Bogans versus Mordor, why can’t we all get along?
NO wonder Bill Shorten is cracking open the champagne already. And he’ll be drinking plenty more in coming months if the Liberals keep fighting among themselves, writes Miranda Devine.
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THREE days before the Wentworth by-election, Bill Shorten felt so confident that he indulged in a spot of premature exultation.
The Labor leader was spotted at the bar of the Hyatt, Canberra’s ritziest hotel, last Wednesday night, cracking open $550 bottles of Cristal champagne with staffers into the wee hours.
You can almost forgive Shorten’s hubris because, hardly surprisingly, Wentworth turned out to be a catastrophe for the Coalition, plunging them into minority government and delivering to a powerful position on the crossbench a socially progressive independent whose chief concerns are climate change, refugees and the rainbow agenda.
Worse still, in the days since, instead of accepting with humility the voters’ verdict, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison manfully did, you’ve seen both ends of the Liberal party vie to fictitiously spin the result to their own ends.
If that’s the way the party deals with an existential wake-up call, what hope is there that they can win an election in seven months?
The left of the party is claiming that the message from Wentworth is that the government has to go soft on asylum seekers and do more on climate change, including throwing a symbolic $1 billion into the Emissions Reduction Fund. This is anathema to the right of the party which just ousted a climate alarmist PM.
From the right of the party came the message that, like Malcolm Turnbull, Wentworth voters aren’t real Liberals and good riddance to them because now is the chance to move the party right, get out of the Paris agreement, build coal-fired power plants and cut immigration.
This, we are told, is the only way to keep “the base” happy.
An American term, “base” in Australia refers to the grassroots party member/voter without whom you cannot win elections and will not have enough people to hand out “how to vote” cards on election day.
It makes sense in the United States where voting is optional and parties need to “get out to vote”, to obsesses about the base. In the context of compulsory voting it can be misleading and potentially self-defeating.
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For instance, the left of the Liberal Party, aka “moderates”, would regard Wentworth as “the base” and conservatives would regard Mitchell in Sydney’s north west “Bible Belt” as “the base”. It’s a tale of two bases with echoes around the country.
Now, it is true that Wentworth is not much like the rest of Australia, though there are other Liberal electorates in the big cities which share many characteristics. The wealthiest electorate in Australia, Wentworth is the cosmopolitan, globalist eastern suburbs of Sydney stacked with the sort of voters John Howard used to call “doctors’ wives”, who have Labor/Green sensibilities on social issues but vote Liberal out of snobbery.
It is true that a lot of people don’t even think Wentworth is part of Sydney. The best depiction of this city’s tribal rivalries was a hilarious cartoon map of Sydney on the cover of the UNSW newspaper Tharunka in 2011, which has gone into folklore.
Devised by The Daily Telegraph’s former political correspondent Kylar Lossuikian, then a Tharunka student editor, and coloured by artist Cara Maritz, it deliciously splits Sydney up into four rival perspectives.
There are four maps, one is Sydney according to the Eastern Suburbs (aka Wentworth), one the North Shore, one the inner west, and one the [Sutherland] Shire. The four maps label the great west and southwest of Sydney as “Out there”, “Someone has to live here”, “Refugees” or “Yummy ethnic foods”.
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Each map paints its own part of Sydney as wonderful, and the rest awful or alien. So, the inner-west labels the North Shore “Mordor” and Wentworth as “Bourgeois Pigs”, the Hills District as “Bible Belt” and itself “Cultured”.
The North Shore labels the inner-west “Hippies”, Wentworth “Wankers and Queens” and the Hills District “Not the North Shore”.
Wentworth labels the North Shore “Tony Abbott Land”, the northern beaches “nothing on Bondi”, the inner-west “Nouveau Riche”, and itself “Enlightenment”.
Meanwhile, the Shire, aka “SCOMO Land”, labels the North Shore “Rich Anglo brother”, the inner west “Socialism”, and Wentworth “Satan.”
The other three maps all label the Shire “Bogans”.
The Shire map labels itself “Australia”.
The point of all this is that one man’s base is another man’s Mordor. And despite our differences, Sydneysiders love our city and wouldn’t live anywhere else for quids.
In the end, the number one KPI of any government is to win the next election. Policy purity is pointless if you’re on the opposition benches for six or nine years.
The voters who will decide the next election are not the “base” of either wing of the Liberal Party, but swinging voters who couldn’t care less about internecine political squabbles. They’re not locked into any party. But a squabbling rabble is not a government that deserves their vote.
There is no political capital left to waste on fighting over whose base better represents the Liberal Party. Either Liberals unite behind Scott Morrison or Bill Shorten will be drinking a lot more champagne in months to come.