At the party anointing Zali Steggall as the new member for Warringah, one man was conspicuously not having quite such a good time. He was wearing an “It’s time” shirt, and constantly coming over to me check on other seats “What the fuck is going on in Lindsay? How are we doing in Reid? Chisholm? Jesus…”
Poor guy, he must have thought he was going to have the greatest night a Labor supporter ever had around here.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Warringah was supposed to be a sign of how far the sickness had spread, the point at which the wave broke. If Tony Abbott could be dislodged from this most blue ribbon of Liberal seats, surely it would be the last act of a blowout that had wiped out many far more marginal seats for the Coalition. As it turned out, he was thrashed. But Warringah was the outlier.
In his concession speech, Abbott himself identified at least part of the reason why.
When climate change is a moral issue we do quite badly, when its an economic issue, we do very well.
Whatever else can be said about them, it has to admitted that the people gathered in the Manly Novotel ballroom, whooping and cheering as he conceded, are not people who have any reason to be nervous about their jobs during a transition to renewable energy.
The lack of cut-through from those agitating for climate change action anywhere outside the inner cities is probably the defining failure of the 2019 election. The Stop Adani movement claimed its only scalp 1600 kms too far south.
Wealth was a factor throughout. In Warringah, quite a few, mostly very well off people decided they wanted Abbott gone. That’s not to concede the idea promoted by Advance Australia that it was sinister foreign money, in aid of some green left conspiracy that did for Abbott. It was a legitimate, extremely widespread grassroots movement. Nowhere else that I’m aware of had so many disparate groups crop up spontaneously around a single issue. It’s just that “grassroots” in Warringah means something very different to what it means elsewhere. The grassroots here are extremely sturdy.
And, of course, what a target they had.
“We try to be positive, but people hate Abbott, they hate him,” a tipsy woman who had campaigned for Steggall told me on election night. “I was just gonna, you know,” she points a finger gun at her temple “if we re-elected that misogynist, climate denying … but we did it.” She trailed off into a grin. It was personal. It was always going to be. To hear the people in this room talk, you’d never think Abbott had held the seat by such comfortable margin for nearly a quarter of a century.
None of this is a slight on Steggall — she ran a quite remarkable campaign, and she seems to have the makings of a considered and thoughtful politician. Her economic policies will most likely sync fairly well with the Coalition, but her advocacy for action on climate change will be all the more crucial now.
So what felt as though it would be a revolutionary, momentous occasion savours somewhat of anti-climax, ultimately a side consideration in the face of much larger questions.
A collection of engaged and wealthy groups got organised and took down a high profile, unpopular target. Such a formulation did not (in most cases could not) happen elsewhere. So Warringah didn’t end up telling us anything much about where Australia is at, much less did it represent some great progressive victory. If anything, it served to confirm something we already knew: in this country, if you get organised — and have access to a decent chunk of money — you can get quite a bit done.
Charlie Lewis has been reporting from our special Warringah bureau for the length of the election campaign. Read his full coverage here.
No, Charlie, he became complacent, took the electorate for granted, didn’t represent the views of the majority and tried to fool people that he was busily working on local things he’d been promising for 15 + years and never achieved. Not to mention the bullying lies he unleashed against his opponent.
Now that Scomo has 77 seats, Steggle will be an irrelevant back bencher. She will probably go the way of Maxine McKew next election.
Lets face it, Tony was a bit of a dill who buggered up his big chance as PM with some stupid policies and poor execution. His time was up.
She’s more likely to become irrelevant when the Coalition decide that they’ll actually do some work on Climate change.
Nothing will be done about global heating until global capital finds a way to control and monetise the mechanisms of response.
With a majority of one or two the independent crossbenchers still matter. Any time one of your side misses a vote, or misses the plane back from Manila, you can lose your majority and lose the vote.
Perhaps they bucked the trend because they thought about what they were voting for, and did not bow to the propaganda.
Most of the crossbenchers skew right economically, including most of the crossbenchers who call themselves centrists. While ever that’s the case, nothing will change for the panicked low income workers who voted for more of the same on Saturday.
As far as I can see, this is merely about moderate Libs (probably the majority) having enough of the Mad Monk and the radical right.
Nothing much more than that.
Even Libs used to agree that global warming was an urgent issue (as I’m sure most do in private). Like marriage equality, there’s nothing intrinsically progressive about climate change as an issue.
Essentially this is an internal Liberal fight, with an ostensible Independent the standard-bearer for the majority of semi-rational wealthy Liberal voters.
If moderate Libs were the majority, Turnbull wouldn’t have been rolled and the grass roots Libs in Warringah wouldn’t have had to resort to using Zali Steggall to unseat Tony Abbott.
I agree there’s nothing intrinsically progressive about climate changer as an issue. As some people never tire of mentioning, Margaret Thatcher was key to the phasing out of CFCs to save the ozone layer. The Republicans in America came to the party too. This SHOULD be an everyone issue. Unfortunately, the reason it isn’t an everyone issue is that solving climate change is very costly to many established industries and their wealthy owners, and it is the right who are in thrall to those interests and have been rallied into somehow making it an ideological purity test for right-wingers.
(Marriage equality is different; it is intrinsically SOCIALLY progressive, involving abandoning long-standing severe social and religious prejudices against homosexuality. In the West these days the right-wing parties are often more about social conservatism than economic conservatism: the American right is the gold standard of this but look at how the Liberal Party have threatened their “big stick” legislation and other government interference which is unthinkable for a true economic conservative party).
@ Arky
“If moderate Libs were the majority, Turnbull wouldn’t have been rolled and the grass roots Libs in Warringah wouldn’t have had to resort to using Zali Steggall to unseat Tony Abbott.”
I expressed myself poorly. I meant moderate Lib voters, particularly in wealthy electorates like Warringah and Wentworth, being the majority type of Lib voter, not the parliamentary party or the NSW party machine.
Its time to bury the idea that 25 million people in a vast continent can have the slightest effect on the planet’s climate.
Our emissions are negligible, so the only possible effect we can have is to convince the other 1.3 billion Chinese, 1.2 billion Indians, 200+ million Indonesians, 110 million Japanese, 350 million Euros, 330 million Americans, 65 million Brits and and millions of other fossil fuel burners, to radically cut their emissions to save our Barrier Reef.
Yet this delusional vanity is proffered by Labor; in the effectual words of Q&A Shorten: “Asking the actual cost of climate action is a dumb question, because the cost of doing nothing is much greater”.
Yeah right – our unspecified action and its cost is going to lead the billions of other fuel burners on the planet to the promised land.
The religious fundamentalists here are Shorten, Plibasek, Wong and all the other Labor/Green believers in this nonsense.
@staple
“Our emissions are negligible, so the only possible effect we can have is to convince the other 1.3 billion Chinese, 1.2 billion Indians, 200+ million Indonesians, 110 million Japanese, 350 million Euros, 330 million Americans, 65 million Brits and and millions of other fossil fuel burners, to radically cut their emissions to save our Barrier Reef.”
I assume you are a troll, but in case not … so we will continue to have about the highest per capita emissions and tell everyone else to get their act together?
You should never ask someone to do something that you would not be willing to do yourself.
Australia is a major carbon emitter in the same league as the United States, Canada and Saudi Arabia in emissions per capita and number 16 in the world in total emissions, about the same total as Britain or about 80% of each of Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil and well ahead of Italy, Turkey and France. What do those countries have in common? Their populations are from twice Australia (France) to ten times Australia (Indonesia). So our small population is no reason to think that we are an insignificant carbon emitter. In any case, in a sinking boat nobody should think, “The amount of water I can bail out is insignificant. I might as well stop.” That’s how you make sure everyone drowns.
That’s such a tired, defeatist and cynical take Staple666. Our emissions aren’t negligible, but obviously won’t get us anywhere if no other country does anything.
There is a world wide agreement to act, and if every country with Australia’s emissions and less put in that amounts to just under 40% of all emissions, not negligible.
Europe and China are doing work on it, it really leaves India and the USA to complete the picture.
Australia through Bob Hawke convinced the world to sign a convention for no mining on Antarctica, but you need the moral authority of your own actions to be able to make a stand.
Yours is such a glib response.
With Abbott gone but ScoMo back we have the icing but no cake. Which makes you sick.