Following yet another dismal election night on Saturday, the Coalition finds itself on the opposition benches in every Australian jurisdiction except Tasmania, with its combined representation in the nation’s federal and state lower houses having fallen to 190 at most from a peak of 359 seats in 2014.
As with all historical phenomena large or small, explanations vary between those that place human agency at the centre of the equation and those that prioritise underlying structural factors.
For enthusiasts of the latter approach, Saturday’s result can be readily understood as a case of voters trading in a government with well over a decade on the clock for a new model. However, prosaic explanations of this sort tend not to scratch the itch of journalists with compelling narratives to craft and culture war partisans invested in the ideological dimensions of the political contest.
To some extent at least, this is as it should be. There seems little doubt that Australian election results, since the onset of COVID, entail a national rejection of the populist and libertarian strands that have come to dominate right-wing politics internationally, and which have found an outsized voice in the Liberal and National parties and through the Murdoch media.
Many among the latter are plainly too deeply invested to draw the obvious conclusions. Nowhere is this more apparent than on Sky News, where talking heads are noisily attributing the Coalition’s predicament to its supposed embrace of woke ideology.
Such arguments were always hard to make sense of with respect to the defeat of the Morrison government, but in New South Wales they have found a semi-plausible scapegoat in the shape of moderate factional leader Matt Kean — or “green Kean”, as the demonology of the right would have it.
As the clock ticked down on the election last week, Sky went to town on polling conducted by an interested party in the NSW Minerals Council, which — alongside loaded questions as to whether respondents “agree that Matt Kean is responsible for pushing up energy prices” — contrasted negative personal ratings for Kean with positive ones for Dominic Perrottet and Chris Minns.
These polls further suggested that conservative disaffection with the Liberal Party meant One Nation had a big night in store, which failed to transpire (though in fairness, the party did double its modest vote in Kean’s northern Sydney seat of Hornsby, a pointed exception to its strategy of targeting south-western Sydney and the Hunter region).
The right must also reckon with the fact that the NSW Liberals largely succeeded where the Morrison government failed in warding off the teal independent threat, for which no one deserves more credit that Kean, who was the public face of the party’s campaign in the threatened seats.
On the subject of polling, it should be noted that those who went about it in a duly disinterested fashion had nearly as good a night as Labor.
The Australian‘s Newspoll, which has been conducted since 2019 by the local branch of international market research giant YouGov, appears to have repeated its feat from the Victorian election in landing within one percentage point of the primary shares of the Coalition, Labor and the Greens.
Whatever else might have been going wrong for the Coalition, it also seems that it was at least getting its money’s worth out of the polling conducted by CT Group (formerly Crosby Textor).
Its late campaign polling reportedly showed the Coalition on track to lose up to 12 seats, shedding light on Dominic Perrottet’s campaigning in the seemingly solid seats of South Coast, Camden, Ryde and Drummoyne — efforts which left Labor “bemused”, according to a report in The Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday.
As it turned out, the Liberals indeed suffered an unexpected defeat in South Coast and, according to the results projections on my own website, are going down to the wire in the other three.
Successes inevitably attract less attention than failures, but the Australian polling industry deserves at least some recognition for righting the ship after its heavily publicised failure in 2019.
Bowes’ article makes some relevant points about the role played by Mudroch media and Sky News in driving the Liberals mad. There’s an opinion piece in the current edition of The Saturday Paper on that subject, ‘How News Corp captured the Liberal Party’, which includes this:
It’s not enough to say that because Labor is now in power federally and in all mainland states that this is ok. It is not ok. The poison of News Corp is rotting everything in Australian politics, even with the Liberals stuck in opposition and, for now at least, weakening steadily.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the Liberal Party has been drifting away from being a political organisation towards an organ remade in the image of ideological and corporate interests for decades. This has been happening since 1975 when it was merely a relic of Australia’s pro-imperial and post-colonial past full of White Empire men. Now it’s full of cheap, nasty, made up and botoxed Wide Boys and Girls. The free marketeers have got everything they wanted. It would take wholesale government restructure and nationalisation of monopolies to change things. A tough ask and one that the Liberals and their allies in media and business knew all too well. They conned the public with privatisation, helped by our old mates Paul and Kim and Bob (Hawkey that is, although Carr helped too in his own way), convinced people that we could get fancy foreign cars, buy and sell property leveraged for several lifetimes worth of debt and offshore all our problems. Now we see that the benefits of all this experiment have been mixed at best, the public don’t like it but…Too Late! The Golden Goose has been sold and we’ll have hell’s own job to get it back again.
We can only hope the News Corpse has jumped the shark in they did of most.
Goddamn empty space where the edit button should be..
…in the eyes of most
In case anyone’s wondering how that typo happened, I swipe.
Do you mean “eyes wipe”?………………..
I’ve long thought it is the other way around – the LNP is the parliamentary wing of News Corp.
… which is the point the author of article I quoted is making.
One could also suggest that pollsters and their ‘architecture’ influence inc. friendly media have too much sway with parties and policies including and especially the Libs?
For example, ‘push polling’ on an externally sourced and divisive issue testing with focus groups, polling question, response, traction (or not), if yes, adopt as policy. However, the issue is the Libs do not seem to have any in house policy making while branch membership ageing, declining and becoming more e.g. Christian, following US culture and generic ‘wedge’ issues.
Crosby Textor was cited and also very…. active in the UK, but also YouGov which is often suboptimal on self selecting sample populations, and a company founder includes former Tory Minister Zahawi.
It never fails to amaze how the supposed ‘party of business’ is so completely lacking in business acumen.
Business lesson number 1: If the customers ain’t buying what you’re selling, it’s because the customers don’t want what you’re selling.
Business lesson number 2: To learn what your customers want, listen to them (but here’s a clue to get started: recognition of climate change and policies to deal with it).
Business lesson number 3: If you don’t change what you’re selling and if your customers continue to not buy what you’re selling, you’re going to go broke.
Well, the public may want “recognition of climate change and policies to deal with it”, but they didn’t vote for it. They voted for Labor, who are hand in glove with the Coalition in backing the continued expansion of the coal and gas industries and, federally, pushing a safe-guard mechanism that is intent on safe-guarding the same (unless it is owned by Clive Palmer, which serves him right). Meanwhile, the Greens are stuck on 10%.
Whatever the putative “…public may want…”, not only did it not vote for it, there is no willingness to pay for it.
As with off-shoring, 70-80% consistently vote for complicit parties.
What the public actually want is comforting rhetoric re climate change while continuing to nothing serious about it. That is what the ALP is offering.
aka “The customer is always right”
The simple fact is that people have lost interest in far right politics with their climate change and covid denial. Their lack of integrity in government and business dealings is also a massive turn off which transcends borders.
So what does the Liberal Party do? It blames the very reasonable Matt Kean instead of taking a long hard look at themselves.
Matt Kean has ruled out standing for NSW Liberal Leader after Perrottet, saying he wants to prioritise his family. Of course that might be the whole story, but how likely is it that Kean also took account of how News Corp and the hard right would react if he stood, and then how much further their hostility would go if he won? It’s not credible this was not a consideration. And that’s a big part of how News Corp exerts its influence more widely; the more reasonable and capable candidates are relentlessly hammered until they give up, leaving the field to the zealots, nutters, dimwits and zombies.
Barely any mention of the damage that allegedly corrupt guy John Barilaro did, or the all-round repulsive David Elliott trying to blow up the joint on the way out.
I hope Winston Hills goes to Labor. That will be a real kick in the guts for the hard right god botherers in the area.
After Gladys fell on her sword, they chose the hard right repellant Perrotet. Why am I not surprised at the result, in spite of MSM telling us daily the campaign showed them neck and neck?
Thrilled to see someone using ‘disinterested’ correctly. Thanks for the analysis – the polls always seemed quite clear, it was the media reporting that was definitely trying to make it seem a close race. Even the ABC.
No clicks in a walkover………………
Me too. Hurrah for ‘disinterested’, one of a considerable number of useful words these days being steadily degraded by frequent misuse.
Of course the media report every election as a close race, their objective is to get people to pay attention and a close race sounds more interesting than a foregone conclusion. The media speculation before the last VIC election was particularly egregious; you probably remember the consensus was that Dan Andrews’ Labor would either lose in a bloodbath or be left to govern as a badly wounded minority. Ha ha ha. But even that pales compared to News Corps’ spinning the poll results for the federal Liberals, where for example Dutton’s approval rating moving from, say, 25% to 28% is breathlessly announced as ‘Dutton closes the gap on Albanese’.
Add to that crescendo, appraise, and adverse, just to name a few.
Unique, incredible, refute, decimate…
My Oxford Concise (1997) notes that:
“Disinterested is commonly used informally to mean ‘uninterested’ but this is widely regarded as incorrect.”
Interesting that ‘common’ usage was ‘widely’ regarded as incorrect – paradoxical? Anyway, the rot had set in a long time back and worsened since, no doubt. The battle is probably lost- maybe in today’s world the concept of disinterest / non-bias is no longer relevant …
My Oxford Shorter Dictionary (sixth edition, 2007) includes the same note for ‘disinterested’ (adj), and also records that its use meaning ‘not interested’ dates from the early 17th C, while the ‘impartial’ usage is first found in the mid 17th C. However, ‘disinterest’ (noun) as ‘impartiality’ is also found in the mid 17th C, but with the meaning of absence of interest, uninterest, it is first found much later, in the late 19th C. Meanwhile, ‘uninterested’ , as Merriam-Webster says, swaps its meaning from originally being used for ‘impartial’ in the early 17th C to something like its usual current meaning in the late 18th C. It seems possible that the first usages are lost anyway and might have had either of the two definitions. My guess is that the reason some are keen to defend its use for ‘not biased’ is because that makes it useful and precise in its own right instead of merely a pointless synonym for ‘uninterested’.
This is possibly the most boring comment I have ever posted to Crikey, and I hope it is, but I could not pass up the opportunity to engage in a dic(tionary)-waving contest.
“possibly the most boring comment”
Nah. Love it! Here are two other erosions that tend to ruin my day: reticent used for “reluctant”; and “salubrious” used for “wealthy” or “plush”.
I’ve resisted writing, until now, that the antonym of “interested” is ‘BORED NOW!’ – it just seemed too obvious.
Maybe time for me to upgrade …
As you say, “disinterested” is precise in its own right – apart from being an unnecessary synonym for “uninterested”, it has a specific (and important) meaning not represented by “unbiased” or any other word that I know, or can find after consulting my copy of Roget (1962 for the record!). The online Cambridge dictionary puts this meaning well:
Having no personal involvement or receiving no personal advantage, and therefore free to act fairly (my emphasis)
As a south Coast person Perrotet partly lost because of privatisation of housing. No Dept of housing has left Southern Cross housing to do what they want. The housing costs have gone for example from $125.00 per week to $264.00 per week currently. An impossible amount for those who need housing.
Repairs are not done, roofs leak, carpets are old, asbestos abounds, taps leak, ovens are old etc.
Thank goodness I’m not in this situation, but many are.
What’s more is Southern Cross housing are now NDIS providers! Tenants are being advised to apply for the NDIS so that housing can “help” them better. They can be the Tenants plan manager and help them with services while taking money from their plans.
All thanks to the liberals/perrotet. There is no where for Tenants to go to if they have a complaint.
Missed saying; and the mould!
Part of NDIS cost blowouts is other public services trying to dump their responsibilities on it.
Absolutely! The arguments about the pay rates are keeping the focus off the top down pilaging of the individual NDIS pools of money. But of course this was always the Liberal plan. The Libs don’t mind that they lost.
Now they can spend the next however many years exploiting business opportunities that they created while in power to destruction. Oh well!