With two weeks to go, the polls suggest Labor is headed for a comfortable victory. No one believes it — least of all Labor. The possibility of minority government has been repeatedly raised in recent weeks.
That would make 2022 the third election in a row that voters have either voted in a minority government or delivered a narrow majority government. That’s what voters delivered in 2010, too. Only in 2007 and 2013 have voters delivered a convincing victory to one side. And, as independents like Monique Ryan like to point out, we’ve had a minority government for the last nine years courtesy of the Liberals being unable to govern with the extremists in the National Party.
What’s clearer is that, whether they win their seats or not, teal independents have seized a surprisingly large level of support in urban Liberal seats, and have supplanted Labor as the key opposition force against Liberal MPs.
The origins of the teals go back to a phenomenon first observed under John Howard. Back then, disgruntled Liberals in well-off seats were mocked, misogynistically, as “doctors’ wives”. That two of the key teal independents are doctors themselves is a nice kiss-off to that grubby, sexist slur.
Scott Morrison doesn’t dare go near any of these seats, The Liberal PM is deeply toxic in the Liberal heartland and would be the kiss of death for self-described “moderate” MPs trying to save their seats.
How did it come to this? Morrison’s involuntary smirking, relentless lying and glib vacuousness alienate many, but the toxicity is because of issues, not personality — particularly climate change. Morrison is far more comfortable in outer suburban seats and regional areas where he can talk about the economy and promise more coal mining and gas fracking jobs.
In 2019, there was evidence of real polarisation in Australia. In Victoria, Labor secured nearly 37% of the primary vote, and 52% in two party preferred terms. In Queensland, it only managed just under 27%, and only managed 41.6% 2PP. In WA, Labor couldn’t manage a 30% primary vote.
That’s polarisation.
Labor will lift its vote in WA this time, and looks likely to improve its performance in Queensland too — though perhaps not enough to gain seats. But the polarisation is spreading from geographical and state-based to urban-regional. As Labor has discovered, so too the Liberals: it’s now very hard to say one thing to regional communities and another to urban communities. For every assurance from a Dave Sharma or a Trent Zimmerman that they support climate action, there’s Matt Canavan to declare that net zero is dead and it’s time for more coal-fired power stations.
And as both Labor and the independents like to point out, a vote for the likes of Sharma, Zimmerman, Falinski, Wilson and, most especially, Frydenberg is a vote for Barnaby Joyce, an outright climate denialist, to be deputy prime minister.
The initial response by Liberal incumbents to the teal threat was to ostentatiously show that they were true moderates who had a real voice in a government run by right-wingers and denialists. More recently — encouraged by News Corp — the party has shifted to full-on, hysterical attacks. This week Scott Morrison was essentially suggesting the apocalypse would arrive if independents held the balance of power.
Meanwhile, Alexander Downer and former Victorian premier Ted Baillieu have written extraordinarily misogynist pieces about the independents — Baillieu refused to mention any of them by name, referencing only Simon Holmes à Court as their puppetmaster. Today a former Liberal hack argued in The Australian Financial Review that voters in urban Liberal seats should basically shut up and enjoy their privilege.
The rage of the federal Liberals is palpable — how dare once rusted-on voters abandon them over an issue as trivial as climate inaction? While state Liberals like Matt Kean have expertly used climate as a policy positive, his federal counterparts are wedded to denialists who refuse to acknowledge the laws of physics.
But polarisation is here to stay. It’s been growing across the Western world, fueled by growing inequality, globalisation, the loss of privilege of white heterosexual males, and the fragmentation of media and the growth of far-right, anti-democratic media like News Corp. In Australia it’s been masked by compulsory voting, but the same factors are at play.
Morrison himself, like Trump in the US, has sought to benefit from polarisation and deliberately fostered division. That’s his strategy with the odious Katherine Deves, with candidates who might have posed a real threat to Zali Steggall in Warringah kept out of the fray. Instead Deves serves as a dogwhistle to reactionaries and transphobes elsewhere.
Morrison can thus have no complaints if the division he has fostered starts breaking away urban Liberal seats at the federal level, further polarising a national electorate between those who want climate action yesterday — and who can afford to pay for it — and those for whom it’s a second-order issue, or who actively want more fossil fuels to be dug up and burnt.
While the federal Liberals remain shackled to the Nationals and ignore the need to bring regions and cities together, the polarisation will continue. Get used to teal — they won’t be one-election wonders. Certainly not if Morrison stays in power.
Morrison’s government has been a minority one in another sense: just about every single policy position it proposes reflects the views of only a minority of Australians, on issues ranging from climate change, to integrity commissions, to historic matters such as same sex marriage, industrial relations and supposed ‘freedom of religion’ protections.
Granted that there is such a thing as a ‘tyranny of the majority’, in general, democratically elected governments are supposed to represent the will of the majority of the people. The fact that the Liberals so consistently refuse to do so reflects a basic contempt for the concept of democracy itself. Their reaction to the teal candidates is just one further manifestation of this. This is how a democracy is supposed to work: anyone is free to run for election based on the platform that they believe in. Furthermore, there is a very simple way that the Liberals could have neutralised the threat now posed by the teals, just by adopting policy positions more aligned with their Australian public constituency. This they have steadfastly refused to do and they are now paying the price.
To project their own failings onto their opposition, though, is puerile.
True enough. John Stuart Mill coined the phrase ‘tyranny of the majority’ in 1859 and despite the way our Liberal Party carries on he was certainly not arguing for the ‘tyranny of a minority’.
Yes, and their basic contempt for the people, is emphasised by things like their Positive Energy misinformation campaign. When faced with a choice between what fossil fuel corporations want and what the majority of Australians want, they largely make policy that benefits the corporations, while spending $31 million of public money, falsely claiming that; no, we really are doing what you want and reducing emissions.
Totally agree, and find it ironic that the LNP argue that the support for the Independents is somehow undemocratic. This is how democracy is SUPPOSED to work.
The problem with the political strategy of the Libs and the Nats is that it’s totally derived from the pages of News Corp. This means it only caters to that reactionary far-right section of the Australian population which, thankfully, just isn’t very large.
Combine this with their coalition partner, and deputy prime minister of Australia no wonder, Liberal party values are vanishing!
I recently received my Postal Vote papers. I noticed there is no space or square on both the House of Representative
and the Senate paper, for News Corp. Since it is likely that Rupert and his minions will influence the Federal Election,
to the point of winning I think it is only fair that the Electorate should have a chance at voting for them.
..it is only fair that the Electorate should have a chance at voting for [News Corp].
Or putting them last – as we do with Zed in the ACT.
I think they’ve more or less been running the country since Whitlam was kicked out. But Rupert is a dictator, not a democrat. We vote against his wishes at our peril.
It’s kind of sad to consider that the last Australian politician to aggressively state that he wasn’t going to let Rupert win was Henry Bolte, and a man was hanged because of his resistance.
Firstly, it is unthinkable that the incompetent, venal, vacuous, unethical, dishonest grub, Morrison, gets re-elected.
And the internal Liberal polling must be indicating a massacre given the increasingly unhinged attacks from Libs on the Teal independents. This attacks alone reveal the essence of the problem. The sole purpose of the Liberal Party’s become pure power. It no longer sees it purpose as facilitating the welfare of citizens, of society. Morrison perfectly epitomises that sole purpose. And his view is obviously supported by many senior Tories. The show is falling apart. Thank the Lord!
..the incompetent, venal, vacuous, unethical, dishonest grub, blabbermouth Morrison,..
I think his language abuse needs to be included in any list of his failings.
Yes, indeed. Let’s call his lying, blabbering blather a Gish Galloping Word Salad.
Yes, continues to amaze me why this is played up as a likelihood by the media. By rights it should be a total wipe out for all the reasons you mention. I posit that if the media were genuinely neutral, and justly critical of this current mob they wouldn’t have a chance. But no, the vested interests with loud voices work hard to remove our democratic rights. LNP is copying the Republican playbook. Haven’t got there yet, but they’d love to.
I thought polarisation was a split between two parties, two opinions. Surely, if there are more individuals and minor parties in parliament, with independent views, then that is a weakening of polarity. And a very good thing – Gillard achieved more in a short time than any other Australian peacetime government (and that included a carbon price). Mostly since destroyed by the LNP once we returned to the usual polarity garbage we should all be so sick of but which the vast majority of voters are stupidly addicted to. Some genuine intelligent variety in the mix might, just might, herald a time of real change. We could even end up with proportional representation.
But not holding my breath.
When did we ever have a Liberal majority government? We have a Liberal minority government being led by the nose like a bull at the Easter Show by Barnaby Joyce and the coalman Canavan who says climate change measures are dead and buried
In 1975 Fraser could have governed without the Nats. but chose not to do so.
Afraid of Shade of BlackJack McEwen (the first ever,formal DPM) returning to haunt him?
Saying it’s Labor vs “Coalition”, as too many do, obscures the crucial fact. “Coalition” fundamentally means a parliament that is in all material respects “hung”. The Liberal Party does not, and believes it can not, win power in its own right. It is forced to buy the support of a long-term minority party at the price of many/most of its economic principles, particularly the forward-looking ones.
The economic challenges and opportunities of managing climate change, anthropogenic or not, and the two decade reality of a worldwide shift towards a service economy must be ignored if the Liberals are to help choreograph the Nationals’ vision of turning the clock back to whenever it was things were wonderful.
Things were never wonderful comparted to now: I’ve just spent weeks on the family tree going back uninterrupted to Georgian times and know of what I speak.
indeed, the first Coalition Government came about because the Country Party would not support the Nationalists with Billie Hughes as PM. Hughes was gone in an instant!
True enough, without Nats the Libs would not even surface as a Political Party.
That plus the likes of Hypocrite Hanson and her sheep allocating preferences to L/NP ( just look at the payoff to Hypocrite after last election)
Fair enough that Labor gets preferences from Greens, but it is not in collusion with Labor.
One can speculate about what might happen if in future the independents become more numerous in parliament than the Nats whose coalition with the Libs leaves them short of a majority; would the Libs be prepared to drop their coalition partners and amend their policies if the independents as a group state they would only support them in a ‘minority government’ if the Libs did those things?