens have been caught up in the battles they were hoping to win, and losing the battles they were assuming they would consolidate. Adam Bandt could be finished in Melbourne, and the party has suffered almost toy status, aside from the respectable Senate presence it still maintains. One could critique the Greens for their lack of commitment, meandering from issue to issue based on perceived political capital, never following through to completion due to fear of wedging and backlash, like the way it lost its momentum on the housing debate. They were punished in perception for blocking Labor’s housing bill, and lacked the substance in real world measures that Labor was offering in the form of neoliberal (but still tangible) policies. They’ve traded two key seats in Queensland with the now-overpowered ALP, including that of outspoken Max Chandler-Mather. The usual major party hijinx and horse trades consolidated preferences away from them in seats like Wills in Victoria, where a highly unpopular ALP incumbent knocked off a winless Green candidate that didn’t quite have the street cred to act as confidently as the polling-booth volunteers would suggest.

The Victorian Teals lost their lustre, with some of the leafy green washed away to reveal an affluent shade of blue. Some were never more than a figurehead for the inhabitants of those constituencies, deserted as they were by the last of the moderates, bolted onto a boat that would never allow itself to be sailed into progressive waters too far. The inability of the independents, led by a Teal wave unwilling to venture to far into uncharted territory, doomed the independent flotilla to sit in shallow waters and wade in the ideas that come with it, inhibiting the community independent movement that was hoping to challenge the major party into a minor government. When they stayed silent on Israel’s war on Gaza, and voted for draconian measures to fight antisemitism, whilst aligning with the major parties on many issues, it swept away their early gains that guided the Labor government’s climate policies, and what came after seemed to be a bunch of independents focused on retaining their seats that had been blue since Menzies. Turns out they were right, in Goldstein and perhaps in Kooyong too.

The Coalition has broken its end of the social contract with the Australian people, and threatens the functionality of our democracy because of it. Choosing to double down into something Morrison had proven didn’t work, the Coalition lurched and limped further to the right with a less likeable and less intelligent replacement, emboldened by the four corners of our concentrated rancorous press, and an increasingly bizarre billionaire class, swollen with mega profits and unreasonably insisting that they get one more wafer thin dinner mint after decades of ingesting buckets of everything with extra pate while one in six children live in poverty.

In a two party democracy, it is the responsibility of both of the overpowered political entities to act within the reasonable confines of the country. A sane and rational approach needs to be in place for the best results in a sane and rational country, as one party cannot project values outside the norm without tipping the balance. If the LNP decides to go beyond the pale, it does so at the expense of the viability and functionality of the democracy, either by irresponsibly moving the nation out of its political orbit, or leading its major party dance partner to the right with it, resulting in an unhealthy majority like we now see Labor hold.

Labor has a mandate through the voters repudiation of the ideological ambush imposed on Australians by the Coalition as much as it does from its effective centre led campaign, and with more seats heading their way, the Labor right faction will likely spring up to claim victory, believing its poor ideas like AUKUS, support for Israel, insufficient housing and cost of living measures, and meagre economic and tax reforms can sit like proud jewels in its policy tiara. But this logic is flawed.

The Australian people are left wanting from government, feeling that above anything as they return from their voting shuffle and re-focus on all the red lines in the spreadsheet, they voted for the lesser-of-two evils again. And that is a feeling that doesn’t fill the stomach of many. 

Labor has a mandate to be more progressive, it can make changes to negative gearing, tear up the gas contracts that return no benefit to Australians, or review AUKUS based on the looming spectre of Donald Trump. But it probably won’t, because it thinks it doesn’t have to. As the Coalition looks to be in the dog box, perhaps along with the Greens, there are people looking for something that isn’t there yet. And as the years go on, there will be new political elements that seek to fill the vacuum, and in lieu of real change, to the risk of the Labor government and what turned out to be the peril of the Coalition, they will be foolish to ignore.