In these organisations, elements of woke culture have spread through the upper echelons of management, but when Woolworths and Qantas played party politics, promoting the Aboriginal segment of the woke culture, they received a severe rebuke both from customers and Coalition politicians.
Large enterprise executives often live in inner-city electorates, so woke culture now dominates what were once affluent Coalition strongholds. The Coalition plays a dangerous game as it tries to widen its appeal beyond these areas.
The wide distribution of the 60 per cent of Australians who voted No at the Aboriginal referendum and the areas of concentrated Yes votes in affluent areas of capital cities told us that there was a clear distinction between “ordinary” Australians and the so-called “woke” areas.
Corporate marketers are already adapting.
Today, I want to tell the contrasting stories of two of those electorates, Goldstein (including Brighton) in Melbourne and Franklin in the Tasmanian state election.
In Australia, the woke community is different from the US and usually embraces affluent people with strong views on issues like female equality, gay rights, carbon emissions, plus the environment, and Aboriginal rights.
The woke community views are not uniform but are usually held with great sincerity and passion, particularly by young voters.
In assessing candidates for woke-dominated electorates, like Goldstein, nominating Coalition assemblies need to make sure they have a candidate who at least has a fair chance. In most states, that will be a female candidate because there is a strong belief in these electorates that more women are needed in politics, particularly on the Coalition side.
The teal candidates in the 2022 Federal election picked up this trend brilliantly, and many male coalition members lost their seats. In Goldstein, one of the Liberals party’s more effective politicians in government, Tim Wilson, got swept up in the avalanche and suffered a massive 12 per cent swing to lose the seat.
The Liberal Party wants Wilson in their parliamentary ranks, but in reality, the chances of a male Liberal winning in Goldstein are much lower than an excellent female candidate unless there is a massive community-wide swing to the Liberals.
But Wilson does not accept that logic, and in the Goldstein preselection, he mustered the support of the elderly male Liberal Party members who dominated the nominating room.
For the wider Liberal movement, what was sad about the process was that if Wilson again loses Goldstein to the teal Zoe Daniel, whose camp is absolutely ecstatic at the chance to fight Wilson again, then that probably eliminates Wilson from the political stage.
Making it doubly sad, one of the Coalition nominations to fight the teals was Stephanie Hunt, who excelled as a legal adviser to the coalition governments but also, most importantly, now runs her own business.
Political parties don’t get candidates, female or male, of that calibre who are prepared to put themselves into the political ring. Yet Hunt was passed over because the elderly who had joined the party were no longer representative of the new structure of the electorate, and Wilson was more experienced than Stephanie Hunt in lining up their support.
Making it even harder for Wilson is that the teals have woken up that the proposed capital gains tax on unrealised gains on large superannuation balances is unfair. It’s an issue Wilson will also fight on but is now not alone.
Hunt says she’s prepared to try again in three years, but political parties that turn their back on great opportunities usually don’t see them repeated.
Interestingly, in Josh Frydenberg’s old affluent seat of Kooyong, they read the referendum message and nominated Amelia Hamer, the 31-year-old Oxford-educated grand-niece of former Victorian premier Sir Rupert “Dick” Hamer.
Had both Hunt and Hamer been nominated, the anti-female hangover that arose from Morrison/Abbott eras could not easily be applied to Victoria in a 2025 election.
In Tasmania, Eric Abetz, who had been placed in an impossible Tasmania Senate position in the 2022 election, put his name forward for the state seat of Franklin where, under the Hare-Clark system, seven people would be selected. Franklin voted Yes in the referendum, but in the state election, Abetz topped the Franklin voting list.
Abetz was clear about his non-woke principles in supporting ordinary Tasmanians, particularly in the small business area, and knowing many Liberals were frustrated by the green policies of Liberals in Tasmania.
The task for Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is to establish clear policies that are attractive to the 60 per cent of ordinary Australians but at least understood and respected by the balance. And the ALP has its own version of the same problem.
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The prevalence of woke culture in large corporates and professional organisations is an issue that many do not talk about because counter views are not popular.