by ERIC LOUW – THE 2022 election saw both Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese play the same game – cling to the political centre and attack each other’s personalities rather than their policies.
This meant there was little differentiation between the Parties for voters to choose from.
- A revival of the Liberal’s “broad church” strategy is pointless.
- The Party has lost its former heartland of moderate voters.
- It should now focus on centre-Right voters in the regions and suburbs.
Soon after, the results came in, with voters rejecting bland, centre-ground politics, which saw both the traditionally centre-Right Liberal-National Coalition and centre-Left Australian Labor Party (ALP) suffer historically low first preference votes.
Only 36 per cent of voters gave the Coalition their first preference and 33 per cent gave theirs to Labor.
CONCERNED
Although Labor did “win” government on the back of preferences from the Left-wing Australian Greens, they should be deeply concerned, given only a third of the population actually supported them.
Curiously, neither major party woke up to the broader political shifts sweeping the globe, namely the widening gulf between Right and Left-wing voters.
So why did both Morrison and Albanese keep clinging to the centre despite the political headwinds?
Morrison did so because he inherited a divided Coalition being pulled Left and Right. So he focused on holding his Party together by sitting in the centre and making concessions both ways.
This “broad church” strategy successfully held the Liberal Party together but at the cost of irritating both (green ideology-leaning) Left voters plus the Coalition’s Right-leaning supporters. As a consequence, the Coalition bled votes both ways.
Albanese clung to the centre because he wanted to avoid being punished like his predecessor Bill Shorten for promoting clearly Leftist policies at the 2019 election. So Albo went invisible and centrist.
Instead of clear policies, his spin doctors simply dished up two years of nasty below-the-belt demonisation of Morrison.
Although this spin strategy made Albo look weak, the character assassination of Morrison paid off and lost the former prime minister a huge number of votes.
But curiously, the centrism of both Parties ultimately failed to deliver a centrist-favouring 2022 election.
Instead, we saw Australia catch up to the political headwinds sweeping the rest of the world and saw votes splinter Left and Right, but not centre.
HEARTLANDS
The Left’s success was encapsulated by millionaire Simon Holmes à Court’s Climate 200 group, who backed several “teal independent” candidates, eventually winning six inner-city seats from former Liberal Party heartlands.
Climate 200 did this by building a message that mixed “climate change” hysteria with elements of the Labor Party’s demonisation of Morrison.
The group also cleverly plugged into the global mood of dissatisfaction with the two-Party system and growing distrust of career politicians.
It was also a watershed moment for the shaking up of the Australian political order, with affluent inner-city voters moving Left and less affluent suburban and regional voters moving Right.
So what are the lessons for the country’s conservative-leaning Parties?
Those on the Right of politics must think more creatively about how to leverage the breaking up of the old two-Party system and build future alliances among like-minded Parties (the kind of thing that occurs in the Israeli Parliament).
Any future alliance will need to centre on the Coalition rediscovering its classical liberal roots.
On this matter, the “teal independents” have done it a favour by ripping affluent inner-city seats away from the Liberal Party, making it difficult for any revival of Morrison’s “broad church” vision for the Party—supposed to encapsulate both moderate and right-wing voters.
In effect, Holmes à Court’s Climate 200 has pushed the Liberal Party rightwards.
The Coalition should also stop focusing too much energy on inner-city seats filled with progressive-leaning voters who inherently oppose socially conservative values and are not affected by issues like cost of living (rising electricity prices), housing affordability, declining public school standards, and living standards (congestion). Instead, the Coalition needs to focus on suburban, peri-urban, and regional electorates where Australia’s “battlers,” the working class or the socially conservative live.
If Peter Dutton leads the Coalition to the next election, they must develop counter-strategies to the Labor Party’s—assisted by media outlets—vicious spin campaigning.
Further, the next election will likely see Labor subjected to the same pincer movement that swept through Liberal Party’s heartland. The Climate 200’s achievements will empower left-leaning individuals to become “teals” themselves, re-energise the existing Greens Party, and encourage the woke-green wing of the Labor Party.
GREEN
Labor leader and now-Prime Minister Albanese will face pressure from all three fronts to move progressively green.
Yet, further moving to the Left will create dissatisfaction with Labor’s right faction. This will create opportunities for both Dutton and the Right-wing One Nation to pull votes from Labor’s Right flank in the battler suburbs.
Conservatives and classical Liberals must take this chance to review their Party’s performance, examine the ongoing fragmentation of the political centre, and begin re-building for 2025.PC
It’s well understood that a change of scale leads to a change in effect. So it will be with the looming attack on Australia’s constitution. The Australian Constitution faces war on two fronts, with no obvious allies. The first part in this pincer movement is the proposed federal integrity commission, advocated by the ALP and even more enthusiastically by the political ingenues of the Teal movement. Quite why any candidate for the parliament would want the will of that Parliament to be subject to review by an body of unelected bureaucrats is not clear to this writer. But if you’re a Teal, emotion trumps reason, and none of these highly educated individuals seem capable of objective analysis.
But more serious still is the proposed Voice. Setting aside Linda Burney’s recent appearance in the pelts of dead possums, surely endorsing their murder, it seems possible we are about to witness a schism in the ranks of the Indigenous community. An alarmingly wide cohort of opinion supports both Recognition in the Constitution and the Voice, but as the estimable Senator Jacinta Price points out, there are now ten Indigenous members in the Parliament and that is in itself a Voice. What we don’t need is a corporate entity representing Indigenous interests within government, either ex-officio in the Cabinet, or as a bureaucracy with the right of veto over any administrative decision of the elected government. We still have a representative democracy based on the ancient principle of one man, one vote. Roll these two ALP initiatives together and that comes to an end, with the Indigenous having in effect, two votes. At least Jacinta Price seems to understand the potential problems this may cause for her constituency, unlike M/s Burney. Just imagine where constitutionally mandated Indigenous representation within a federal ICAC or the Human Rights Commission might lead.
Fair enough, Dagworth. Points well made. But meanwhile the Globalists’ Coup d’Etat rolls on unnoticed in the wake of their successful rigged election tactics — long evidenced here and around the world.
Nary a question permitted in Oz by their minions on how Preferential Voting for “minor parties”, “groupings” and “independants” was axed on 21 May and its potential impacts ignored. Correctly counted and allocated, preferences can and should serve their purpose in tyrranous times.
Any voter determined NOT to exhaust their vote to give freedom a voice in the Senate by voting below the line (inserting anti-globalists first, next their allies, then placing the duopoly majors/Greens last) understood the function of the ballot paper Group Order A to V, UNG was to record a nuanced spectrum of preferences for a fairer result. Surprise, surprise! Didn’t happen!
The rule of law has all but imploded here as it has throughout the corrupted West. We’re still under the Globalists’ murderous health dictatorship but distracted by the rolling UN/Davos-designed avalanche of disastrous distractions.
Wait for the promised Lumpy Skin cattle disease to strike down our herds (we’re told today it’s not IF but WHEN) and whether Monkey Pox can be hyped (or replaced by something scarier) to continue “their” agenda to get “trans-human” technologies under our skin and into our genes for total mind control via more lockdowns and corporate fascist thuggery.
A couple of hours recommended reading for politically-and-propaganda-abused voters who’ve had enough of it: seriously, the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy for Moses God-given instuctions to get his errant and confused people out of their Egyptian hell and into the Promised Land. Being estranged from our biblical cultural and historical roots is not a good way to defeating and breaking free of the devils at Davos, the UN and WHO, and the apostates riddling today’s churches.
Nearly 40 percent of the Bible is prophesy, much of it ignored and rejected in our post-Chistian world. And especially so in today’s feel-good luke-warm churches as summed up in Christ’s message to the Church in Laodicea (Revelation 3:16).
Antidote to the Great Reset is an even Greater Personal Christian Reset before all else.
Well Done to the Teals! I was manning a booth in North Sydney as I was concerned for Tim James @ State Election. They will target Tim.
We were out funded, out smarted & out numbered. Savvy business defeating a hapless heard that had lost its way.
Conservatives now must be vocal & remove a couple of others. If Matt Kean remains as Deputy Premier it’ll be good bye at the State Election.
I hear the Lefties are Branch stacking in Goulburn in an attempt to remove a Conservative President at a Branch.
Remove “Climate Change” from the Liberal’s vocabulary!
I phoned Peter Dutton”s office and conveyed my opinion, It was well received. I encourage others to do same.
Conservatism is a maligned concept. The education system and the MSM hates it. Yet conservatism is the foundation of Western democracy. Only one politician in the West has been brave enough to advocate it: Trump.
I think Dutton will cave; for me the marker was him apologising about his comment about the Pacific Islands and climate change.
The biggest loser of the last election was Palmer who’s monstrous ego prevented him from doing what the rich brat did with his teals: concentrate on a few seats and really push his message about energy, security and economics.
Teals are basically greens in lipstick and high heels. Their coal-face supporters are generally very naive. A friend told me that if Australia has a hard commitment to net-zero then this will influence the rest of the world. Their top-level supporters will make a lot of money from renewable electricity subsidies.
The great tragedy of this election was that the looming danger of a Chinese military presence in the South Pacific (for police assistance read military) was buried.
Morrison was smug and arrogant and beholden to the anti Christian Un,WHO & WEF and he thought he was more powerful than God . Dutton will bring the Liberal Party back on course and it all be better than it has been for decades . The scary thing is how people voted for the Elma Fudd ALP led by a bumbling boob who does not know the cost of living and still the fools voted just because ??? Remember Kevin 07 ????
“Dutton will bring the Liberal Party back on course […]”
Actually he won’t. One of his recent pronouncements mentioned families “no matter what composition they may be”, so he was kowtowing to the left before he had even received the nod as the new so-called leader (who knows, maybe that was a prerequisite for being anointed).
The coalition are going to spend a long time going round in circles in the political wilderness, while we all watch Albanese and his malfeasant mates destroy what’s left of Australia.
Barely 30% 1st preference support clearly states that Labor won nothing, rather the ScoMo Coalition lost the farm. Evicted, distrusted and no longer viable.
And what have they learned from this? Not a damn thing!
The same idiot thing tank that have brought about coalition demise through endless policies of appeasement are now busy drawing all the wrong conclusions from an emphatic trouncing at the ballot box.
When was the last time the notionally conservative coalition had a decisive victory? When they were led by a principled conservative leader and they proposed governance which actually aligned with the small government / free market mantra upon which the Liberal party was founded.
Yet right from that moment, the cringing left of the coalition has set about dismantling the party from within. And even after an absolute trouncing at the ballot box, they’re still intent upon dragging the party deeper towards unelectable irrelevance.
I’m now hearing all this nonsense about abandoning once blue ribbon seats, because the electorates have changed. They may have changed, but nowhere near as much as party policy has changed. Those seat are not somehow devoid of conservative voters, those conservative voters are left with few viable options, and their votes have been spread far and wide beyond a Liberal party that no longer stands for anything.
Here’s an out there idea, why not the loyal few who’ve persevered in the ranks actually elect the representatives who’ll stand in those seats? Maybe run, AND SUPPORT, some conservative voices, you know, like the ones who led the last decisive victory the Libs ever managed.
And while we’re at it let’s quash this idea of focussing here, appeasing a minority there, and get back to offering a viable option for all Australia, rather than a stand for nothing party, focussed more on personal careers than on improving the lives of all Australians.
I wish Dutton well, it’s a pity many of those within the Liberal elites won’t. They’ll see him a sucker for the tougher times of opposition while they focus on further erosion of the party base. Just look at what’s being served up in the deputy roles to validate my suggestion. The utter tripe being espoused by Littleproud confirming that the Nats are eager for a dose of the same electoral rejection their Liberal partners have just experienced. “International Obligations?” What obligations? And what about your obligations to hard-working Australians?
Australia cannot afford multiple terms of of a PM who cannot even say Pry Menster, let alone perform the role. Nor can they afford the plotters within Labor wishing to bring about his demise. Yet the current state of the coalition says that’s exactly where we are heading.
If the Liberal Party cannot represent Liberal values, we need a to rebuild a viable alternative who will. I don’t see what is left as recoverable, I’d love to be proven wrong, but doubt very much that I will be.