Australian politics
Newspoll in detail – Labor has little chance of winning back Queensland
Newspoll shows that Labor’s TPP support is just on 51:49, down from 52:48 at the 2022 election. This is pretty well in line with other polls, but more detail, based on a respectably large sample, is provided in the latest Newspoll quarterly breakdown, summarized in Wiliam Bowe’s Poll Bludger. (The poll itself sits behind a paywall.)
Labor is holding up in three of the five mainland states, but has slipped behind a little in New South Wales and quite significantly in Queensland.
More detail, in a surprisingly neutral style, is in a Sky News report on the survey (that is, if you don’t click on the embedded videoclip of propaganda about the Coalition’s energy policy).
These figures contain few surprises, but one that stands out is the strong support for One Nation in South Australia, at 12 percent. That’s even higher than its 10 percent support in Queensland. It’s higher than it was in the 2022 election, where South Australia’s far-right vote (One Nation plus UAP) was 9 percent. In that election the far-right vote was concentrated in Adelaide’s far northern suburbs, home to ageing immigrants, disproportionally from the UK, and heavily represented by people who once worked in the car industry.
Other findings from the Newspoll disaggregations confirm the established gender and age splits in support for the main parties. Tough economic conditions have not brought young people to the Coalition, and the Green vote is holding up strongly among the young.
One finding is that the higher one’s household income and education the more likely are people to believe that Albanese is a better prime minister than Dutton would be. That’s not surprising. The incongruous finding is that those same people in the highest income households, who believe Albanese is a better prime minister, have a clear preference to vote for the Coalition. Self-interest trumps assessment of competence.
Another striking finding is that those who identify themselves to the pollsters as “Christian” have a 59:41 TPP support for the Coalition, a mirror image of the 59:41 TPP support for Labor among those identifying as “no religion”. (Newspoll seems to ignore Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists …) One may wonder in which part of the New Testament these “Christians” find parables extolling the virtues of the strongman and justifying greed, selfishness, and contempt for the public good.
The Senate now and into the future
In the Poll Bludger post linked in the above article, William Bowe explains what the Senate now looks like, with Senator Payman having become an independent. It’s only a marginal change, but it’s informative to consider the Senate’s composition, shown in the pie chart below.[1]
Note that, apart from the occasional Green-Coalition deals designed to wedge the government, there is no combination of two blocs that could command a majority in our 76-seat Senate.
Crispin Hull reminds us that in the 2019 election the Coalition did particularly well in the Senate election, which meant that 17 of those 31 Senate seats were not up for re-election in 2022, but those seats will be contested in 2025. Hull points out that 5 of those Senators were on the #3 position in their states’ tickets. Such has been the weakening of the two-party vote that #3 spots are becoming much harder to win. All five positions are vulnerable, Hull believes.[2]
1. In consideration of the need to keep the graphic readable, rather than any normative judgement, I have classified individual One Nation and Jacqui Lambie Network Senators as “Remnants”. ↩
2. There were actually 18 elected whose positions will be contested in the 2025 election. One was Senator David Van, who has been expelled from the Liberal party. ↩
Labor and the “Muslim vote” – polarization and misinformation
The electorate of Watson, named after Australia’s first Labor prime minister, lying about 15 km southwest of Sydney, is Labor heartland. It is held by Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Tony Burke on a primary vote of 52 percent and a two-party vote of 65 percent.
It is one of the seats targeted by Muslim Votes Matter, a movement organized by Sheikh Wesam Charkawi. Watson’s population is 25 percent Muslim.
The Muslim Votes Matter movement will have been encouraged by the UK election, where, contrary to the general swing to Labour, four seats were lost to pro-Gaza independents.
The Economists’ political analysts have found a strong correlation between electorates’ Muslim population and a swing to Labour: How shallow was Labour’s victory in the British election? (Paywalled) An application of The Economist’s arithmetic to Watson suggests Labor would experience about a 25 percent loss of support, easily enough to swing the seat.
That arithmetic, based on a country with a different culture and with a first-past-the-post voting system, is crude. Also it is based on a strong campaign run by former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. It would be hard to imagine Julia Gillard or Kevin Rudd joining forces with Sheikh Charkawi in a campaign to unseat Watson.
Maybe the threat to Labor is overstated, as pointed out in last week’s roundup, but the emergence of an explicitly religious-based movement is a serious development.
It’s not as if Australia’s history is free of sectarianism. Writing in The Conversation – Faith-based politics is nothing new in Australia – so what’s Albanese really worried about? – Frank Bongiorno has a short history of religious sectarianism in Australia. It was “once a drain on Australia’s social cohesion”, and could become one again:
Talk of a Muslim party or political movement is seen to challenge social cohesion. It does not conform with a key demand made of people of Muslim faith: that they accept the existing rules of political engagement. Here is a conservative face of multiculturalism, as discussed by scholars such as Ghassan Hage.
Bongiorno is not suggesting that Muslims should be denied the right to organize politically: in light of the history of various thinly-disguised religious movements in Australia’s recent past, that would be hypocritical, but it would be an unwelcome development in a country that has shaken off religious sectarianism.
His article is also a reminder to Labor and others on the “left” that immigrants and “people of colour” (to use the left’s simplistic terminology) are not natural allies. As with Christianity there are deeply conservative and authoritarian strands within Islam. The Liberal Party is well aware that it can exploit a base of support among Muslim Australians: its candidate in Watson in the 2022 election was a Muslim who won 27 percent of the primary vote. In his post about Senator Payman’s defection Crispin Hull reminds us that the strongest No vote in the same-sex marriage plebiscite was in urban electorates with high Muslim populations.
People who see their identity in religious terms tend to be on the right: as revealed in the most recent Newspoll, Australians who identify themselves to pollsters as “Christian” are overwhelmingly (59 percent) Coalition supporters.
Schwartz Media’s Post has several references, mostly paywalled, to repercussions within Labor of Senator Payman’s defection. Young Labor and university activists are lining up behind Payman, or are moving to the Greens.
It’s unclear what their causes are – disgust at the behaviour of Netanyahu and the Israeli military, sympathy for the people of Gaza, or alignment with Palestinian political movements. This third development should be of concern, because Hamas and Hezbollah are hard right authoritarian and misogynist movements. The left in the West has often been drawn to the assumption that any movement countering western imperialism or aggression is, de facto, on the left. Not so: there was a time when there was a strong Marxist movement in the Middle East, but those days are long gone. Most political movements in the region are on the hard right.
Labor MP Peter Kahlil, who holds the Melbourne seat of Wills, himself of Egyptian ancestry, has declared that the Muslim Vote movement is misleading the public about the government’s stance on the Gaza War. A redistribution of his electorate has been to the favour of the Greens, who are seeking support from Muslims who make up 10 percent of the electorate. In an article in The Age by Paul Sakal – Embattled MP slams Muslim Vote claim that Labor's “weak on Palestine” – Kahlil is reported as accusing
… the group’s [Muslim Votes] leaders of failing to mention “countless” public statements by Labor such as breaking with the United States to back a ceasefire vote at the United Nations, calling for unimpeded aid, demanding Israel respect humanitarian law, and affirming Australia's role in a peace process that could lead to a Palestinian state.
Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald – The denial and disinformation facing October 7 survivors – Chip Le Grand reports that there is a disinformation campaign that goes so far as a claim that the October 7 massacre didn’t happen and no hostages were taken: it was all staged by Israel using some mighty clever actors.
The presence of disinformation devalues genuine evidence of war crimes and callous disregard for civilian lives by the Israel military, and in doing so polarizes public opinion on the issues.
The government has reacted by appointing an anti-Semitism envoy, and promises to appoint an Islamophobia envoy to follow. The government’s timing sends the wrong message, and it is not an unreservedly wise decision, explain a group of academics in The Conversation: Australia has its first antisemitism special envoy, with an Islamophobia special envoy to follow. What will this mean? To quote their conclusion:
It serves no-one’s purpose to pit antisemitism and Islamophobia against each other, as both are manifestations of hate – and often perpetrated by the same individuals.
We don’t have to be on the verge of a nasty sectarian war. Chris Wallace of the University of Canberra, writing in The Conversation, points out that Labor’s tight internal discipline has helped bring about this situation: All “commit” and no “disagree”: the real reason why Labor’s solidarity pledge is not working. The party line is that Payman should have raised her disagreement in caucus, but that line is disingenuous. There was a time when caucus was an open forum, but that time is long past. Labor needs to return to that openness, she says.
The situation could also be cooled down if Dutton were to break from his line that any opposition to the policy of the Netanyahu government is anti-Semitism. But it would be out of character for him to miss an opportunity to frame a political disagreement in such a way that maximizes division and polarization.
Law’n’order – there have to be more choices than letting kids run amok and locking them up in jail
In view of problems of youth crime in Townsville and Gladstone, the politics of youth justice were bound to enter the Queensland election campaign.
So, sure enough, the Queensland opposition, with an eye to the state election in October, has announced its “adult crime, adult time” policy. Gone is the idea that detention should be the last resort.
Unsurprisingly this announcement has resulted in criticism from the Council for Civil Liberties and the Queensland Law Society, reported by the ABC’s Alex Brewster: Queensland legal experts compare LNP 'adult crime, adult time' policy to failed Newman bikie laws.
At the same time youth crime has become a problem once again in Alice Springs. You can hear a considered coverage of the issues around youth crime in a 13-minute interview on ABC RN Drive with Catherine Liddle of SNAICC (Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care): Will another curfew really help Alice Springs?.
Wilcannia: Is this the future for Alice Springs?
Liddle explains what is required to prevent the development of problems that lead to ineffective but attention-grabbing moves such as curfews and tougher sentencing. Policymakers need to look at the evidence revealing what works and what doesn’t. The policies that work are those that support families’ housing needs, and young people’s recreation needs. Simply locking kids up doesn’t work. It’s costly because it leads to more crime and health problems, and it doesn’t add to community safety in the medium to long term, because it simply allows troublesome kids to graduate to hardened criminals.
Although the problem of youth crime is not as geographically concentrated as in Queensland and the Northern Territory, it is an issue in all states, including Victoria, and it provides easy pickings for populist politicians offering simple solutions, generally based on locking up young offenders.
Governments would be unwise to ignore the allure of simple law’n’order solutions. The public are rightly concerned with safety – not only their personal safety, but also the way crime can destroy a community. Policy approaches that are indifferent to community safety are bound to create an understandable backlash.
Janet Albrechtsen should brush up on Machiavelli
The Murdoch press seems to have given up on criticizing John Hewson for his criticism of the Coalition’s policies, but it has now turned its attention to Turnbull in a vindictive opinion piece in The Australian by Janet Albrechtsen: Is anyone else worried about Malcolm Turnbull?. It’s paywalled, but its content is easy to imagine. No argument, no challenge to Turnbull’s ideas – just childish, spiteful drivel.
It appears that this reaction has been precipitated by Turnbull having called Peter Dutton a “thug” whose style is “division and animosity” on commercial media. Turnbull had earlier made the same call on the ABC, but commercial media is sacred ground, the ABC being fringe media for chardonnay lefties and senile socialists.
The point in raising this is not to respond to Albrechtsen’s opinion. Rather it is to point out that the Murdoch media does the Liberal Party no favour in its blind defence of its far-right populist policies, and in its hostile reactions to those who criticize those policies. Machiavelli warned the prince not to dismiss his critics, but to listen to them. There is little chance of the Liberal Party reforming itself while its media champions ridicule the party’s critics.