Politics
Stop laughing at the Coalition: this is serious
Polls published this week have dire warnings for the Coalition and for Australia, but is anyone in the National or Liberal Parties taking any notice or are they living in a bubble trapped in a time warp?
Another by-election with miserable results
Last weekend came news that the Liberal Party has failed to win back the New South Wales state seat of Kiama in a by-election – a by-election necessitated by the resignation from Parliament of Gareth Ward who held the seat as an independent.
As a Liberal Ward won the seat off Labor in 2011, and held it as a Liberal in the 2015 and 2019 elections. After he was charged with serious sexual offences in 2022, he left the Liberal Party and successfully re-contested the seat as an independent in the 2023 election, but now that he has been prosecuted he has had to resign from Parliament.
The Liberals are making the best of their defeat, because the numbers show they enjoyed a 15 percent swing, but that brought their vote up to only 26 percent.
Labor won the seat comfortably. The Liberals hadn’t expected to win it back, but they were dismayed by their poor showing. True to form, attention within the party turned to the state party “leader”, Mark Speakman. The story is depressingly familiar: when a party fails because it is out of touch with the community, or because its policies don’t align with people’s values, blame the “leader”. Scapegoating is easier than reforming.
Just to confirm the Coalition’s problems, on Wednesday a Resolve Strategic poll, reported in William Bowe’s Poll Bludger, found that state-wide the Coalition’s vote is down to 28 percent. That means it hasn’t picked up since the 2023 election, even though we normally expect an opposition party’s support to improve over two years.
Then on Monday three federal polls (Newspoll, Resolve Strategic and Redbridge), also reported in Poll Bludger, showed terrible results for the federal Coalition. Support for Labor and the Greens is about where it was for the May election, but support for the Coalition is down by somewhere between 2 and 5 percent, to around 27 percent, while support for One Nation is up by about the same amount.[1]
One may believe that a party so on the nose with electors would try to re-establish its relevance, and that seems to be what Sussan Ley is doing. But there are forces within both the National Party and the Liberal Party working to undermine Ley. These seem to be people responding to a shrinking and ageing party base, and it is possible that their strategy has been reinforced by this apparent drift of support to One Nation, confirming their views that the party needs to move to a Trumpist right or to some 1950s conservatism. Climate change and immigration are their chosen issues.
Climate change
The conflicts within the Coalition are covered well in the media, including Karen Barlow’s Saturday Paperarticle “I despair for this party”: Inside Jacinta Price’s sacking.
Even though support for net zero emissions by 2050 had been Coalition policy when it was in office, climate change has been bubbling along as a divisive issue since the election.
The National Party seems to be firmly opposed. At first sight that’s a strange stance for a party whose supporters are among those most adversely affected by climate change. In comparison with the environmental effects of land clearing, cropping, more than 100 years of investment in roads, railroads and transmission lines, these new energy projects – windfarms, solar farms, batteries, transmission lines – have a minor imprint on the landscape, and can provide new sources of income for rural communities. But these projects have become rallying points for those who stoke the wider and established grievances of rural communities. These are old grievances that date back more than 100 years.
Renewable energy opponents find the most far-fetched reasons to oppose projects – their visual impact on landscapes already blighted by erosion and invasion of weeds, windfarms’ risk to birds (even though their nesting places were cleared decades ago), vastly exaggerated claims about loss of food-producing land, and when all else fails they refer to “fear and anxiety”.
A powerline would be an aesthetic improvement
Country people have some well-justified gripes with governments, state and federal, and it appears that they bundled them all into an opposition to renewable energy projects. For example last month legitimate complaints about state government policies were mobilized into an anti-Commonwealth protest against renewable energy in Ballarat, in which Albanese’s car was chased by angry farmers on tractors.
This means that climate change and renewable energy remain as issues of partisan division. It shouldn’t be. To organizations like the Business Council of Australia a 2050 net zero policy is a matter of providing a reliable framework to guide investment. Polling shows that the public are on board with the clean energy transition: electorally opposition to clean energy is a political liability.
But it remains as an issue to mobilize the Coalition’s base. The Queensland LNP government has stepped into the space once occupied by Premier Joh Bjelke Petersen, to use state power to thwart Commonwealth-backed renewable energy projects and to extend the lives of its coal-fired power stations. In other states Liberal Party state branches have been writing opposition to net zero into their platforms, and now Andrew Hastie has joined the fray on the side of opposition to net zero.
This movement makes no sense politically, but that doesn’t mean it’s beyond comprehension. Maybe it’s because Hastie, Taylor and others on the party’s far right live in echo chambers of party branch members and right-wing reactionary media. Or maybe it’s a part of a strategy to seize power – the little power of an opposition leader whose party holds only 18 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives – from Sussan Ley.
Either way it’s pathetic.
Immigration
Undeterred by poor polling results, members of the Coalition, most notably Jacinta Price, have opened up another front, this time on immigration. It’s a more complex issue than climate change, because while there are people concerned about the volume of immigration, there is also a spectrum of people opposed to multiculturalism, ranging from old men who yearn for a return to the Australia of 80 years ago when we welcomed “white”, “Christian” migrants from the “old country”, through to Nazis who make no attempt to wrap their racism in euphemisms.
Crispin Hull, for example, is one who pursues a civilized argument against high immigration, while expressing his support for multiculturalism and his disgust at the bigots and racists who have hijacked the debate. His latest post Progressives should support lower immigration clearly expresses his views – views which are undoubtedly shared by many other liberal Australians.
But such voices have been drowned out by those with other agendas, as pointed out in the roundup of 6 September which covered commentary on the March for Australia rallies. In those protests were some who naively believed that the marches were about immigration numbers, and at the other extreme, particularly in Melbourne, there were committed Nazis. In between there were many people holding aloft the Australian flag.
We still don’t have a clear picture of the flag wavers or their motivations. Their use of the flag stands out, because unlike Americans, British, Ukrainians, Germans and others, Australians don’t rally around the flag. That’s because it incorporates the flag of a foreign country, and its design was partially dictated by the government of that distant country. What stands out in those pictures of the demonstrations, where the Union Jack flies over people’s heads, is just how un-Australian it all seems.
Investigative reporters Danny Tran and Madi Chwasta confirm that neo-Nazi groups in Australia have close links to British neo-Nazis, including that country’s National Action, who use the Union Jack as one of their unifying symbols. It all looks like something imported from another country.
That is not to suggest that the flag wavers were sympathetic to Britain’s neo-Nazis, but it is to suggest that they fell for the bait of the flag, because it represented those days of a different Australia. Theirs is an emotional attachment to an imagined past, an attachment easily picked up by those who exploit people’s anxieties for political ends. There are also a few older people, including some migrants from the UK, who fail to recognize that there are huge cultural, political and ethnic differences between Britain and Australia (as there are between most countries), who believe that Australia has the same political issues as Britain. That country has some terrible problems with race relations, as we saw in huge Nazi demonstrations in London. But they are Britian’s problems, not ours, and we don’t want them imported here. We have our own Australian problems to deal with, and so far we have been dealing with multiculturalism very well. As the investigative journalist Paddy Manning writes:
As flag-bearing Australians marched through cities across the country chanting against mass immigration, some saw it as a sign the far-right movement was gaining traction.
But aspiring far-right politicians agree the nationalist, conservative movement is so fractured that a UK-style anti-immigration political party will struggle to emerge — particularly as Pauline Hanson's One Nation battles defections and a reputation for top-down decision-making.
Nevertheless the Coalition still has in its ranks people like John Howard who freely admits “I was never comfortable with multiculturalism” and who asserts that immigrants from the UK more easily fit into Australia than people from other countries. Tony Abbott has been more subtle, but as Patricia Karvelas explains in her post about Liberal Party tensions, he is uncomfortable about our non-discriminatory immigration policy.
These are the voices of past times. Until the Chifley government passed the Australian Citizenship ActAustralians were officially described as “British subjects” and travelled overseas with British passports. In the 1950s the Menzies government invited the British to use our country as a nuclear bomb testing site. In the days of tariff protection there was a system of preferential tariffs for Britain. Until 1974, when the Whitlam government passed the Privy Council (Appeals from the High Court) Act, decisions by our own High Court could be overturned – and often were overturned – by the British Privy Council. It was in 1975 that the Governor General turned to the court of the British monarch for advice that he would use to justify his serious breach of Australian political conventions. It was not until 1986, when the Hawke government passed the Australia Act, that we were finally free of the UK’s right to be involved in Australian legislation.
Even after 124 years our separation from colonialism is still incomplete – we don’t have our own head of state or even our own flag – and over this period it has always been the Coalition, or its pre-1944 predecessors, who have tried to hold on to colonial bonds and symbols.
That’s why Senator Price has been able to tap into this established political division to raise anxiety about multiculturalism and our non-discriminatory immigration policy. Some Liberal Party politicians, from Malcolm Fraser through to Malcolm Turnbull, asserted support for multiculturalism, but, as with climate change, there is still a party base who yearn for that imagined “white” and “British” past.
As is the case with opposition to net zero, dragging up the racism of earlier times is probably a dead end, because it is impossible to imagine the Liberal Party capturing back its urban seats while it dog-whistles about supposed undesirable aspects of “Asian” or “Middle Eastern” migrants.
A short excursion into electoral arithmetic confirms the folly of this move.
As pointed out in the roundup of 12 July, the Liberal Party holds only 7 of the House of Representatives 88 urban seats. These 7 seats comprise 2 of the 43 seats classified by the AEC as “inner metropolitan” (once the Liberal Party’s prosperous heartland), and 5 of the 45 seats classified as “outer metropolitan” (the traditional Labor seats that Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton hoped to win over).
As the graph below shows, assembled from 2021 Census data, it is in those metropolitan seats that our immigrants live, particularly immigrants from Asia and the Middle East.[2]
For example, 22 percent of people in inner-metropolitan electorates are from Asia and the Middle East, as are 17 percent of people in outer-metropolitan electorates. Because they are census figures they include many non-voters, such as children and visiting students, but they give a broad picture of electoral differences.
It is understandable that someone yearning for the imagined monocultural paradise of postwar Australia would view these figures with alarm. But a political pragmatist, conscious of the small swings that determine many outcomes, would be thinking of voters who don’t have a rusted-on history of party loyalty. If the Liberal Party still has any advisers who live outside the party bubble they would also be thinking of the preponderance of immigrants in small business.
When we look at the columns for “provincial” and “rural” electorates, however, we see a different ethnic composition – a composition that is more representative of an earlier Australia. The Coalition holds 36 of these 62 non-metropolitan seats.
Of those 36 seats 9 are held by the National Party and 16 by the Queensland LNP leaving only 11 held by the Liberal Party (one of them is Sussan Ley’s), which means that of its 18 members in the House of Representatives only 7 are from electorates with significantly large numbers of migrants.
Those figures probably go some way to explaining the Liberal Party’s present problems, and they add to the case for the party to dissolve itself and to re-constitute itself as representative of what Australia has become, not what it once was.
It’s a serious situation, in part because Labor is being given an easy run. It’s also serious because there is risk that the right may assemble around some extreme grouping. As Paddy Manning points out we have been fortunate that so far in Australia our far right has been undisciplined and has looked fairly shabby. And we are turned off by politicians’ attempts to replicate Trump’s style. But Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie, who would place themselves well on the right of Sussan Ley, come across as presentable and on message. Inexperienced and poorly-briefed journalists can be seduced by their articulate style and fail to see the fundamental flaws in their political and economic arguments.
1. These summary figures are based on a comparison with the 2025 election results. At first sight support for One Nation seems to be up between 4 and 6 percent, but some of this, perhaps 2 percent, is possibly from the Trumpet of Patriots, who were not covered in the polling, suggesting that One Nation support is up by 2 to 4 percent. ↩
2. The “other” category orange) includes the Americas, Oceania, and some countries in other continents from which we have taken very few immigrants, because the ABS census data identifies only 51 countries in its classification by electorate. ↩
Two media developments against public interest journalism
Without conspiring, Rupert Murdoch and Anthony Albanese have both moved against good journalism
The Murdoch family’s $3.4 billion Kumbaya
The big media news is about the Murdoch family’s settlement of its succession problem, explained in detail in a Conversation contribution by Andrew Dodd of Deakin University and Matthew Ricketson of the University of Melbourne: Murdoch resolves succession drama – a win for Lachlan; a loss for public interest journalism.
While the general interpretation is that Lachlan inherits his father’s iron grip on News Corp and Fox, the ABC’s Neil Chenoweth notes that the deal will involve Lachlan having to raise capital to finance his holding, which will result in some loss in the family’s voting stake: Murdochs resolve succession saga but family's hold on empire is vulnerable.
This may mean Lachlan’s politics may become more constrained by commercial interests, but that doesn’t suggest that there will be a shift towards good journalism, because there is a firm market for far-right propaganda and misinformation posing as journalism.
Writing in the Saturday Paper – What will Lachlan Murdoch do with his News Corp victory? – Jason Koutsoukis reports on Lachlan’s ideology:
Lachlan’s world view has hardened over time. Friends say he is instinctively conservative, sceptical of climate action, disdainful of social movements, convinced that part of the media’s job is to channel the grievances of those who feel ignored by elites. In the US, that posture is a financial winner. Fox News thrives on fuelling partisan anger, and mobilising the base is enough to deliver Republican victories. In Australia, the same strategy can have the unintended consequence of hollowing out conservative politics.
Quoting Bridget Griffen-Foley of Macquarie University, Koutsoukis suggests that even though the Murdoch empire is multinational, Lachlan will maintain a focus on Australian politics. Koutsoukis also draws from John Menadue, who, in his rich career, spent some time as General Manager of News Corp fifty years ago (when it was a very different company):
Menadue sees a man propelled by ideology and profit into ever-deeper polarisation. From this perspective, the “status quo” is not stability but escalation.
Albanese applies Putin’s media management methods
Imagine that you are a Canberra-based journalist, and you get a media drop from the government announcing a new policy. It includes an embargo, giving you time to prepare a story. You have your contacts – politicians from other parties, retired public servants with deep policy expertise, academics – who could add comments, such as exposure of assumptions on which the announcement is made, warnings of unintended consequences, historical precedents, findings from different research.
But the drop includes a restriction: “no third-party content permitted”. The pressure is on you to publish, doing no more than to re-arrange the wording on the drop so as to give the appearance of some journalistic value-added, knowing that journalists in other media are under the same pressure.
It's a textbook prisoners’ dilemma situation. The public interest, and your responsibility as a professional journalist, would be served if you all ignored drops with such instructions. But you also think of the consequences if you ignored a substantial story: it wouldn’t be a good career move.
Writing on the ABC website, Gareth Hutchens explains how the Albanese government has been increasingly imposing “no third-party content permitted” restrictions on important announcements, and how the federal press gallery has been meekly going along with these restrictions: The federal press gallery is ceding power to the Albanese government. Hutchens’ post includes a link to an 8-minute segment on the ABC’s Media Watchin which Linton Basser explains the practice in more detail.
The Albanese government didn’t start this practice, but it has expanded its use. And it’s not the only form of media manipulation: Coalition governments in the past have been prone to giving the Murdoch media favoured access to government information.
If we go back further there was a time when government media releases included a contact phone number of a public servant, usually a middle-ranking officer, who could provide details and background for journalists, but those days are long past. Government departments now have large media units, whose task is to provide a protective wall between public servants and the public and to maintain quality control on media spin.
There is no credible justification for these forms of media manipulation.
But the government’s resort to “no third-party content permitted” rules may have been prompted by the practice by some journalists guided by the idea of “balance” – a notion from the wasteland of moral relativism – who turn to the most strident critics of government policy for comment. That’s an effective way to kill a good policy proposal.
If I may add one gripe against journalists it’s the practice of reporting on a study or piece of research without providing a hyperlink, or even a reference which might allow an independent researcher to trace the source. These are the stories that start “A major study has found …”.
Islamophobia
Many Muslim Australians have been subject to social exclusion. Should our anti-discrimination legislation cover religion?
The report A National response to Islamophobia, authored by Islamophobia Envoy Aftab Malik, was presented last week.
Its recommendations to the Commonwealth are based on four findings. To quote:
Islamophobia engenders social exclusion, which leads to a degraded sense of personal safety, a deterioration in health, impaired performance in education and productivity in the workforce. It also corrodes a sense of belonging, citizenship and trust in government.
Islamophobia has far-reaching implications for all Australians because it produces an “us” and “them” dynamic, which undermines Australia’s core values such as mutual respect, inclusion, fairness and compassion.
Fear, hatred and the mistrust of Muslim Australians and Islam encourage people to act on fear instead of fact, and legitimise prejudice and dehumanisation.
Islamophobia is not a Muslim issue, but a social cohesion issue, and therefore a challenge for all Australians.
Hergott Springs Mosque, est 1882: Muslims have a long history in Australia
Its recommendations are mainly about raising awareness of Islamophobia among the public and in government departments and agencies. There are also some specific recommendations, such as specifically referring to Muslims in the Racial Discrimination Act. It recommends specific strengthening of online safety laws, and more official scrutiny of the media, but its recommendations are generally less prescriptive and interventionist that those in Jillian Segal’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism.
Mehmet Ozalp of Charles Sturt University summarizes the report in a Conversation post: Landmark report makes 54 recommendations to combat Islamophobia in Australia. Now government must act.
The ABC’s Tom Crowley draws attention to one specific concern in his post: Islamophobia envoy calls for religious discrimination laws, review of approach to counter-terrorism. In particular Malik’s report has a number of recommendations calling for protection against religious discrimination.
Crowley reminds readers that Albanese remains reluctant to legislate for protection of religious belief, because he doesn’t want to do so unless he can gain Coalition support. Understandably Albanese wants to avoid the scare campaigns and misinformation that the Coalition would mount if he legislated without their support, but it’s strange that a government with such a strong majority, confronted by a disunited Coalition classified as an “opposition”, so frequently falls back on the need for Coalition support. That is not to say that Labor will remain in office forever, but the likelihood of the mob presently guiding Coalition policies ever forming executive government is remote. Albanese should break from the idea of bipartisanship and acknowledge that there are many other voices in Parliament than the two old party gatherings.
Otherwise we don’t know how much specific action will come about in response to the report’s recommendations. Raising awareness is a slow task, and it does not generate specific “deliverables”. But the report is a reminder that over the years Australians have been conditioned by graphic and emotive media reports which have led people to associate Islam with terrorism. It also brings to our attention the extent of anti-Islam prejudice in our community – incidents that don’t come to the attention of people living in comfortable middle-class multicultural communities, but which are recorded in the Islamophobia Register.
Political language in Australia
The slow passing of “White Australia” in revealed in 124 years of changing labguage.
Frank Bongiorno was a guest on last weekend’s Saturday Extra in a session What language is acceptable in politics, and how has it changed?
A changing view through the window
It’s a discussion of the shifting shape of the “Overton window”. That is the space in which the topics of public discourse, and the language used in that discourse, have licence to be aired in the public forum.
Bongiorno traces the discourse around the White Australia policy from its inception at Federation, through to its echoes in the recent anti-immigration demonstrations.
The early language about the nation’s ethnic composition was explicitly and unashamedly racist. Politicians of all persuasions referred to the need for “a united race”, and warned about the hazard of “racial contamination”. Later in the twentieth century that language gave way to rationalization about White Australia (“It’s really about protecting workers’ wages”.)
Bongiorno and Bryant refer to an infamous statement in 1947 by Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell, but out of sensitivity for ABC listeners they dare not quote it. I don’t either, but I do provide a hyperlink to a comment on the statement, which raises important questions about the context in which such a statement is made, the way it is recorded, and the way clever rhetoric is interpreted.
In one way Bongiorno’s account is a heartening reminder of the extent to which public attitudes to ethnicity and “race” (whatever that means) have shifted over time.
It’s also about the way language shifts. Words that were in common use just two or three generations ago are now seen as grossly offensive. What some people see as a “woke” restriction on language is usually simply a shift in what people see as language that’s polite and respectful.
And there are movements in the other direction: in the 1960s there was an uproar when a popular musical playing at Australian theatres used the word “bloody”. The Overton window is constantly changing, not only to accommodate a few swear words, but also to allow easier discussions on matters to do with sexuality, death and other matters related to public wellbeing.
Fortunately in Australia we have never been so woke as to call a toilet a “restroom”.
The murder of Charlie Kirk and its consequences
It was a senseless murder, but it doesn’t relate to any “left” movement.
Right-wing media have had plenty to say about Charlie Kirk’s murder – much more than they had to say about the murder and attempted murder of Minnesota Democratic state lawmakers and their spouses just three months ago.
For a less emotive account and commentary one can turn to George Packer’s Atlantic contribution, The tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s killing, which he describes as a disaster for the country. He acknowledges Kirk’s talents: “he had a feel for the political pulse of his moment, a demagogic flair, and the courage to take on all comers in argument.”
In acknowledging his competencies Packer does not defend Kirk’s behaviour, such as his vile depiction of Martin Luther King, or his “assault on everything that democracy’s remaining believers should hold dear”. But that does not excuse his murder:
Those who disagreed with Kirk ought to be able to deplore what he stood for and also the violence that killed him.
No-one claiming to adhere to liberal principles can justify punishment without process or capital punishment.
What stood out about Kirk was his willingness to go to places where few MAGA supporters dare to go. That is to the credit of universities – could you imagine the Conservative Political Action Conference inviting one its critics to speak and hold a Q&A session at its gathering in Brisbane next week?
But we should not imagine that Kirk’s university sessions were guided by the conventions of academic discourse – openness, scepticism, a quest for truth, adherence to rules of rational argument. As Bruce Shapiro points out on Late Night Live discussing the fallout from his murder, Kirk’s gift was his ability to present views that most people consider to be reprehensible: replacement theory, the idea that the occasional school massacre is a small price to pay for the right to bear arms, reference to political rivals as “maggots”, “vermin” and “swine”, and demented ideas about Jewish conspiracies.
Writing in The Conversation Jared Mondschein of the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney describes Kirk’s effectiveness in mobilizing young men to vote for Trump. He was no lone wolf: by last year his Turning Point USA political outfit had a revenue of $US85 million and 7 million social media followers. This was, and still is, big business.
Anyone looking at Trump’s dwindling support base (regularly updated on The Economist website) may believe that Kirk had little success in his university appearances. Trump’s support is miserably low among young people and graduates, but Kirk’s success seems to have been in mobilizing a small base of students, mostly male, to get out and vote. Universities are (or should be) places of open discussion, but it is a mistake to believe that everyone on campus is a liberal. In fact the mind of a first year undergraduate, particularly one who has come from a home where learning is not highly valued, is fertile ground for indoctrination.
Mondschein’s article Charlie Kirk’s assassination is the latest act of political violence in a febrile United Statesis set in the context of a resurgence of political violence in that country. As pointed out by The Economist, drawing on data from The Prosecution Project, perpetrators of political violence are overwhelmingly from the right.
Like Packer, Mondschein fears that Kirk’s death will further inflame the present cycle of polarization and political violence. This risk is heightened by the circulating idea that Kirk’s killer was a member of some well-organized left-wing organization. In introducing the Late Night Live session David Marr asks if this killing is America’s “Reichstag moment”, referring to the 1933 incident when the Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe, acting alone, set fire to the Reichstag, giving Hitler the licence to suspend civil liberties and consolidate his grip on power.
Another aspect of Kirk’s influence is covered by Gordon Lynch of the University of Edinburgh in a Conversationcontribution: Charlie Kirk: why the battle over his legacy will divide even his most ardent admirers. He points out that Kirk has become a source of inspiration for the movement known as “white Christian nationalism”.
It’s never easy to describe this movement. It’s perhaps best understood if one disregards the liberating message of the Christian New Testament – the Sermon on the Mount, the story of the Good Samaritan – and regards the term “Christian” as a purloined brand name to cover authoritarianism, racism, intolerance and anti-intellectualism. It is stronger in the USA than in Australia: according to Pew Center surveys 64 percent of Americans describe themselves as “Christian”, while in Australia the figure is 47 percent. (Some surveys suggest the gap is even wider – 77 percent compared with 44 percent according to Wikipedia, which also relies on Pew data.) If there is a similar movement in Australia it is probably among those who have been waving the flag at demonstrations, who see the Union Jack as a rallying point for a reversion to white Christians of British stock as a source of migrants.