Scott Morrison should fight Labor to keep aspirational Australians on side

Scott Morrison should not get sucked into fights with cashed-up greenies but instead fight Labor to keep aspirational Australians on side, James Morrow writes

It used to be that when the left screamed: “No war but the class war,” they meant they wanted to abolish capitalism, lift wages, and build a socialist paradise.

Now when they say it — albeit a bit more quietly — they simply mean they want working class people to subsidise their electric cars and renewables-heavy share portfolios.

Much has been made of the so-called “Voices of” movement that is cropping up in mostly high income seats across the country with the Morrison government correctly pointing out that any pretence the movement has to independence is a nonsense.

But while the government might be right to say that they are just a front for Laborites and greenies, to make their politics the focus is to miss the point.

Allegra Spender will run as an independent candidate against federal Liberal MP Dave Sharma in the Sydney seat of Wentworth. Picture: Jane Dempster/The Australian.

Just have a look at the occupations of some of their most prominent candidates: The “Voices of” movement is not so much an insurgence of leftist rabble as it is a well-dressed boardroom mafia trying to seize control of the crossbench.

A class war? Yes, but very much one of the upper-middles against the world.

Jo Dyer, who is trying to win Boothby in South Australia, used to run the Adelaide Writers’ Festival.

Allegra Spender, daughter of fashion designer Carla Zampatti and candidate for Wentworth, is regularly described as simply a “company director”.

Other candidates include a former Victorian senior public health bureaucrat (why one would brag about this is anyone’s guess), an in-house lawyer for a Big Four bank, and ex-ABC presenter, Zoe Daniel, who has made a lateral move into politics to take on the Coalition more directly.

Greetings from Trumpland author and former ABC News US Bureau Chief Zoe Daniel, who is now running as an independent “Voices of” candidate. Picture: Supplied

These are not, to put it mildly, John Howard’s battlers or Robert Menzies’ “forgotten people”.

Instead, they represent the end point of a shift that has been taking place for at least two decades that has seen well-off educated Australians drift left, using the language of politics and all the complicated codes of wokeness not to overthrow the system but to cement themselves into the elite.

As the unofficial successor to the spent Boomer armies of GetUp!, the Voices movement is very much of the left, but not in any way traditional leftists might recognise.

They are cashed up and full-on believers in climate change (many of the movement’s organisers have ties or offered support to Extinction Rebellion), with heavily invested billionaires backing them.

And they are implacably opposed to Scott Morrison, whose decent, churchgoing suburban normality offends them to the core.

All this represents a trap for the Morrison government if it allows itself to get sucked into fights with people they will never win over while surrendering on issues that alienate their base.

To allow this to happen would be to ignore the way the political spectrum has shifted since the start of the century.

Leader of the Australian Labor Party Anthony Albanese with Labor candidate for Longman Rebecca Fanning at the Caboolture TAFE Campus. Picture: NCA NewsWire / John Gass

On the right, the link between commerce and conservatism has been all but severed (something also observed in the US, where high incomes and high education levels track closely with support for woke progressivism).

On the other side of politics, the connection between the left and support for the downtrodden is now a hazy dotted line.

Again, you can also see this in the US, where Donald Trump scooped up rural poor voters who had been taken for granted by the million and increased his party’s share of minority votes as well.

Here in Australia, the moneyed corporate classes who have drifted left are not talking about things like wages or housing affordability; they are pushing climate change policies that come with billions of dollars in opportunities for rent seeking, subsidies, and portfolio growth.

This is something which Anthony Albanese — who never fails to drop a mention when he can of his battler upbringing in Camperdown public housing — seems to understand.

The smallest of small target candidates, the Labor leader has lately been carving out issues such as immigration as points of difference with the Coalition.

This week Albanese said he wouldn’t support Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s plan to automatically get the country back to 160,000 migrants a year.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison talks to a group of children at the Brookfield Showgrounds in Brisbane's west on Wednesday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dan Peled

Avoiding nativist traps, the opposition leader simply told Chris Smith on Wednesday morning that Australia had become “too reliant” on temporary migrants, and that this had hurt our record training up locals — something which left us caught short when we had to close the borders in 2020.

It’s a statement that will surely horrify the corporate class, whose lobby groups are screaming for more migrants for cheap labour and bigger markets.

But it is the sort of thing that will be music to the ears of many voters in western Sydney and elsewhere who were being hit by population pressures before the pandemic and who have no enthusiasm for “getting back to normal” if that means more crowded roads, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for their kids.

Because while there may be a push on to make the boutiques of Balwyn and the gourmet butchers of Woollahra the controlling centre of Australian politics, it is the far greater mass of everyday Australians who tend to win the day for governments.

Menzies knew this, as did Bob Hawke and for a while Paul Keating, who went an early version of woke and let the “aspirationals” be scooped off Labor by John Howard.

The danger for the prime minister is that Albanese, who has already been quietly doing the rounds of seats in middle Australia, gets this too.