Progressive issues fail the Friday night pizza test
We should always be wary of taking political lessons from the US. But the recent election of Donald Trump as president is a powerful signal to everyone. It tells us unequivocally how elections across the Western democracies will be won in the foreseeable future.
This is not simply the MAGA rituals of making America great again and wearing obscure hats, though that does come into it. The real magic formula is the deadly combination of economic privation and popular resentment at being treated like idiots.
Neither Kamala Harris nor Anthony Albanese has ever quite accepted that the cost of living is the only issue that matters to the electorate. It is not merely one problem among many but the defining problem, in the sense that a Tyrannosaurus rex loose in your lounge room is your only immediate priority.
You can plot the details of this crisis in any way you like. Interest rates are high. Groceries are expensive. Power has gone through the roof. It hurts to pay for your kids ’ education. You will buy your next car in 2039.
But the real test is the pizza test. Can a family with a couple of kids afford the family-size pizza with a couple of bits of garlic bread on a Friday night? I remember that test vividly from when I was a very junior academic, married with two children.
“No pizza tonight, kids, we’ve decided to try something different.” Like tinned ham sandwiches.
There are a lot of Australian families just now not getting their Friday night pizza.
Like an industrial worker who has been made redundant after 30 years’ service, people bitterly resent their humiliating circumstances. They hold the government – which is meant to protect them – to blame.
This is where it gets tricky for any incumbent Australian government. The fundamental pact between government and electorate is that our kids are going to be better off than us. Just now, that is demonstrably incorrect. This is a political killing ground.
The only way forward for a government is to solve this crisis, or at least look as if it is trying to solve it, or at rock bottom to show that it actually cares about it. Governments of the centre left are having great trouble here.
The problem is that they are permanently hostage to numerous groups obsessed with various progressive causes who have no interest in the economic circumstances of a marginal fruiterer from Leichhardt.
They do not care if achieving their cause means bloating the public account at the expense of aiding what Julia Gillard referred to as “working families”. Indeed, they are inclined to treat issues such as the Friday night pizza as trivial greed on the part of uneducated social inferiors.
Take climate change and the cost of power. Catastrophists do not really care about the impact of energy policy on a family in Cessnock. It would be nice if they could still turn on their heaters in winter, but that is not the point. Like Anzacs on the Somme, they are acceptable losses.
It is the same with most of the progressive issues of the left. Those of correct thought have no interest in the views of the peasantry on things such as sexual identity, teaching in schools, industry policy, availability of land for housing, or public safety.
Yes, they will profess public sympathy. But in the mauve-tinted breakout rooms of government working parties, the 12-toed skink will always beat a new housing development, and it will be the teachers union deciding on literacy strategies, not parents.
Worse, this is not merely condescension at play but contempt. What would some working-class parent know about reading and writing, or environment versus places to live? These plebs should simply be silent and obey their betters.
This is where things get really ugly. The hardest human emotion to conceal is contempt. If you despise someone, it is bound to get out, whether by an ill-timed smirk or a pitying remark. This is what got Trump elected. It is one thing to be screwed over, but being told to smile obediently as it happens is beyond the pale.
America’s Democrats, like Australian Labor, have an entire raft of political correctness, wokeness and just pitying moral superiority to which everyone must adhere, regardless of genuine feeling. We must all subscribe to extreme multiculturalism, the evil of Israel and transgender treatment for teenagers.
It is bad enough to be endlessly harangued about this stuff, but it is excruciating if what you really care about is finding a meal, accessing dentistry and getting a house. Right or wrong, someone with no roof will have little interest in theoretical feminism.
This is the problem facing the Prime Minister as he flicks the election switch to an uneasy combination of demonstrated progress and the big picture. Precisely what progress? Who cares about the big picture when I can’t afford a pizza?
Critically, he has to avoid the Harris disaster of running on a platform of “joy”. There is not a lot of joy out there.
Greg Craven is former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.
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