Joe Hildebrand: Why the election was a vote on kindness
Both hard left and hard right were handed a hospital pass – the election was a ‘referendum on kindness’, writes Joe Hildebrand.
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Three weeks have now passed since the federal election and the fallout from the extraordinary result continues to rain confusion and carnage on the Coalition.
The fact that the Coalition may or may not even exist by the time you are reading this tells you just how complete the catastrophe has been for the Liberal and National parties.
But whether or not the two parties have actually split or done a last-minute reverse ferret hardly matters. Either way, the Coalition is in tatters electorally, ideologically, politically and personally.
And that’s before you even get to the toxic divisions that are tearing apart the Liberal Party itself.
As usual in times of disappointment and dismay, there is plenty of blame to go around and no shortage of people to help it on its way.
Who said or stuffed up what, which policies or politicians were electoral poison, right down to who has or hasn’t breached shadow cabinet solidarity.
But in wading through the weeds of such minutiae, it is easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees or, in this case, a tangle of limp and straggly fronds.
What really happened on May 3 cannot be explained merely by a dungheap accumulation of poor policymaking and messaging and strategy.
Yes, it was also clearly that, but the eye-wateringly unprecedented Labor victory points to something much bigger at play.
Indeed, the fact that the sheer scale of the result flabbergasted even the most bullish Labor strategists – right up to the Prime Minister himself – proves that this was about more than politics.
On the eve and on the day of the election I heard from senior ALP figures from both the left and the right factions who were confident of majority government – as though this was an outlying position.
And in many ways it was. I, too, had no doubt Labor would win majority, and had publicly and repeatedly said so for weeks, despite the increasingly bizarre predictions of a hung parliament.
But even all these self-assured analyses were talking about a seat count in the high 70s. Perhaps, with a Hail Mary, the second last integer on the dial might just flip to an eight.
Nobody, literally nobody, predicted that number to be a nine. Let alone nine and then some.
In other words, the result dumbfounded even the people who achieved it. It went vastly beyond anything they were trying to engineer or hoping to prove.
If politics is a science – which it is not – this result was in the realm of the supernatural.
And so, for want of a better question, what the hell happened?
As is obvious, and as they themselves acknowledge, the Coalition campaign was shambolic at best. Thousands if not millions of words have already been written about this and there will be plenty more to come. There is no need to add to their suffering here.
Likewise Labor ran a strong, disciplined and often brutal campaign that was devastating in its effectiveness, completely overrunning the memory of three years of economic pain with the hope of better times ahead.
But that, too, doesn’t explain the magnitude of what happened on the night.
So, again, what the hell happened?
To understand it we need to step back from politics and politicians.
Election results are more than just numbers and parties and seats. They paint a picture of the nation. They reveal to each of us individually who we are as a whole.
And two significant and completely unrelated individuals offered me their thoughts in the long unfolding aftermath of May 3.
One, a seasoned and well-connected Labor figure who is a matrix of the party in Western Sydney, pondered with something akin to happy disbelief: “The Albo comment ‘Kindness isn’t weakness’ for some reason really hit a spot. With all the anger and world crankiness it seemed to break through.”
Also apropos of nothing, a veteran schoolmaster told me: “The election was a referendum on kindness.”
The result of that referendum speaks for itself. It proves false the claims of the vicious activists of the left after the last referendum that Australia is a mean-spirited or racist country, and it proves delusional the efforts of the right to sow division where division does not exist.
Our moral centre has spoken. Both the hard left and hard right have been handed a hospital pass at this election.
Australia is a greater country than either of them pretended it to be.
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