Oh what strange joy it is to find out we've got a hung parliament again. And I'm not being sarcastic - I'm getting a kick out of it. It was on the cards, and in an interesting mirror image re-run of the 2010 election that took place after Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd, we now have the same outcome with Malcolm Turnbull after he replaced Tony Abbott. There are some - crazy some - who are screaming out in the far right yonder that the Coalition should have stuck with Tony Abbott because he wouldn't have done any worse. That's hard to imagine. By rights, Tony Abbott was looking more like he was going to surrender a landslide so those far-right people are frantically rewriting history right there.
It is being painted as a disastrous outcome for Malcolm Turnbull, but that overstates his impact on the campaign given what he inherited, as well as how much the party tied his hands. The Malcolm Turnbull people thought they were going to get, and the one the Liberal Party allowed him to be were two completely different people. The Coalition are blaming the ALP for the medicare scare campaign but here's the problem with that theory: 1) Who exactly created the social environment where a Medicare cut would be so devastating? the Coalition; 2) how puny were the Coalition's selling points if a mere scare campaign could defeat their proposition; and 3) blaming other for your own mistakes is unbecoming of the party that tells people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
Just sayin'.
We all know the sordid sorry truth: Had they let Malcolm Turnbull properly address the issues that mean so much to the political middle instead of holding him captive to the right wing of the Liberal Party, they would have had a positive proposition to sell to the electorate. What's amazing is that the Liberal Party can't see it at all. They had the biggest election-winning advantage in Malcolm Turnbull's personal popularity, and they managed to squander it by not letting him do the things people expected of Malcolm Turnbull. That the party strategists seemed to think his popularity was somehow separate to the policy positions he espoused in earlier incarnations is quite staggering in its wrong-headed-ness. It is what it is, and what it is, is the height of stupidity.
The ALP medicare scare campaign? I mean, put-lease!
I Thought More Old Codgers Would Have Died Since 2013
I recently attended a funeral of an elderly woman who passed away. The attendance was scant of the elderly. When I enquired I was told most of the deceased's friends had already died or were too senile and demented to attended. It made rethink the Howard-supporting geriatric generation were finally pushing off their mortal coil, moving on into the next world. I mean, let's face it, we've lost some pretty big Baby Boomer musicians this year alone - you'd think the even older were even more dying-er. So in the three years since the 2013 election, one could surmise the ranks of the Howard's grey-power demographic would have shrunk considerably. The hung Parliament sort of shows that maybe this wasn't as big a factor as other things after all.
Of course, I'm told the percentage of the young not enrolled to vote is as high as it's ever been, so perhaps that balanced itself out. Really, we live in difficult times when we need everybody's thinking caps on. It's amazing that this is the moment at which youth apathy has reached pinnacle.
In other sad news, we find Tony Abbott is still alive and well, elected and in office as member of Warringah. Who will ind us of of this meddlesome Abbott?
The Good News
Sophie Mirabella is gone. Miserabella is done as a lower house candidate having now lost twice. With a 3.1% swing against this time and 9.5% swing against last time, she managed to freshly alienate 1/8th of an entire electorate that was once a safe seat for the Coalition. She sure won't be running again - unless of course the Liberal Party is a lot more stupid than we're led to believe.
The Ungovernable Demographics Of Australia
It's no coincidence that the hung Parliament comes so close on the heels of the previous hung Parliament. When you think about how the seats are allocated and distributed, it is pretty clear that over time, seats are becoming more entrenched, not less. The entrenched Liberal seats of the Sydney North Shore, together with Wentworth represents a particular demographic that keeps getting more entrenched, not less. It's hard to imagine any of those seats going to the ALP in the next 10 elections, Maxine McKew's amazing effort in 2007 notwithstanding. The equivalent of those seats in other Australian cities represent the bastion of Liberal Party support. Around those suburbs are the suburbs that are the traditional ALP heartland - and these might get flipped to Liberal as they become wealthier and gentrified, but on the whole the parties are entrenched according to class and income.
If the seats divide up so easily and get entrenched as a result of increasing inequality and disparity, we're going to see a lot more of these hung Parliament scenarios. There's a lot of disillusion going on out there in the deep electorate. It's no coincidence that Pauline Hanson and her One Nation brand have made a comeback, exactly at the moment of maximum uncertainty. The Two Party system funnels everybody's votes into two parties, but people are squirming like mad for another option. Add this altogether and you get a picture of a deeply divided electorate that is suspicious of anything and everything it seems. The hung Parliament isn't a simple dis-endorsement of politics or politicians or the political elite; it's a deeply structural problem manifesting itself in votes.
If the major parties can't pull themselves together they can damn well expect this to keep on happening because the entrenched rigidity of class mobility is only going to increase and reinforce what is already there. People are actively looking for an alternative that is not the major parties. It's only going to get worse for the major parties from here on in, and they themselves are to blame.
The same voter rage that drives support for Donald Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK has taken hold here. Some of it is a perfectly rational response to a political system that is not working for the people it is designed to serve.
Australian politics broke in December 2009 when the major parties could not reach a consensus on Labor's climate change bills.
Mr Abbott rose from the ashes of the Coalition leadership spill and so terrified Kevin Rudd that he cut and ran from "the greatest moral challenge of our time".
That massive breach of trust with the Australian people was compounded by his midnight assassination. It, in turn, fatally wounded Julia Gillard.
The parallels between the two major parties are now eerie.
Labor dispatches a first term prime minister in 2010 and emerges from an election into a hung parliament. The Coalition did it last year and now faces the same future.Yes, Tony Abbott ran at the ALP with maximum malice and no intention of governing properly. So the question is whether Bill Shorten is going to pull the same stunt. Arthur Sinodinos seems to think so.
Remember what happened next?
Senator Sinodinos said Mr Shorten's election night speech was "very negative".
"What comes out of that speech is he's saying the government has lost its mandate. [Mr Shorten] doesn't have a mandate for anything."
When asked if he meant a re-run of the election, he said: "If Bill Shorten is saying... that he will be frustrating everything the government wants to do. He wants to cut the government down.
"That is what he is saying. He's saying I've got them on the run, I'm going to cut them down. For what? Is he endorsed on a scare campaign. Is this what this great country has been reduced to?"Good heavens. Really? Who did the reducing last time?
Anyway, that's the picture we have of this increasingly unruly electorate. Yay for the unruly electorate, I say.
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