Election analysis: The Coalition couldn’t return in its own right
The fact that this campaign continued right up until the polls closed, with both parties desperate to win the approval of the large group of “hard undecideds”, reveals an important truth.
Analysis
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AUSTRALIA may not have elected Labor in its own right but it has decisively rejected the Morrison Government.
All around the country in seat after seat where voters have more money and more education than average the Liberal vote has plummeted.
The party’s worst fears of a Tealslide have been realised and then some.
In Victoria, they’ve grabbed the prize seats of Goldstein and barring an absolute miracle on postal votes Kooyong.
In NSW they’re looking certain to get Wentworth, North Sydney, Mackellar and in WA, Curtin, while also holding on to Warringah.
In Queensland where the Greens have played the Teal role, they have grabbed the seat of Blair off the LNP.
Worst of all for the Liberals, if Anthony Albanese does end up governing in a majority these MPs won’t have to damage their brand by supporting Labor.
The epicentre of this defeat is Victoria, a Division which for many years has threatened to deliver a national disaster for the Liberal Party and on Saturday finally delivered on that promise.
Going into this election the party held 12 seats of 38 in the country’s second biggest state, at the time of writing it looks like will end up holding only eight, half of which will be on margins of less than 5 per cent.
Faced with the prospect of national Liberal wipe-out in the “nicer” parts of Australia, Morrison gambled on trying to attract cost-of-living voters.
As a strategy it had merit, but in the end, although there were swings to the government in some working-class booths, it failed.
No doubt there will be plenty of analysis of why it failed to come off the simple answer would appear to be a dislike of the Prime Minister.
To be fair to Morrison, while the decision of some of the richest people in Australia to break up with the Liberal Party has happened on his watch, it can’t all be blamed on him.
The Liberal Party’s ‘women problem’ which is really a professional middle-class women problem has been a long time coming.
It wasn’t Scott Morrison’s decision to put only one woman into the Coalition’s first Cabinet in 2013.
It wasn’t Scott Morrison’s decision to tear up a pre-election promise to give them a rolled-gold paid parental leave program.
And the Liberal Party doesn’t give its leaders the prerogative to choose who it preselects for parliament.
The next few years promise to be a difficult time for the Liberal Party.
The enormous numbers of young people born in the years after Peter Costello introduced the baby bonus are going to radically alter the demographic makeup of the electorate just as its most reliable voters – those born before and during the Second World War – begin falling off the twig.
One of the problems it will have in trying to find its way back to office will be that in contrast to the Howard Government, in domestic matters anyway, there is little that one can point to in the past nine years that could really be described as a legacy.
This wasn’t entirely its fault. Australians expect their governments to enact reforms but then deny them the numbers in the Senate that would allow them to achieve them.
But some of the blame resides with the men and women who have led this government.
In retrospect it is clear it never got out from under the political disaster of Joe Hockey’s 2014 budget which broke so many of the promises upon which it had been elected.
Though from time to time the Coalition might be able to start again, first under Malcolm Turnbull and then at the height of the pandemic under Scott Morrison, it bottled taking difficult decisions.
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Originally published as Election analysis: The Coalition couldn’t return in its own right
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