If you hope to appeal to prejudices, you probably want to make sure they are actually shared by the people you’re sharing them with

You have to wonder how many women juggling work and child care are from homes in the same mortgage-belt seats the Liberals are trying to appeal to and win for the first time.

Another election, another result where the voters deserted Labor in droves but for some mysterious reason failed to come across to the Liberals.

On Saturday, the ALP’s primary vote in Western Australia dropped by 18 per cent, between them the Libs and Nats increased theirs by only 8.4 per cent, which translated into an 11.3 per cent swing on a two-party preferred basis.

Last month in the Victorian state by-election in Werribee, Labor’s primary vote fell by 16.5 per cent but the Liberals went up by a pathetic 3.7 per cent.

It was the same story at last year’s Inala by-election in Queensland – Labor’s primary down by an eye-watering 30 per cent but the LNP up only 12.8.

Labor’s Roger Cook celebrates winning the Western Australian state election despite the ALP’s primary vote dropping by 18 per cent. Picture: AAP

In all these cases the big drops in Labor’s primary happened in mortgage-stressed areas, just as they did at the 2022 federal election and the past two Victorian state elections.

Obviously it’s a big problem for Labor.

But until the Liberals can find a way to get these people to vote FOR them, they are destined to be disappointed.

After last year’s referendum I joked that the conservatives were staring at the piles of No votes in Labor’s seats like dogs at a butcher’s shop window.

Because if they could turn enough of these people into Liberals it’s no exaggeration to say that Labor would be finished as a party of majority government.

The difference in the size of the task in persuading them to vote No and persuading them to vote Liberal is encapsulated by an observation of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway that “there’s a difference to voters between what offends them and what affects them – and voters most often will vote according to what affects them”.

So while in a consequence-free exercise like a referendum, voters are able to give free rein to their prejudices, in an actual election to choose an actual government that will decide how much tax they will pay and what they will get for it, well, most people feel there’s a bit more at stake.

Which isn’t to say that trying to win them over is a chase after fool’s gold.

It’s just that a political party that has never tried much to win their votes and against which many of them have a fixed, if not immovable, aversion, is going to need more than an appeal to prejudices in common.

Or to put it concretely, a shared dislike of the demands of the trans rights movement and the endless acknowledgments of the traditional owners might well be a good start, but that’s all it is.

If he cannot reassure voters that Medicare is safe in his hands, it won’t matter how many flags Peter Dutton stands in front of, they are not going to be listening to him.

Sometimes you have to wonder how deeply the Liberals have been thinking about the task before them.

If you hope to appeal to prejudices, you probably want to make sure they are actually shared by the people you’re sharing them with.

You have to wonder how deeply the Liberals have been thinking about the task before them. Picture: John Gass

But earlier this month opposition finance spokeswoman Jane Hume announced “it will be the expectation of a Dutton Liberal government that all members of the (Australian Public Service) work from the office five days a week.”

Obviously there will be exceptions but the message – reinforced by Dutton’s later pledge he would not be having public servants “turn up to work when they want to” – is that people working from home are slackers and if he had his way we’d all be back in the office five days a week.

Some might well be slackers – the evidence is mixed – but if you ask me this is still a pretty weird message to be sending to a country where, to quote Hume herself, 36 per cent of Australians are “usually working from home”.

What was even weirder was that no one appears to have considered which segment of the electorate was most likely to be affected by the back-to-the-office message.

In the same survey that found more than a third of us were working from home, 60 per cent of women “strongly agreed” that they would not even consider jobs that failed to offer flexible work arrangements – compared with 32 per cent of men – and of the workers who said they used flexible working hours or locations in the past year, 66 per cent were women.

You have to wonder how many of these women are juggling work and child care from homes in those same mortgage-belt seats the Liberals are trying to appeal to and win for the first time.

That Labor understands the Liberals’ vulnerability on issues that affect women is revealed in this month’s Essential Report.

It finds that at 40 per cent, Labor is trusted by twice as many people as the Coalition to fund Medicare properly.

This same survey found that in the past year “only” 39 per cent people had put off seeing a GP because of a lack of bulk-billing.

The numbers for the respective sexes were 33 per cent for men and a whopping 44 per cent for women.

Originally published as If you hope to appeal to prejudices, you probably want to make sure they are actually shared by the people you’re sharing them with