Election 2022: Empathy a party to success in our new democracy

Jenny Morrison accompanied her husband during the final week of the campaign as he sought to soften his ‘bulldozer’ image. Picture: Jason Edwards

After three terms and three different prime ministers, the Liberal National Coalition has fallen in a spectacular fight brought by Labor, female independents and Greens candidates who have taken the country by storm. Labor has won majority government with a record low primary vote.

A third of voters have rejected the major parties for minor contenders. The Liberals no longer hold a capital city after the Greens took Brisbane. The conservative vote has fractured along class, gender and ethnic lines. It looks like majoritarian democracy is under assault. Or is it a return of representative democracy in its simplest form; the sense of being seen and heard by those who represent you in parliament?

In the lead-up to the election, Labor, the Greens and independents seized upon the feeling that the prime minister lacked empathy. Opposition parties ran scare campaigns that cultivated the image of Scott Morrison as a carefree toff who was dismissive of minorities and abandoned Australians during natural disasters. The effect was acute, so much so that in the dying days of the campaign, Morrison pledged to govern with more empathy if he were re-elected.

It was not the first time the deficit had been raised. In 2019, the government engaged the services of a consultancy to help it build more sympathetic relationships with drought-affected farming communities. It was ridiculed in the media as training for unreconstructed conservative MPs. But in the corporate world, empathy is recognised as a key trait that separates good leaders from great ones.

Aristotle observed that nature abhors a vacuum. Into the perceived empathy gap came a team of female candidates billed as a grassroots, community movement independent of party politics and immune to corruption. The teal independents, as they became known, campaigned on climate action, gender equity and integrity while denying they were a political party. Rather, they claimed that a lack of party affiliation meant their first and only loyalty was to members of their local community. And it seems they have converted many to the faith. On election eve, it was anticipated the teal independents might take a couple of seats from Liberal MPs. At the time of writing, they are on track to win six.

Strongwomen politics has arrived in a teal tsunami. Independents have swept through the leafy streets of blue-blood enclaves and wiped out the next generation of Liberal moderate leaders. The biggest loss was treasurer Josh Frydenberg, whose economic management of the Covid pandemic is regarded as world class. He lost his seat after the nation posted the lowest unemployment rate since 1974.

Victorian MP Tim Wilson is likely to lose his seat to a teal independent, as well as Celia Hammond in Western Australia. In NSW, the teals look set to take over from Dave Sharma, Jason Falinski and Trent Zimmerman.

In the lead-up to the election, polls showed a record rate of Australians might park their vote with non-major party candidates. However, some perspective is needed in the aftermath. Despite the shock loss of some key Liberal seats, teal independents are not in control of the country. They failed in their bid for a hung parliament, which is a welcome relief given it would have delivered the crossbench disproportionate power in matters of national governance. Instead, the victory goes to Labor. It looks set to form majority government with at least 76 seats.

Like the independents, Labor worked to fill the empathy gap during the campaign. Albanese made much of his background as a boy raised by a single mother in public housing. When he made a series of errors, the Liberals responded in standard political fashion by going for the jugular. But the public responded with a more maternal instinct. Empathy had primacy over politics.

Great political and economic upheavals will occupy Labor for the foreseeable future. It will be left to steer the country through difficult terrain, with inflation driving up the cost of living, the risk of recession, education standards plummeting and the march of autocrats threatening liberal democracy. However, the priority for Australian voters is reducing the cost of living.

Australian National University researchers polled voters about what policies the next government should prioritise. The highest proportion (67.2 per cent) thought reducing the cost of living was the top priority, while fixing aged care came second. Only 27.2 per cent of respondents thought reducing the budget deficit was a top priority. It indicates the Coalition failed in its bid to convince the public that under Labor budget deficits could drive up inflation and lead to a higher cost of living.

The best the Liberals can hope for is that their defeat was brought on by a protest vote and the anger will subside in time. But broader problems seem apparent. The Coalition cannot accommodate the broad church of small-l liberals and conservatives as well as satisfy voters looking for political absolutes. They cannot run a small-target campaign to attract inner city seats apparently focused on gender and climate politics while appealing to battlers in the outer suburbs and the bush. What they can do – and do better from opposition – is take the time to return to local communities and rebuild the party from the grassroots, where needed.

There will be inevitable calls for gender quotas given the success of the independents in key Liberal seats. There will be friction between the unofficial Liberal factions over whether the party should lurch left to regain the inner city progressive vote. Perhaps more important than #MeToo symbolism, however, is the sense among voters that they are more than pawns in a big political game. Empathy means that voters feel seen and heard by MPs who don’t only come knocking when they need your vote. “I see you” is the simple message behind the success of the minor parties and independents.

MPs from major parties cannot satisfy every constituent all the time. They must govern in the broader national interest with the inherent complexity of competing rights and ideas it represents. But in the long run, major party MPs have a better chance of creating sustainable change than politicians in protest from the crossbench.