One thing every Australian should be proud of after the election
Over the weekend, Australia pulled off the near impossible. Now, the world is looking on with envy.
Analysis
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COMMENT
Well, did you get your sausage? Your mandated snag slapped on a white piece of bread by a frazzled P&C parent sweating over a greased up barbie?
Forget the final tally, ignore how many more seats Labor picked up having romped home past the beleaguered Liberals to deliver a thumper of a win in Saturday’s election, the most interesting number of the day is 1.5 million.
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That’s how many sausages of the proudest democratic flavour were served up to Aussies as we did our democratic bit and got in queues to cast our vote, according to Beef Central.
(It’s the only place I get my hoofy, bovine news.)
However, the banger industry was not the biggest winner from election day nor was Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, relieved he won’t have to move his collected works of Engels and Lee Child out of the Lodge.
It’s us.
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The 18,000,000 of us who just chewed our lips in cardboard booths as we ummed and ahhed about which minor party we disliked less.
What Australia managed to pull off on Saturday is something truly remarkable, something that is increasingly rare in the world — a relatively boring election.
The end result might have been a bit of a shock but by and large we just saw a couple of mainstream parties have a decent crack at winning and did the whole thing with dignity, a degree of politese, maturity and a very fair shake of the sauce bottle.
The way the world is going, boring has never looked so damn good.
Contrast that with the UK where Brits were waking up to the hangover that was the astounding, stunning nationwide sweep of the harder right, anti-immigration Reform party in council elections.
Reform, headed by Trump loyalist Nigel Farage, won 677 seats or 41 percent of those up for grabs, in a devastating evisceration of the Conservatives, winning 319 seats, and Labour, with 98 seats.
Overall, Reform now boasts five MPs, controls ten councils and won two mayoral races.
It is “feasible,” the leader of the Conservative Party Kemi Badenoch has said, that Farage could become the next prime minister. (And Margaret Thatcher wept.)
Similar results were seen in Germany in February where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party came in second, winning 152 seats with 20.8% of the vote.
Last week the country’s domestic intelligence agency classified the AfD as a right-wing extremist organisation.
On Sunday, Romania went to the polls. At the time of writing, far right leader George Simion is leading.
It goes without saying that the elephant in the room here is Him, the One Who Shall Not Be Named in Washington who has been keeping his hands busy dismantling American institutions and norms faster than a bald eagle could disembowel a wee little mousey.
What has emerged over the last six months is that traditional political systems are breaking down.
The normal left and right are flailing around the world and democracy as a concept is looking increasingly fragile.
With our election, Australia has just dodged this fate.
We have just had an election where no party furiously disputed the result or started yelling about the Electoral Commision hiding votes in the bins round the back or that Hugo Chavez rigged the booths in Lalor or Wentworth and no one tried to have a go at an armed insurrection.
We just got to enjoy an election where two leaders from long established political parties abided by the same rules and same electioneering demands to get on a bus and visit sports grounds and scout halls in marginal seats.
They did not accuse each other of being cognitively impaired or suggest invading an island owned by a peaceful European nation or propose banning any one from entering the country who might look a bit too longingly at a kebab or regularly order siu mai.
While Mr Dutton might have taken things in a more MAGA-flavoured direction than previous Liberal leaders, still, he and Albo are in many ways two flavours of the same homebrand variety of chip.
Given what is going on in the world right now, the centrism of our politics, the plain, plodding, meat-and-three-veg, vanilla-flavoured, yawnsville centrism of it all has never looked so wonderful or so rare.
But let’s keep the patting on our backs going.
As a country, we have also just proven something that those in the land of the ostensibly free cannot claim - in Australia, money cannot swing an election.
Clive Palmer, taking a break from WD40-ing his animatronic dinosaurs, claimed he spent up to $60 million on his Trumpet of Patriots party - an investment which did not result in them winning a single lower house seat. (The Trumpeteers might yet pick up a Senate seat.)
Party leader Suellen Wrightson received only 3,458 first party votes or 3.4% of the vote in the seat of Hunter.
Even the Legalise Cannabis party did better.
Talk about blowing a few sad, flat, very, very expensive notes on your own trumpet.
(The real tragedy? Imagine how many more dinosaurs Mr Palmer could have built instead with that cash. Oh, the shame of it all.)
It’s all enough to make me want to break out into song.
I am, you are, we are Australian…And we are bloody good at elections.
We should be proud of what we can do and have just done.
Viva le snag. And viva le boring.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
Originally published as One thing every Australian should be proud of after the election
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