The fragmentation of votes in Australia’s 2022 federal election told a local version of a global story as parties, media and social identities grow more diverse.
Trouble is, our locally focused reporting tends to the parochial, looking back through a lens of 20th century institutional stability where shifts can be attributed to the to and fro of big-party combat and the charisma (or lack of) embodied in their respective leaders.
Now, we’re starting to get a deeper look at the full picture with last week’s twin release of Griffith University’s Australian Election Study along with Labor’s more self-interested election review.
With almost one-third of voters now ticking the “none of the above” box, we should stop asking “why are people leaving the major parties?” and instead ask “what attracts people to the new parties?”
Rather than a single storyline — “voter disenchantment with the major political parties” as Griffith study co-author Sarah Cameron called it — the seemingly sudden fragmentation reflects long-term trends which may still be playing out.
Call it that moment when Duverger’s Law crashes into the power of possibilities held out by social media networking. The French political scientist Maurice Duverger argued that the number of parties in any given country reflects the electoral rules they operate under. Single constituency first-past-the-post voting? That delivers a two-party system, like the United States. Proportional representation? That gives multiple parties, as in most of Europe.
It’s driven by how different groups reckon they can best advance their interests: by forming coalitions in big parties or by having a party of their own. The Griffith analysis looks at identity markers like class, income, gender and education.
Australia has been slowly evolving into an unusual hybrid: single constituencies in lower houses, but with preferential voting and, since the 1980s, upper houses at both federal and (most) state levels elected by proportional (and preferential) party-line voting.
No surprise then that we’re seeing an unusual hybrid party structure emerge. We have two big parties, and smaller groupings around them. It allows people to vote both for the party that they think best represents them and for the government they prefer — at the same time.
Right now, it’s coinciding with the parallel fragmentation of the media which, once monopolising the message, restrained the imagination of the possible. Now, advertising and political messaging once channelled through mass media are being replaced with grass roots and online social media campaigning (and, on the right, by an increasingly extreme News Corp). Campaigning has been democratised, making it practical for smaller parties and independents to break through.
One result is that people are opting for the ideological sorting the new media ecosystem makes possible, with parties on both the left (like the Greens) and the right (like One Nation and United Australia) garnering votes from each of the big two. These parties are turning those votes into direct representation in proportionally-elected houses and preferences to the big parties in the lower house.
Where they can geographically concentrate those votes (Greens in the inner-cities, Katter’s party in north Queensland) they can also capture a handful of lower-house seats.
A look at European parties suggests this ideological sorting — with between 10% and 15% of the vote available at each end of the spectrum — is close to done in Australia, unless there is some spectacular implosion of one or both of the big two (as happened on the centre-right in Italy in the 1990s and on the centre-left in France in 2017).
The Griffith survey (and Australian experience) suggests this sorting is age dependent. The Green vote skews young and seems to shift to Labor as they age. The One Nation/UAP vote skews old as they shift (mainly) from the Liberals (until they, er, drop out of the voting population).
Another global trend is that democracies are dividing between cities and regions. Leafy suburbs in large conurbations which once comfortably sat with small-l Liberals in Australia, wet Tories in the UK, or liberal Republicans in the US now increasingly vote for left-of-centre parties.
The last election brought that trend to Australia. The Liberals now hold just 15 out of the 95 seats in the (broadly defined) greater urban areas in and around seven of the eight state, territory and federal capitals (the always proudly different Queensland remains the exception).
It’s the reverse in the 34 regional seats (including Queensland): Labor holds just two. It holds just one of the 13 semi-urban and Gold Coast seats around Brisbane. It’s why encouraging Greater Brisbane to vote like the rest of Australia is a priority in the Labor review.
The pattern encourages us to ask: are the teal seats, then, a Morrison shock that will soon head home; a permanent centrist offering for these once conservative suburbs; or does the Griffith survey conclusion of tactical voting by usually Labor and Green votes make it look more a long-term bridge from right to left?
All of this misses a more obvious explanation. The voters have not changed. The parties have. The centre-right voters who gave solid support to the Liberals before John Howard have seen their party increasingly concentrate on sucking up to the loony xenophobic Xtian-fundamentalist fossil-fuel-fetishist vote, and they don’t like it. Labor has meanwhile dropped any pretence of socialist policies and also shed a lot of its social democrat ideology by subscribing to the neoliberal economic model and turning its back on the trade unions, and is no longer a left-of-centre party; it is centre-right. Similar transformations to the previously centre-right party have occurred in the UK and USA, mutatis mutandis. Voting for a teal candidate is just voting for the sort of politics the Liberals once offered but have now abandoned. Enough Liberals see that to get the teals over the line when you add in the tactical voting, but these voters could get much the same result by voting Labor, if they could just overcome their aversion to the Labor brand label.
SSR you are on the money. If Menzies could see the LNP these days, he would wonder what became of his Liberal party, and how they became a party of extremists and Pentecostal nut jobs. Labor’s shift to the right under Hawke/ Keating et al pushed the LNP further to the right and into the arms of the nutters on the fringe of the right.
Even Malcom Fraser and John Hewson quit the Liberal party because they didn’t like the direction it was going in.
Rusted on devotees of the LNP are slowly dwindling with age. Labor’s shift to the right has made it a centre-right party, and will hopefully keep the RWNJ’s on the opposition benches for ever.
Menzies without context would probably be considered a far-left radical in today’s political culture.
Agree mostly, but I’d label the Albanese govt ‘centre’, not centre-right
Exactly. This is as obvious as the proverbial to anyone whose voting intentions are not based on the team name.
And the reason this idea does not get entertained much in public is to short-circuit any examination of the steady ratchet to the economic right of the entire political spectrum for the last 30-40 years.
Indeed, instead it is actively covered up by conflating socially liberal == “left” and socially conservative == “right”. Eg: by pretending that people voting for the Teals have shifted left.
This ultimately represents yet another failure of the fourth estate.
Using the same definition the Victorian Hamer Liberal government of the ’70s would be described as ‘left’; the likes of Howard et al. would have viewed them as ‘wets’ for their support of liberal social policies and environmental laws.
Our terminology and pigeon-holing has not kept up with social change. If the terms we use require inverted commas (and they do) its possible we either need new terms, or accept that issues don’t align with those of last century. My younger relos don’t see relevance to left /right branding, they are issues based, more likely to identify as Gryffindor or Hufflepuff than a legacy political party.
The next big thing in politics I see as generational. The drift of benefits of economic activity away from labour to capital is substantially a young/old fault-line, intersected by different capacity of the BankofM&D.
We’re also seeing a reset of economics away from the purist neo-liberal dogma toward an expectation that governments step-up to fix what ‘The Market’ fails. Reactions from BigGas quite different from the industries reliant on gas. Doesn’t fit the Lib/Lab script of old.
But the Murdoch media hacks will do their best to cast all issues as L/R in a US themed culture war that is as much intended to chorale conservative voters as win arguments. It reminds me of the Académie Française declaring a new word la or le. Is sexual identity a matter to be view through libertarian prism (gets thumb up) or religious conservatism prism( thumbs down)? Outrage-generator-dial decided the latter.
I think that’s wellI put. In trying to service their corporate donors both major parties have moved rightwards and, not surprisingly, some of their voters have rebelled against the move.
Agree, but the advantages that Howard leveraged with oligopoly legacy media support have also gone eg. catering to the above median Anglo-Irish cohorts or according to some, ‘Australians’ are being replaced by more diverse and educated voters; according to the census those self described as Anglo-Irish are now 54% of population, probably lessin cities.
I agree with Sinking Ship Rat that the parties have changed, but I think you need to take another step back and recognise that the media environment has encouraged the rightward shift. The internet’s demolition of the media’s classified ad-driven business model and the rise of social media necessitated a change in strategy by the MSM from straight reporting (expensive) to opinion (cheap). The dominant right-wing media, led by News Corp, have corralled specific audiences and then been captured by them, while successfully convincing politicians that those fringe views are mainstream. So the entire media-political complex has shifted right.
The big mystery from a business perspective is where is the centre-left media to tap into the urban demographic that voted Teals/Green? This is a high-spending populous market – socially liberal and economically centrist. I don’t think anyone can legitimately be described as economically ‘conservative’ anymore. What gets called conservatism (the business lobby perennially asking for lower wages and lower taxes) is really just rent-seeking.
So the major parties (losing their Big Capital vs Big Labour raison d’être) have lost their way – the LNP moving ever rightward under the US-imported Pied Piper spell of Rupert and the ALP unable to grow beyond the Hawke-Keating neoliberalism of the 80s. The population is ahead of them both – sensing a need for not only a new politics, but a new economics – based on sustainability, the reversal of obscene levels of inequality, integrity, respect in the workplace and a reinvestment in public institutions.
Agree, and one would also suggest the weaponising of US Koch linked think tanks in Australia promoting climate science denial and ‘libertarian’ economic policies.
“Economic centrist” and “economic right” are indistinguishable for all practical purposes.
Hardly anyone is seriously economic left. Not even the Greens, who generally favour market-centric (albeit interventionist) economic policies. For example, their “free childcare” is just another massive transfer of $$$$ to private childcare operators, when it should be expanding the public education system and facilities to encompass kindergarten and childcare.
What do you think an economic “conservative” is ? You’ve described parts of standard conservative behaviour (enrich the rich, milk the workers, abandon the poor, demonise the unemployed, neuter the Government), but you seem to think it’s something else ?
I’m talking about big ‘C’ economic conservatism in the deregulate, privatise, marketise, liberalise context. That’s gone. The small ‘c’ conservatism you refer is still dominant. That’s true. But that’s not about shrinking the state but expanding it so as to preserve comfortable middle class welfare
Plenty of that still going on – not that there’s a lot left to sell.
The business of Government itself has been largely privatised to consultancies like KPMG, Deloitte, etc.
And it inevitably leads to the ‘small c conservatism’ as you call it from above. So it does seem hard to find a distinction.
Big things that are left (education, health) are slowly being underfunded so that people “choose” to switch over to privatised alternatives. This is the more subtle path taken when blatant and outright privatisation doesn’t fly.
In my experience all people really mean when they say “shrinking the state” is “lowering the taxes”.
Preferences were invented to protect the big two parties and are a scam. First past the post is unfair. Proportional representation is the only way of fairly making every vote count. It might even make us think we own the place, and demand a few more changes. Right now we obviously don’t, and can’t.
The big parties would do well to select 50% of people with science degrees. Right now we are governed by a bunch of ignoramuses. 5%? 1%?
I wouldn’t count on that. We had a scientist who was replaced by an engineer, both climate science deniers.
Perhaps the rise of Independents and Smal Parties is mainly due to the Two Major Political Parties continually being embroiled in scandals, branch stacking, hiding of donations, etc.
Up to a point. There is certainly a correlation between those behaviours and the major parties, but it’s not so easy to assign cause and effect. Somebody trying to buy political influence is not likely to waste time and money on a party with no prospect of being in government in the next few decades. Those with big money to hand out will almost always buy influence from the main parties; only a few with more ideological concerns are exceptions, willing to fund politics without much expectation of immediate rewards. Perhaps the apparent moral superiority of the minor parties and independents is only like to last while they are distant from power. It also hinders them getting to power. Additioonally, minor parties do have their own scandals and internal feuds, but it tends to pass unnoticed because it’s often not worth reporting to the general public compared to the ructions in the major parties that can have real-world consequences. Take a closer look at PHON, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats etc. and it’s soon apparent that they are not squeaky-clean, even if it is small beer compared to the major parties. The readiness of various small parties to deal with Glenn Druery does not reflect well on any of them. And independents cover a hell of a range, from some of the very best candidates available at one end of the spectrum, to Raving Rod Culleton at the far end. The closer a minor party gets to power the more it will be under pressure to act the same as a major party. What are the chances that such a party will be, like Oscar Wilde, able to resist anything except temptation? As Whitlam pointed out, only the impotent are pure.
The root of the problem is that elections require resources, parties have a huge advantage, and voters favour familiar names. The result, and it’s presumably a deliberate feature, is a system that encourages corruption and influence-buying and makes it nearly impossible to root out. Very handy for those with the deep pockets to keep a grip on politics while preserving the democratic facade. The idea that an elected parliament can be genuinely democratic, representative and honest is not credible. To achieve that needs a parliament of members selected at random from the general population, and replaced often enough that they have too little time for serious corruption to spread.
I think so. Teal independents would have been small L liberals in an earlier time. But with the big L Liberal Party ignoring (or even avoiding) any form of good governance, there is no way that the voters would ever have voted for the LNP.
I don’t see this as a new phenomenon, nor media-driven. Compulsory, preferential voting has offered nuanced choices to voters and had a big impact throughout my life-time, especially on the right: Nats, DLP, Australia Party, Democrats – they have all exerted lower house influence via preferences while gaining upper house seats where available. The Nats have always captured lower-house seats by geographically concentrating their vote, as have others less frequently. The ALP used to be relatively monolithic, but its fragmentation to the right (DLP) was enormously consequential. Its vote dropped share dropped markedly with the demise of the unions and the advent of the Greens – neither of these were a product of media diversification. There are more minor parties in play these days, but society is more complex.