There was no landslide, despite all the Left-of-centre excitement on election night. There will be, most likely, a minority government.

Three cross-benchers, inevitably including Alex Greenwich, will control the governance of the State. Despite a substantial swing to Labor, they barely got over the line, suggesting that they were simply the less hated option.

INVISIBLE

This was a very glum electorate, it seems. And why not? Voters were faced with two Parties each pursuing such a small target set of policies that they were almost invisible. With nothing to say. “Trust us” versus “time for a change”.

Why on earth would we trust the NSW Liberal Party? They don’t trust each other. They have not earned it. They have squandered it. And Labor’s time for change. Change to what?

But it gets worse.

As has been the case in recent Australian elections, not many people actually voted in the Premiers State last week.

These non-attenders must be added to those who (like me, at least in the Lower House) voted informally. And to those who didn’t vote for either of the legacy Parties. There are no mandates to be seen here.

In the Lower House, the incoming government garnered 37 per cent of the valid votes actually cast. Not a stunning endorsement.

Put another way, 63 per cent of NSW voters don’t want the government we now have. The losing Coalition managed to attract a little over 35 per cent. Groan.

The turnout was a measly 72.95 per cent. The informal vote was 3.39 per cent. So, fewer than 70 per cent of voters bothered to vote formally, if at all.

Let’s look at the NSW Upper House. 73.2 per cent of eligible electors bothered to vote. That is, over a quarter of potential voters simply didn’t. This is in spite of all the ways that voting is now made easier.

UNINTERESTED

Clearly the prospective fine for not voting didn’t deter the clearly pissed-off and the uninterested. It is pretty easy to vote above the line in NSW Upper House elections. Yet 6.35 per cent of voters voted informally.

So, we are down way below 70 per cent. Close to a third. In the Upper House, it was 37 per cent and 30 per cent, respectively, of the 70 per cent who actually cast a valid vote. This amounts to a massive repudiation of the legacy Parties.

Does anyone now actually call this majoritarian democracy?

The social contract is cooked. There is no consent of the governed, to speak of. The NSW figures are on trend with other recent elections.

Fewer and fewer voters turn up, even with the (totally unexplained) general permission given now to all to vote before election day.

At one level, these non-voting numbers might strike observers of our democracy as a worrying indicator of non-engagement.

But to the disaffected classes, it speaks to government failure on a massive scale. And few are exploring why this is occurring. Few see this as a failure of democracy. Few among the columnist class dare to conclude that the UniParty system is broken, and that the 30 plus per cent of the electorate utterly ignored by the ruling class might have a point. Strategic non-voting is in play.

Just look at the things the two major Parties in NSW agree on. Woke education with parental rights whittled away so as to be virtually non-existent. The war on fossil fuels actively prosecuted by both Parties. Big spending gone wild. Windfarms and solar panels as far as the eye can see. Subsidies for renewables while the lights are expected to go out on a regular basis down the track. Banning real cars. Endorsement of the sexual revolution a done deal. Irreversible. Non-binary, mostly. The right to life dead and buried.

Socially, they are almost all radical-liberal. Economically, they are neo-liberal.

The two-Party system in NSW is “progressive, green, globalist, woke, COVID” central.

.The politicians on both sides emerge mostly from having been political staffers whose experience of the real world and affinity with normal outside-Macquarie-Street people has been minimal.

Both sides are run by off-camera apparatchiks and lobbyists. Labor by Sussex Street and the Liberals by Michael Photios. The Brokeback Nats seem to be run by the homosexual lobby.

All of the politicians are run by the bureaucrats. Unchurched, uneducated (except in ideology), low information millennials who have emerged from the swamp of the modern higher education system.

And the thousands of political advisers, Young Libs and Young Labs fully immersed in factional politics and destined, they think, for greatness. It is all such an echo chamber.  Removed from everyday people and their issues, despite what they say for a few weeks every four years in March.

DEPLORABLES

Left versus Right has been thoroughly supplanted by insiders versus outsiders. Elites versus deplorables.

Matthew Goodwin, author of a new book called Values, Voice and Virtue: the New British Politics, has stated: “Whereas that old elite had been defined by its extreme wealth, its inherited titles and its country estates, the members of Britain’s new ruling class are defined by very different things.

“They are often defined by their elite education at the most prestigious Oxbridge or Russell Group universities. They are defined by their postcodes in one of the big cities or university towns, where they not only hoover up the economic gains of globalisation but tend to marry and hang out with other members of the elite graduate class who share the same backgrounds.

“And, most of all, they are defined by their very liberal if not radical ‘woke’ values which they are now imposing on the rest of the country through their tight control over the institutions.”

Here is the thing. The elites now have fundamentally different values and interests to the rest of us. The punters appear to have cottoned on to the fact of who now has the power and what they believe in, and that their votes are worthless.

So why bother turning up on election day? More revolts in the years ahead? Perhaps.

Stuart Lindsay opined (at Quadrant Online) that most Australians (during COVID) simply wanted Netflix, a full belly and a warm place to defecate. There is certainly anger in the disillusioned electorate, but there is, as there has always been, a fair bit of apathy.

The outgoing Premier has been almost salivating at the wonderful election – unusual, to say the least, for a defeated and humbled incumbent – and the uplifting spirit of the election.

FORGIVEN

He has been full of praise for his opponent for making the election such a great contest of ideas. One could be forgiven for thinking that what we have just witnessed was a textbook exercise in representative democracy. It didn’t feel like that to me.

It felt more like a non-contest between a tired, corrupt government and an opposition pottering about among the weeds, making itself a small target, refusing to debate big, difficult issues. A classic UniParty affair.

There was no contest of ideas. There was a feeble competition between two sides of the same penny. Over who best can “manage” the crumbling State.

If the outgoing Premier feels good about an election where his own Party attracted 30 per cent of the 70 per cent who bothered to cast a valid vote, we have a problem.