Black Swan poll result helps nation show its true colours
A voter backlash against political correctness has been mirrored by events around the globe.
Last Saturday’s election result was a bolt from the blue, astounding commentators, pollsters and I suspect Scott Morrison. As with Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, there was an unexpected and unobserved shift in sentiment that was somehow missed by the opinion polls. But what was it? How come, in a variety of electorates across the developed Western world, we are seeing such “black swan” events, happenings that defy all expectations and can be rationalised only in hindsight?
There is a growing body of research and theorising about this. One of the most important is the work of British scholars Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin set out in their recent book National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy.
Eatwell and Goodwin focus mainly on continental Europe, seeking to explain the overnight rise of what they term “nationalist-populist” parties in a variety of countries, and the corresponding sharp declines in support for traditional centre-left parties. Typically such parties derive their main support from the centre-left’s traditional working-class base, especially in declining industrial regions.
However, the phenomenon seems broader than that. One of the most striking results cited by the authors is Europe-wide polling that shows very high proportions of the population saying the mainstream parties are indifferent to the concerns of “people like me”, being more preoccupied with the ideological obsessions of privileged elites. Unsurprisingly, this sentiment is strongest in France, home of the “yellow vest” movement, with 68 per cent agreeing.
The resonances with what happened in Australia last Saturday are clear, exemplified by the jeering crowds that greeted Bob Brown’s green convoy in provincial Queensland. Labor did best in inner-urban, relatively wealthy and highly educated electorates, and worst in provincial, rural and outer suburban seats. A book that I launched recently, Labor’s Forgotten People: The Triumph of Identity Politics, written by Michael Thompson, is strikingly prescient.
So how do we explain the consistent failure of the pollsters to pick this up? The answer seems to be that the actual concerns of “people like me” are often in strong opposition to the prevailing elite zeitgeist, including concerns about how their communities are being affected by uncontrolled immigration and the growing presence of Islam, the effect of globalisation and climate change policies on traditional occupations, and in Europe the sense of having their lives regulated by remote, unaccountable bureaucracies in Brussels.
The reality is, many people feel intimidated. In Britain, according to a poll conducted by YouGov, about a third of people “believe they cannot speak freely on controversial subjects such as immigration and religion for fear they may be criticised, lose their job or be prosecuted”.
Who wants to risk social and occupational death by being fingered as a racist, xenophobe or Islamophobe, especially in the age of social media? Or maybe a visit by a nice policeman with a polite warning that something said or tweeted might count as “hate speech” (this is becoming a regular event in Britain)? It is not entirely surprising, therefore, that some people would be reluctant to express their real views, even to an anonymous opinion pollster — what some have termed the “shy voter” effect.
This is the result of the wholesale adoption by media, educational, political and increasingly corporate elites of the ideology of identity politics. Identity politics, the idea that we are all essentially defined by our membership of an intersecting set of categories based on gender, race, and so on, has become all pervasive.
This is especially so in parties of the Left. With the collapse of socialism as any sort of viable project, the identarian ideology has come to pretty much define what it means to be progressive, left-wing or “liberal” in the American context. We see this with the Labor Party here, with references to gender identity far outnumbering mundane matters such as unemployment in the party’s platform.
The most pernicious effect of this development is its deadening effect on the way contentious issues are debated generally, not just those strictly concerned with identity. This is the system of thought control we have come to label “political correctness”, which holds that a growing array of widely held viewpoints are so toxic, so abominable that they must not even be expressed, let alone debated.
According to the political correctness mindset, those who deviate from its orthodoxies are not just wrong, not just people who hold a different opinion that can be debated. No, their dissent labels them as stupid or knavish, or some combination of both. Not to be heard but to be shouted down, ridiculed, castigated in social media, assaulted and, if possible, fired from their jobs. Studies show that those who see themselves as progressive are much more likely to think of their opponents in this way than conservatives — and much more likely to stick strictly to the safe cluster of received opinions across the board. In academe, progressive theorists concoct justifications for designating certain issues “not debatable”.
This mindset contaminates and warps every debate it touches including, perhaps especially, the important issue of what to do about climate change, where all are expected to adhere to a “consensus” that a drastic set of abatement policies must be implemented immediately. To contest this is to be labelled a “climate change denialist”.
But what is this consensus? Consensus about what? If acceptance that the climate is warming, that human activity is a major driver, and that these facts warrant a major policy response makes someone part of the consensus, then count me in.
But that is not enough to avoid the denialist charge, nowhere near enough. To avoid the taint, you have to accept uncritically the most drastic of the steadily escalating set of proposed responses to the problem, as shown by the way all the main Democratic Party contenders in the US presidential primaries immediately fell into line with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (nicknamed “AOC”) Green New Deal that would move to 100 per cent renewables within a decade. There is precisely zero chance that any administration would, or could, implement anything like the Green New Deal, but it is now holy writ, which any candidate quibbles about at their peril. AOC dismissed any concerns about the estimated $2.3 trillion annual cost of the proposal with a wave of the hand — after all, the world is set to end in a decade.
Bear in mind that, when polled, people might say climate change is important, but when pressed how much they would sacrifice for it the result is derisory. According to a US poll 68 per cent of Americans wouldn’t pay $US10 extra a month on electricity for the cause.
Bill Shorten provided a masterclass in this kind of idiocy in the debates before the federal election. He justified refusing to provide any costings of his plan to reduce emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 by stating that it was “dumb” or “dishonest” even to ask such questions, a “charlatan’s argument”. What about the cost of not acting, he asked, without providing any estimate of that, or of the effect his policy would have on global temperature.
I wonder if Shorten would label the 2018 Nobel laureate in economics, William J. Nordhaus, as dumb, dishonest and a charlatan.
Nordhaus received the award for his contribution to “integrating climate change into long-run macro-economic analysis”, asking the sort of questions, and conducting the kind of cost-benefit analysis, that Shorten and many others regard as off-limits.
As an economist, Nordhaus does not claim any expertise about climate but takes as a given the assessments of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and goes on to develop an economic model (the DICE model) to estimate the long-term “social costs” of CO2 and of possible policies to address it, in an attempt to identify the best policy. His conclusion? That the optimal policy — the one that achieves the best balance of costs and benefits — is one that sets a target of 3.5 degrees over pre-industrial levels. The more ambitious targets of 2.5 degrees, or even 1.5 degrees, turn out to be ludicrously expensive, according to his analysis.
His optimal policy would include much less drastic measures than the kind favoured by AOC or Shorten, including a modest tax on carbon, but one that, as he stresses, must be globally co-ordinated and involve all the major emitters. But what are the chances of that?
Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg takes a different approach, pointing to the very small effect on the Earth’s climate of the Paris Agreement proposals. Like Nordhaus, he accepts the scientific conclusions of the UN climate panel, but argues that even if fully implemented the Paris accords would make a difference of only 0.17C by the end of the century. Instead, he favours a massive investment in research and development aimed at drastically reducing the cost of renewable energy rather than immediately subsidising existing technologies.
Maybe Nordhaus and Lomborg are both wrong, but surely we should be prepared to debate these issues? I was struck, when ploughing through the critiques of Lomborg and his responses to them, by the level and vehemence of ad hominem abuse by the critics. I could almost feel the clouds of spittle rising from screen as I read. Since he accepted the UN panel estimates, he could not easily be labelled a denier so they invented a new epithet for him: “climate contrarian”.
There is something deeply unserious about the approach of Shorten and those of similar mind. Suppose Labor had been elected. Would Shorten really take the steps, and incur the political costs, of doing what he proposed? Or would he be like Emmanuel Macron in France, who promptly reversed a modest increase in petrol costs for climate abatement in the face of the yellow vest movement?
I suspect that Shorten would have folded at the first whiff of grapeshot. (Albo, if elected, might hold out to the second whiff.)
Peter Baldwin served as a minister in the Hawke and Keating governments.