When They All Hate You
Well, thank God the bread and circuses are over for another three years of utterly bastardised representative democracy. This is an idea whose time has well and truly gone. Now come the recriminations, blame games, useful narratives and the vendettas. It will keep the political class and the punditocracy busy for weeks, nay months.
Some things were clear before the guillotine fell upon ScoMo’s head. First, election campaigns are no longer a remotely useful mechanism for determining the issues that matter to voters.
The election outcome broadly went to script.
First, the Newspoll and some others got it right again. It will be, as close as it needs to be, to a 53-47 two-party-preferred vote outcome. And as the old psephologist Malcolm Mackerras used to say, the seats will pan out nationally as if the TPP was perfectly uniform. Despite the modern caveats, it still broadly works. What would have been, in the old days, a landslide to Labor is now a narrow majority government, down to the inner-city lefties preferring communism to socialism, and electing 15 or so left-independents.
Second, a whole bunch of Liberal “wets”, as Senator Gerard Rennick still, delightfully, calls them, have been consigned to their deserved place in the dustbin of history. That they have been replaced by an equally offensive bunch should not deter us from a quiet celebration of the demise of career homosexualist advocates, climateers, globalists, enemies of life causes and energy vandals. They never, ever belonged in the Party of Menzies, who stopped voting Liberal pretty much as soon as the 1960s version of “moderates” got near the levers of power. (He went Democratic Labor Party).
Third, the predictions of voter disillusionment with the Lib-Lab duopoly came true, as predicted in the polls. The Coalition and Labor were both on the nose. The legacy parties themselves, like the campaign, were devoid of compelling narratives, arguments and policies that spoke to the core concerns of voters. Albo isn’t Whitlam. Or Hawke. And Albo’s arrival in office is not especially welcomed. There will not be street parades in his honour.
Some of us (of a certain age) welcomed Gough. Certainly, many of us welcomed Hawke. In the case of the former, our hopes were well and truly dashed. In the case of the latter, they were largely fulfilled, at least till the late-career madness of the suddenly woke Paul Keating dashed them. Not so with the contemporary Labor party.
Around two thirds of the electorate did not give Albo’s party their first preference vote. Ouch. A tired, nearly decade-old, second-rate government which believed in nothing and trashed the country over a minor virus got what it deserved.
But …
Fourth, the political class – the major parties and the corporate media – played a blinder in totally ignoring the FFMPs (freedom friendly minor parties), and so most people had never heard of them. The creation of the “fake binary” of a Lib-Lab duopoly, with due nods to the politically sexy “teals”, and the total parking of the said loons on the fringe, conspiracy theory right, consigned the heroes of Covid politics to extreme minority status. That the latter failed to learn the basics of electioneering – and they were always up against it, despite Clive Palmer’s money – didn’t help, but they were on a hiding to nothing. The presence on the ground for the FFMPs on election day bespoke a lack of willingness on the part of the probably 15 per cent of voters disposed to these parties actually to get their hands dirty. To be boots on the ground at election time. The corporatised parties have a massive market advantage here, with their far deeper resources. And Holmes a Court’s money was spent far smarter than Clive’s.
Fifth, the majors had another trump card up their sleeves. The laptop class had a very good Covid. The other half of the one third of voters who disdained the major parties, firmly on the leftist fringes, basically lose sleep over rising sea levels rather than the threats to freedom from a Covid State. Mostly, they embrace the Covid State. They disdain deplorables, anti-vaxxers, and loopy “sovereign citizens” who actually, you know, value freedom. Like the old left and the old right used to. So, the one third of voters opposing the majors were never going to be a single and, therefore, threatening voting block. The result? Sickeningly low primary votes that would, historically, have doomed the chances of winning elections, didn’t matter in the end for Labor.
And, so, to the recriminations.
For the ABC “squad”, it was always going to be described as “the climate election”. See under the ageing but, alas, still active, Laura Tingle. Well, they would say that. For at least 90 percent of the electorate, it was NOT the climate election. For Julie Bishop, forever bitter at her non elevation to the leadership of the Liberal Party, it was, inevitably, about “women”, and Morrison’s supposed women problem. This is fantasyland. And, related but different, for Niki Savva and the endlessly grumpy female-left, it was all about Catherine Deves! Really? A single candidate whose past, eminently right-thinking social media posts on the unbelievably prominent transgendered issue, caused a nation to turn on ScoMo.
For the dimwits at The Guardian, it was the defeat of a right-wing government. No one other than a Guardian “journalist” (Katharine Murphy) could possibly think Morrison or even Abbott – inevitably still given a mention – led a remotely right-wing administration. Again, fantasyland. Her headline read “Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have emptied the Liberals’ Broad Church.” I agree the broad church is dead and buried, or at least it was last Friday, before the election, in effect, re-broadened the church a little. But it wasn’t emptied by conservatives, it was emptied by Katharine Murphy’s mates in the teals’ cabal. Fair dinkum conservatives are these days all but non-existent in the Liberal Party (with now, apparently, the pro-life stalwart Bernie Finn set to be excised this week in Victoria in an act of utter bastardry). Most certainly there are no real conservatives in the National Party. The Guardian’s line is ideologically blindfolded, self-serving idiocy.
For the (mercifully now) ex-minister Simon Birmingham, it was, expectedly, the Liberals’ alleged move to the right on climate policy, or, at least, their failure to embrace the extremist position on climate change of a lunatic minority of voters, that did the Government in. When in doubt – blame the Nats! Kill the Coalition. That would be the now-Brokeback Nats who embrace every leftist cause going. Only last week, the NSW Nats cheered on the euthanasia legislation in New South Wales, as enthusiastically as they had championed infanticide-on-demand back in 2019. The same Nats who waved through Matt Kean’s insane green agenda for the collapse of the NSW economy. This is now the party of Trevor Khan, thankfully granted his retirement sinecure as a magistrate. The same Nats who in Canberra waved through ScoMo’s net zero abomination, with only Matt Canavan expressing opposition.
What about ScoMo? It really is a problem when they ALL hate you. The conservative base that you obliterated with your corporatism. The Modern Liberals. The feministas. The climateers. The Covid-crushed. The fiscal conservatives. Those who resent top-down “captain’s picks”. The old fashioned swinging voters. The religious freedom lobby.
Morrison let everyone down.
His Government was old, by Australian electoral standards. It was a poor government. It corrupted grants programs, it worked through three prime ministers, two of which it sacked without giving the electorate a say in the matter, it was populated with mediocre (at best) ministers, it was fiscally incontinent, it failed (post-Abbott) to create a reason for its existence, it was hopelessly divided factionally, it trashed our defences, and, worst of all, it crushed freedoms and rights during its woeful Covid State phase. The Liberal left thought the Government too “conservative”, a truly mind-numbing analysis.
It was left with no one loving the Government, despite its all-too-late appeal to party elders to save it.
The only surprise is that the LNP Government lingered as long as it did. Governments lose elections, oppositions rarely win them, in Australia. This appalling Government lost. There is no great mystery, despite the mindless narratives already being rolled out by everyone with an interest in so doing.
When they ALL hate you, you have nowhere to turn. Especially when you were the accidental prime minister in the first place, without a compelling reason for your occupation of our highest office.
But another aspect of the election, clearly, is that we clearly hate them ALL. As Adrian Beaumont (at The Conversation) summed up the figures on election night:
Primary votes were 35.3% Coalition (down 6.2% since the 2019 election), 31.9% Labor (down 1.4%), 12.4% Greens (up 2.0%), 5.1% One Nation (up 2.0%), 4.4% UAP (up 1.0%) and 10.9% for all Others (up 2.6%). Labor is projected to win the two party vote by a 51.2-48.8 margin, a 2.7% swing to Labor.
So, we now have a government elected with clearly less than one third of the primary vote. A sad first in Australia. Let this astonishing outcome sink in. On these (incomplete) figures, 68 per cent of Australians have a government they do not want and did not vote for. The electorate wanted “change from”, but had no idea of what the “change to” should be.
The shockingly low results for the freedom parties make a mockery of the optimism many felt that Australians would rally around a freedom-based campaign after two years as a prison camp. As one blogger noted, we have voted to live in said prison camp. Both George Christensen and Craig Kelly admitted failure. Though George did make the point that the FFMPs obtained around 12 per cent of the vote nationally. Enough, as he said, to elect several senators – if the voters for these parties had preferenced the others. Sadly, they did not, though, at the time of writing, Christensen had not abandoned hope of some Senate seats. Which takes us back to the woeful ground game of the minor right-of-centre parties, in contrast to the sophistication and commitment of the leftie minors and “teals”. Splashing big money on big signs and big adverts no longer cuts it in the age of targeted, online advertising. Another clear implication of the election result is that no one who lives in the inner cities cares a fig about the core freedoms of those who do not. As well as being signed up members of the climate cult, of course. These things should alarm those of us who do care about freedom and national prosperity.
Where to from here? Notwithstanding at least one assessment (at What’s Up With That) that Australia now has the greenest regime in our history, it is worthwhile remembering that culture is upstream from politics, and that changes of government count for little when the Lib-Lab duopoly agrees on so much, however much they might seek to bury this and talk up the differences. So many of the wars over climate, freedoms, education, religion and culture are already (alas) lost, and non-parliamentary and supra-national institutions now run the world, dragging along political party puppets of whatever persuasion in their wake.
The Liberal Democrat Topher Field sees a long game. Christensen is here for the long haul. After all, One Nation has been around for a long time now (a quarter century this year), and the ON vote is up considerably on previous efforts. (Yes, that is because they stood candidates in more seats, but the fact remains people were willing to vote for ON candidates). Time will tell whether we get goofy Albo or radical leftist Albo, and whether the Coalition in the Senate will now oppose policies, detested by its base, that it championed in government. Like net zero and Covid statism. But one thing is clear. It was a “feeble” attempt by ScoMo at re-election, as one observer put it, and perhaps this was the inevitable result of having been a feeble, illiberal government, which stood on the sidelines as our premiers and chief ministers gutted the nation, racked up a trillion or so in debt while whinging that Labor was going to add a mere few billion more, stopped Australians from entering or leaving the country, rewarded Covid fascism, denuded our defences, promoted ministers simply not worthy of the title, indulged in cronyism, and lied and slithered over all manner of failure, in both ideology and performance. Should we have rewarded this?
Good riddance to an awful government. Now onwards to Sydney and March 2023.
Paul Collits
23 May 2022