For all the media obsession with the upcoming Trump v Biden contest, the electoral race with the most influence on Australian politics was last weekend’s British general election.
Not only are we both parliamentary democracies but our two major parties have strong historical links with their British counterparts that continue to this day, ensuring shared policy and campaign learning. In the Blair years, a lot of British Labour’s policy initiatives found their way into Labor’s opposition manifestos and, similarly, David Cameron’s climate change rebranding of the Conservatives was picked up here by Liberal moderates.
The new British Labour government has a record majority but a minimal mandate, given that it secured only 34 per cent of the overall vote in an election with a dismal turnout of under 60 per cent of eligible voters. It can’t be good for democracy when 40 per cent of voters don’t turn up and, of those who do, more than 40 per cent vote for neither of the two parties.
Although compulsory voting and the preferential system somewhat mask the public’s disillusionment with politics as usual here, the fact our two main parties now struggle to win two-thirds of the primary vote between them suggests Australian democracy is on a similar path.
With one side obsessing over climate and identity and the other torn between moving left to hug the centre ground or taking risks to run against the zeitgeist, Australians are hardly less likely than Britons to feel let down and politically homeless.
Because of our different electoral system it may take longer but, sooner or later, as in Britain, if the centre left is neglectful of the bread-and-butter concerns of aspirational voters and if the centre right is a weak echo of the other side, there will be an earthquake as voters dump first one party and then the other that has taken them for granted for too long.
Sir Keir Starmer and his team would be too euphoric to feel vulnerable just yet but an electorate fed up with excuses from one government is hardly going to be patient if its successor spends more money and recruits more civil servants without making much practical difference to voters’ lives.
While seismic changes have lessons for both sides, defeat is usually more instructive than success. Sure, part of the Conservatives’ problem was they’d been in office for 14 years and the “it’s time” factor was running against them. Having five prime ministers didn’t help, and neither did making promises about reducing immigration that the government simply wouldn’t or couldn’t keep.
Brexit aside, the basic issue was successive Tory prime ministers have governed more from the left than the right. Under the party’s most recent leader, Rishi Sunak, taxes reached a post-war high. There was some late resistance to peak leftism, such as the trans push, but Sunak continued Boris Johnson’s climate fixations, including bans on fracking, making electric vehicles and heat pumps compulsory, and making Britain’s last coal-fired power station burn wood instead.
The Conservatives promised to reduce illegal migration and stop the boats, but the boats kept coming, migration reached record highs, and no boatpeople were deported to Rwanda. The party even was weak on defence, slashing the British Army to its smallest size in 200 years.
The result of Tories moving to the left was not grateful Labour voters saying “thank God we now have a moderate Tory government”. Left voters kept voting for Labour. But right-wing voters deserted the Tories in droves via the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which claimed to be true conservatives and cannibalised the centre-right vote.
At nearly 40 per cent, the combined Tory-Reform vote would have been enough to succeed in a first-past-the-post system, but a split centre right meant Labour won many seats with scarcely a third of the vote.
Of the 106 electorates where Reform came second, 93 were won by Labour.
This is what happens in a first-past-the-post system when centre-right votes are split between the mainstream conservatives and a breakaway party of the right.
And yes, in our preferential system, at least some of those votes would come back to the biggest centre-right party (although never as many as the more disciplined preference flows on the left deliver). That doesn’t alter the fact the British Conservatives made the fundamental mistake of thinking the way to win was to hug the other side rather than to create a contest.
That’s a mistake too many Liberals make in this country. Think Scott Morrison embracing Labor’s net-zero target, even though he’d won his miracle victory in 2019 in part by opposing Labor’s then 45 per cent emissions reduction target as unachievable and ruinously expensive. Think former NSW premier Dom Perrottet whose energy policy, likely driven by Matt Kean, was even more renewables-dependent than federal Labor’s. Ditto Victoria under two-time moderate loser Matthew Guy; the South Australian Liberals who lost government in a term under wet Steven Marshall; and don’t even get me started on Western Australia with Liberal Zak Kirkup trying to out-green the Greens and losing official opposition status to the Nationals.
In Britain, the Liberal Democrats are a bit like our teals, targeting Conservative seats and using Labour supporters to vote tactically to flip them. Last weekend they won 72 seats with just 12 per cent of the national vote. Contrast that with Reform which, from a standing start, garnered a higher national vote at 14 per cent but won just five seats.
And while it has been the Reform insurgency that has grabbed headlines, the rise of “Gaza” candidates on the left – one of whom displaced a Labour shadow cabinet member – has been no less significant. Thanks to Muslim bloc voting, there are now five British MPs who were elected campaigning more about Palestine than their own country.
The London Telegraph reports that in seats where Muslims were more than 10 per cent of the population, Labour’s vote fell by an average of 6.8 per cent. By contrast, it rose by 3.3 per cent in seats where the Muslim population was under 10 per cent. At 6 per cent, Muslims in Britain are about double the percentage here, but a local version of an entity called The Muslim Vote is similarly trying to mobilise voters on the basis of religion and is similarly pushing Labor for pro-Gaza policy change.
If the Tory party is to have any hope of a swift comeback, the first task of the battered survivors will be to heal the breach with Farage and his supporters. And if the Starmer government is to prosper, it will have to curb the green-left enthusiasm of many of its activist MPs and marginalise anyone who wants religion and ethnic tribalism to drive politics. Both sides of politics will need to work out more compelling ways to build a stronger and more cohesive society as well as a stronger economy and to rekindle the enthusiasm once generated by leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
In a depressing echo of politics here, no big figures campaigned on a specific plan for more excellence in education, getting better healthcare from the National Health Service, making the military more potent or making energy more affordable and the economy more competitive. It was a campaign based on personalities, trivia and mud-slinging rather than clear competing visions on how to make the country better.
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