How an oversharing Coalition drama could make voters polyamorous

So the Liberals and Nationals were going to break up, but now maybe they won’t. Maybe their differences are irreconcilable, maybe they’ve got too much history, or maybe they’re just too co-dependent to go it alone. So much for the rumour that the Liberal-National Coalition isn’t suited to the modern era.

This relationship drama is so today it deserves its own TikTok to keep us abreast of the latest while we sip our adaptogenic tea.

In happier times - Sussan Ley and David Littleproud in question time in February.Credit: James Brickwood

If only they realised it. The Liberals and Nationals are carrying on like they’ve missed a key message of the election and are therefore at risk of missing their moment to get with the times. Granted, the message was concealed by Labor’s thumping final quota of seats in the House of Representatives. But recall the campaign polls, and it’s plain to see: voters are becoming more politically polyamorous.

Right up to election day, a large number of voters remained soft and swinging. That’s not the behaviour of an electorate looking for a long-term marriage to one political party. In fact, for a canny team, it could be the perfect moment to offer a political throuple.

We’re used to talking about the intersectionality of Australian identities in relation to ethnic background and sexual identification. Having multiple ethnicities is not uncommon in Australia – about a third of all marriages registered in Australia were between people born in different countries.

That has increased the number of mixed-religion couples as well. Diversity extends to sexuality – nearly 10 per cent of people between the ages of 16 and 24 are LGBTI+, according to an Australian Bureau of Statistics estimate – more than any generation before them.

It would be short-sighted to ignore the fact that these intersections extend to politics. Just to use myself as a case study, my great-grandfather was an organiser in the Victorian Farmers’ Union, which later became the Victorian National Party. My grandfather scored his first reporting job at the union’s print organ, The Farmer’s Advocate. My father worked for the Labor Party.

My mother fled East Germany in a pretty final statement on what she thought of the communist creed. Each of them left an imprint on my understanding of politics. And that’s before we even touch on my personal political flirtations. You could say my family was “National/ALP/Classical Liberal+“. And voting trends show that there are a lot of other pan-political people out there.

That creates a solid base for a coalition which aspires to represent the individualist aspirations of urban populations, along with the more collective and community-driven values of the country.

People are rarely just one thing or another. Only ideologues and the unimaginative fail to grasp the intricate dance between the two. It’s common to travel through political needs and sometimes affiliations in the course of a lifetime as our experiences compound. Women tend to be more drawn to the idea of community, reflecting the demands of child-bearing and rearing. Men are often more attracted to individualism, even libertarianism. Young people traditionally start off on the left and move to the right over time (though this trajectory has stalled, as it seems to be coupled to homeownership). Reality mugs all of us eventually, in one form or another.

In the wake of the electoral wipeout, the Coalition parties are being forced to think about what they offer to voters. There is anxiety in National ranks that the answers the Liberal Party lands on won’t sit well with rural voters and could drag the Nationals away from their successful representation of those communities.

They could be proven right, if the Liberal Party decides, as it has been threatening, to “meet people where they are at”. This fuzzy language seems to imply that those using it are planning to adopt the policies of those they lost seats to. Given that most Australians live in urban centres and those voters have just expressed a preference for Labor through the ballot box, a lazy Liberal Party “meeting people where they’re at” would just mean trying to emulate Labor policies, as it did during its disastrous matchy-matchy campaign.

But if the Liberal Party does the work and asks the right questions, the National Party would benefit from being part of the process. The Nationals often repeat that, while the Liberal Party has gone backwards, they haven’t lost a seat. I’m tempted to say “yet”. Complacency is dangerous. Even rural communities change.

That kind of short-term thinking was on show in leader David Littleproud’s threat to walk away from the Coalition this past week. As a result, the National Party received a stark and very public reminder that, without the Liberal Party, it would have far less power, not to mention lower salaries for its MPs. The realisation of what they stand to lose could weaken their hand in ongoing negotiations. Complacency goeth before the fall.

But it would be unwise for the Liberal Party to take advantage of the National Party wobble. If the two parties did separate, there would be no end to the division within themselves. If there was a Coalition break-up, why not also a split between the factions? If the parties were to break into tiny pieces, no doubt each could arrive at a state of philosophical perfection. Which would be entirely pointless. Ideological purity is too brittle to survive the real world. As Gough Whitlam said, only the impotent are pure.

Indeed, with political identities increasingly intersectional, a forward-looking party might be able to make a virtue out of the way in which the Liberal-National multiplicity softens the hard edges of individualism, while fostering community with an entrepreneurial streak. After the wipe-out, the creative tension between different understandings of the world is an advantage which could lead to a more rounded vision for Australia.

The silver lining of any electoral routing is that it forces the losers into a hard reckoning which can seem too onerous in less apocalyptic times. In the case of the Coalition, oversharing about their own intersectionalities as they work through their drama could encourage voters to keep their new political relationships open and uncommitted.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.