Lessons learned for our pollies from the federal election
Compulsory voting might be one of the best things about Australian democracy. Other western countries are not so lucky, writes Matt Cunningham.
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Compulsory voting might be one of the best things about Australian democracy.
Other western countries are not so lucky.
Optional voting means countries like the United States have drifted to the fringes as mainstream parties are forced to become more extreme to attract voters.
The US lurched to the right under Republican Donald Trump in 2016 as he promised to build a wall on the Mexican border, overcorrected under Democrat Joe Biden when radical left-wing ideas including the right for biological males to play women’s sport and Black Lives Matter took hold, then lurched back again under Trump’s second coming.
Odds are that pendulum will swing again in three-and-a-half years’ time.
Here, compulsory voting means the key to electoral success lies not on the highly-engaged radical fringes, but in winning over those in the sensible centre who are too busy trying to pay the bills and feed the kids to worry about fighting the culture wars on Twitter.
Parties who drift too far from the first-order concerns of ordinary Australians find themselves on a fast-track to oblivion.
Labor and Anthony Albanese swept to a second term because they stayed in the middle. Albo might have been an old left-faction warrior who liked fighting Tories, but as a Prime Minister, more than three decades of parliamentary experience taught him the need to govern from the centre.
His one misstep on this path may have been the Voice to parliament referendum, although the Prime Minister would argue he was honouring a promise made to Indigenous leaders, and that the Voice, as proposed by Noel Pearson, was meant to be an idea from the “radical centre”.
Its problem – apart from failing to secure bipartisan support – was it won friends in all the wrong places.
If Adam Bandt and the country’s wealthiest corporate bosses are on a unity ticket on any issue, it’s going to be hard to convince everyday Australians it’s a good idea.
But Albanese was quick to move on from the referendum loss.
Labor barely mentioned the Voice after October 14, 2023.
Meanwhile, the Coalition were still trying to talk about it as recently as last week.
It only made them look nasty and out-of-touch when the rest of the country was far more concerned about the cost of living.
On this issue, and many others that were at the front of voters’ minds, Labor won the argument. Albanese talked about health, education and lower taxes for more Australians.
The Coalition talked about welcome to country after a debate sparked by a neo-Nazi. Albanese also rejected the more extreme views within his own party.
He resisted attempts to kill the salmon farming industry in Tasmania and pushed back against the “nature positive” environmental laws, which had faced fierce opposition in resource rich Western Australia.
Albanese was rewarded with a swag of seats in WA and Tasmania, while the Greens saw their representation in the lower house reduced from four seats to one.
The federal election delivered a brutal lesson to the Coalition. But there is also one here for Territory Labor.
Its landslide defeat at last year’s NT election followed a period where its priorities had drifted a long way from the first-order issues occupying the minds of Territorians.
While voters were worried about crime and the economy, the former government often seemed more interested in pronouns than public safety.
It had its own internal correction for the last nine months under Eva Lawler, but it was too late to save the furniture.
Labor will be buoyed by its performance in the federal seat of Lingiari, where there was a swing of more than 7 per cent to incumbent Marion Scrymgour.
The CLP was destroyed in Alice Springs and it’s clearly given up on the bush.
It should be remembered, however, that Scrymgour was one of the loudest and most vocal critics of the former Labor government, particularly over its handling of law-and-order and alcohol issues.
The story for Labor in the Darwin seat of Solomon wasn’t as rosy.
Incumbent Luke Gosling will just hold on after suffering a seven per cent swing against him. It was the second biggest swing to the Coalition in the country in the midst of a national Labor landslide.
Gosling is a hardworking local member who ran a good campaign, centred around his push to return the Port of Darwin to Australian hands.
The swing against Gosling had nothing to do with the man himself.
It was an indication of the lingering anger that still exists towards the former Territory Labor government.
Some of the gloss might be wearing off the CLP, but if Labor wants to return to power in the NT, it, like the federal Coalition, needs to find its way back to the middle.
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