Morrison’s “Quiet Australians” are the voters Labor rejected
Sick of being derided if they didn’t support divisive cultural agenda and socialist economics, Australians embraced the US’s silent majority movement and proved Labor never really understood the nation at all, writes Miranda Devine.
As a man, Scott Morrison is nothing like Donald Trump, but his victory was positively Trumpian.
Like the Trump election in 2016 and the UK’s Brexit vote, the Coalition defied every opinion poll, almost every media commentator and the betting markets to win Saturday’s election.
About the only person Morrison didn’t surprise was himself. “I have always believed in miracles,” he said on Saturday night.
His victory was an emphatic repudiation of Labor’s politics of division and identity and it has shaken leftists to their core, as they struggle to realise that their vision of an increasingly progressive, atheist Australia was a mirage.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: There’s no denying ScoMo earned his right to lead
In his victory speech on Saturday, Morrison paid tribute to “the quiet Australians”. This was the “Shy Scomo” vote that didn’t show up in polls.
Sick of being derided as morally inferior if they didn’t embrace Labor’s divisive cultural agenda and socialist economics, they staged a precision strike at the ballot box. Shorten called them “knuckle draggers” and “cave dwellers” if they didn’t agree with his utopian climate agenda and “haters [who] crawled out from under a rock” if they were among the 40 per cent of Australians who voted against same-sex marriage.
And, then, in the last days of the campaign, gratuitously dragged in the Israel Folau saga, trying mistakenly to equate Morrison’s devout Christianity with bigotry. Big mistake.
Folau, a rugby star and fundamentalist Christian, was sacked for posting a Bible quote on Instagram, which included homosexuals in a group of sinners that the post claimed should repent to avoid hell.
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Even if few people shared Folau’s views, the episode crystallised a fear that the identity agenda had become a totalitarian threat to freedom of speech and religious belief.
Australians don’t appreciate being told what to believe, how to think or, for that matter, what to drive. This was the drumbeat playing through the campaign.
This week, you could hear the embryonic notes of the “Resistance” to come, in voices on the ABC, from The Drum to Radio National, which spoke darkly about Morrison’s Pentecostal Christianity, fearing a faith vote has turned towards him.
They’re right.
On Tuesday, for instance, the Coalition clinched the notionally Labor seat of Chisholm in Melbourne to gain the necessary majority of 76 seats in the House of Representatives.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: What Shorten still hasn’t realised about voters
The Liberal candidate was Hong Kong-born Gladys Liu, who had engineered turncoat Liberal Julia Banks’s 2016 victory in the Labor-held seat, by delivering the votes of the large, socially conservative Chinese community via WeChat, the Chinese Facebook, where Safe Schools and gender fluidity were hot topics.
This time, Liu deployed WeChat’s attack on Labor’s divisive identity agenda for her own campaign.
In western and south western Sydney, safe Labor seats with a high Christian and Muslim migrant vote also swung towards the Coalition.
Tony Burke’s seat of Watson, for instance, which recorded the equal highest No vote of 76 per cent in the marriage plebiscite, along with neighbouring Blaxland, held by Labor’s Jason Clare, swung hard against Labor on Saturday.
In Belfield, Burke suffered a 14 per cent swing against him, in Punchbowl it was 11 per cent.
As one unnamed Labor operative put it: “I don’t think [Labor has] a western Sydney problem. It’s a suburban problem, it’s a religion problem.”
Just ask Joe, a 42-year-old Maronite Catholic, son of Lebanese migrants, who lives the seat of Reid, which the Coalition won from Labor in 2016 and retained on Saturday.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: Virtue police punishing Folau are missing the point
“Religious freedom and the right to express your beliefs respectfully without recourse was a huge issue” he says.
The Folau story “played a million per cent role. It was on everyone’s lips”.
“Lebanese Maronite migrants like my parents were once upon a time traditionally Labor voters. They came to Australia [in the ‘60s and ‘70s] as young adults and worked bloody hard.
“They made sacrifices and embraced their new land as ‘a fair go for those who have a go’.
“At that time the Labour Party was really relevant. It was a bastion of safety for workers so they wouldn’t get exploited.
“Unfortunately for Labor they’ve veered so left they don’t resemble the party [my parents believed in]”.
He says the Liberal party now represents the conservative majority and Morrison is “relatable and very much admired for being a proud Christian.”
It didn’t go unnoticed that Morrison signed off his victory speech on Saturday night with “God bless Australia”, a phrase rarely deployed by our politicians.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: Australian Rugby will rue the day it sacked Folau
In defeat Labor’s existential crisis has been laid bare. It has pushed out most of its former DLP-style social conservative MPs. If they didn’t sign up to abortion, same sex marriage, gender fluidity, and the rest of the hard core identity agenda embedded in Labor’s national platform, they weren’t wanted.
But how, now, does it reconcile the socially conservative voters of Blaxland and Watson with those of Tanya Plibersek’s electorate of Sydney, just ten kilometres away, which recorded the highest Yes vote (84 per cent) in the country? This is the gulf at the heart of Labor which Morrison has deftly exploited, just by being himself.
Many of his “Quiet Australians” are the voters Labor rejected.
The sore losers still don’t understand that Australia didn’t want to be remade according to their utopian fantasies. Instead, just like the losers did after Trump’s victory, they blame the “deplorables”.
Commentator Jane Caro slammed 51 per cent of Australians as “turds”. Mike Carlton wants to “declare war on Queensland”.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: Shorten playing gotcha with gays and hell
Wistful images of Australia with Queensland replaced with New Zealand flew around Twitter, and “RIP Australia” was a typical tweet. “We just voted for climate change denying, white supremacist, Islamophobic, homophobic, misogynist anti-worker conservative government … because we’re a nation of bigoted morons.”
Morrison, the most effective conservative of his generation, has promised to unite, not divide, and to govern for “all Australians”.
He’ll have his work cut out.
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