Australia’s shifting political landscapes
Niki Savva on the media and political fragmentation
Journalist and author Niki Savva once described herself as a “conservative leftie”. She could also be described as a strong supporter of the Liberal Party – not the Liberal Party as it has become under the influence of Abbott, Morrison and Dutton, but the Liberal Party as it once was, the “broad church” led by John Gorton, John Hewson and Malcolm Turnbull.
From that lonely vantage point she was invited to deliver the 2024 Speaker’s Lecture, for which she chose the title Survival in the age of mistrust. (That link takes you to the lecture: the formalities start at 16 minutes, her address starts at 23 minutes, and just on the hour there is a short Q&A session. The Sydney Morning Herald has a transcript of her speech on its website.)
There are two themes in her speech. The first is about the general political and media landscape in Australia; the second is about possible ways our political systems will develop.
Noting that Australia has strong institutions of democracy, she asks:
So why do so many politicians and media wilfully or recklessly seek to undermine all that has been achieved by peaceful means over more than 120 years?
Why do warriors of left and right trawl for fights, whether on gender, climate change, immigration, race or religion?
She goes on to state:
Privately, they confess they believe politics is pointless without conflict. The last thing they want is resolution.
Obviously, policies of substance have to be robustly debated, but today it’s the culture wars that excite passion, commitment and misinformation.
Battlelines are defined by feelings not facts. The sensible centre is disenfranchised and disillusioned. The consequences are deeply worrying.
Trust between politicians and people, between politicians and journalists, between journalists and their audiences is being eroded by those who thrive on discord, who avoid, distort or hide the truth or hunt for clicks rather than facts.
Many others make similar observations, but they often stop there, afraid that if they go further they might offend someone, or be seen as partisan, but Savva demands that they don’t stop there:
If institutions or individuals fail in their obligations, they should be called out and constructive suggestions offered for improvements.
She goes on to call out Dutton’s behaviour in undermining trust in institutions – his attacks on the Electoral Commission, the CSIRO, ASIO.
She calls out the Murdoch media, but she also has a message for other less stridently partisan media (the ABC perhaps?). In her advice to journalists she criticizes the insipid notion of “balance”.
Don’t publish lies then claim it’s balance. Also balance is not refusing to run one side because the other side fails to turn up.
If you do your job well, you will upset people, you will be called names like tory bitch or fat arsed bitch, you will be abused online, you will lose contacts, you will inevitably lose friends. But you will also win respect.
She notes the slow decay in support for the two old parties (a decay many journalists seem to ignore, because it’s too hard to fit into their two-party model based on competing football teams), and the way those parties have changed:
Realignments have already rendered parties unrecognisable to their creators. The Coalition looks more and more like One Nation, Labor more and more like the Liberals used to, the Greens have morphed into Labor’s old-guard Left.
This situation is unstable, and in a message to all who cannot see what’s happening she reminds us that:
There is no law that says political parties must survive. All badly run or led enterprises inevitably collapse. Sometimes it’s desirable.
She develops several scenarios about the ways our political systems will change – maybe with parties’ death and resurrection, the coalescence of new parties, the end of tight party discipline, an enduring and growing influence of independents.
Anything and everything is possible.
What’s up with the Greens: have they peaked?
“Populist politics, once the curse of other less fortunate countries, has now consumed two of Australia’s three main parties: the Liberal-National coalition under Peter Dutton, and the Greens under Adam Bandt”.
That’s how Martyn Goddard introduces his most recent post: Have the Greens already peaked?.
As has often been covered in these roundups, support for the two old party groupings has been on a long-term decline, and in the 2022 election the Greens managed to win four seats in the House of Representatives, while consolidating their representation in the Senate.
Armed with the confidence that comes with electoral success, the Greens have taken on what Goddard calls “hard-left populism”, noting their stances on Gaza and their dalliances with the CFMEU.
I disagree with his use of the term “left”, because Hamas, as a religious-based misogynist authoritarian movement is on the hard right, and the CFMEU is about as “left” as the Ndrangheta mafia. The term “radical” may be more fitting. But that doesn’t detract from Goddard’s detailed analysis.
Goddard warns that “Populism and liberal democracy do not fit well together. This is why the opportunistic populism of the Coalition and, now, of the Greens, is so dangerous.”
The Greens seem to be hoping that their hard-line stances may help win them more inner urban seats, but Goddard is doubtful. Drawing on Redbridge’s analysis, he looks at four seats the Greens have their eye on – Macnamara (Port Melbourne through to St Kilda), Sturt (between Adelaide CBD and the hills), Perth (Perth inner suburbs), and Wills (Brunswick to the M80 ring road). The Greens have done reasonably well in three of these seats, but he doesn’t see much sign that the Green vote will improve and that these seats will flip. Their move to causes on the fringe is unlikely to pick up any new voters. He’s also doubtful about their ability to hold on to the Brisbane electorate.
Goddard’s analysis is confirmed by the political insights time series conducted by Essential. At the 2022 election the Greens’ primary vote was 13 percent. After the election it rose to about 15 percent, where it held for about a year, but it is now back to where it was in 2022. Polls for small parties aren’t very accurate – that’s to do with the mathematics of sampling – but the trends are reasonably clear. The Green vote is stabilizing back at around 13 percent, and even among young voters it has come off its post-election highs.
Goddard concludes:
If there’s a danger point for the survival of minor parties, the Greens – despite their current success – could be approaching theirs. There was no obvious need for them to switch their tactics so drastically. Now, having made that enormous bet, they and the electorate will find whether the party can maintain its previous trajectory of growth or, like its predecessors, fade away.