Politics
The ruptured world order
Trump with his MAGA myrmidons in America, and Putin in Russia, have worked together to wreck the world economic and political order. Australia must adapt.
If you have 19 minutes to spare you could spend them listening to Mark Carney’s speech at the Davos forum.
His speech is about the “rupture” of the world order – a world order that for 82 years had done an imperfect but effective job in governing relations between nations. Maybe the realpolitik is that the order was unsustainable: Carney draws on Thucydides in support of this idea. And whether the rupture was inevitable or not, Trump and his supporters have pushed it along – although Carney does not mention Trump’s name.
These roundups are generally confined to Australian economic and political issues, but it would be remiss if anyone in government, in organizations trying to influence government, or in political parties seeking office, were to ignore Carney’s speech as if we can go on with business as usual.
The implications for foreign and defence policy, including AUKUS, are clear. So too, but in more complex ways, are the implications for energy policy, for industry policy, and for fiscal policy called on to fund a larger defence budget.
On Saturday Extra last weekend Malcolm Turnbull spoke about what the end of the order means, or should mean, for public policy in Australia. (His comments on the speech start at about seven and a half minutes, the first half of his session being about the Coalition’s chaos.) Turnbull would like our prime minister to give a similar speech.
Carney’s speech has brought forth plenty of commentary from political scientists. Writing in The Conversation Shannon Brincat of the University of the Sunshine Coast summarises its implications for middle powers like Australia. Mark Shanahan of the University of Sydney contrasts Trump’s and Carney’s presentations at Davos, as does Emma Shortis of RMIT University: Trump sows “chaotic cruelty” while Canadian PM Carney reminds the world it doesn’t have to play along. And Neville Morley of the University of Exeter, UK, questions Carney’s interpretation if Thucydides. That debate has been running for 2500 years, and is unlikely to be settled before the next US presidential election.
Our government has announced that Carney will be visiting Australia in March, speaking to Parliament. Is it possible that by then the Liberal Party might be prepared to start thinking about foreign and economic policy?
The smouldering wreckage on Capital Hill
I don’t wanna play in your yard/
The Coalition, as we have known it, is probably beyond repair. But centre-right politics has a future if our political classes break from the assumption that we must have a “Westminster” parliamentary system.
Commenting on the chaos of the special post-Bondi sitting of Parliament, Malcolm Turnbull referred to the Coalition as a “smouldering wreckage”.
The government had set some traps for the Coalition, but they needn’t have bothered, because the party’s strategists brought it all on themselves. Prompted by Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce, they decided to use the Bondi murders as a way to attack Labor, and to portray Albanese as “weak”. They insisted on a quick recall of Parliament to enact laws against racial vilification.
Had they thought through the way it would play out, they would have realized that condemning the hatred of antisemitism while directing a hate campaign against the elected government carries dissonant messages. They would have realized that legislating against racial vilification is politically difficult, particularly when some of the Coalition’s support from the right can be traced to white supremacists and nazis. They would have recalled the problems raised by faith-based groups, and by free speech libertarians when the question of racial vilification had come before Parliament in earlier times: having promised so much they were bound to disappoint those Jewish voices calling for tough action. And they would have known that the National Party was bound to resist firearms control.
Unsurprisingly it all blew up over just a couple of days. That was a catastrophe waiting to happen, because the forces that tore the Coalition apart have been building up over a long period, concerning not only right-wing parties, but more basically the “Westminster” conventions that have become increasingly detached from Australia’s political reality.
Each of the two parties that comprised the “Coalition” have their own views of these developments, covered separately below, followed by the view that may be taken by an observer who is not laden with assumptions about the Westminster two party system.
As the National Party sees it
Over most of the last 125 years the Country Party, later to become the National Party, has been in some form of coalition arrangement with the Liberal Party and its predecessors. In terms of Parliamentary numbers it has generally been the junior partner, but it has wielded disproportional influence because the Liberal Party has rarely been in a position to govern in its own right. Writing in The ConversationLinda Botterill of ANU describes this history, bringing us up to date with the current conflicts. She uses the metaphor of a marriage that has gone bad: journalists are extending the metaphor to refer to a couple trying to get back together. The marriage metaphor falls down somewhat, because in a wedding vows are exchanged in public, but the Liberal-National agreement has always been secret.
For now strategists in the National Party feel inclined to show their power. While the Liberal Party has been clobbered in the last two federal elections the National Party has held up comparatively well. In 2019 the Liberals won 45 House of Representatives seats, the National Party 10, and the LNP in Queensland 21. In last year’s election the Liberals’ representation was reduced to 18 seats, while the Nationals held 9 seats, and the LNP 16.
In raw numbers, the Liberal Party has lost its base, while the National Party’s base, particularly in rural Queensland and rural New South Wales, has held up – perhaps even consolidated.
The other emboldening factor has been the growing popularity of One Nation, confirmed in polls taken after the federal election and showing up more strongly in polls taken since the Bondi murders, but before the Coalition collapse. The figures from these recent polls, taken from William Bowe’s Poll Bludger, are in the table below.
Although both the Coalition and Labor lost support, while One Nation surged, Labor’s relative strength in TPP terms (particularly in Newspoll which seems to carry most authority among the commentariat), suggested that One Nation picked up support mainly from the Coalition, and in view of the demographic similarity of National/LNP electorates and those electorates where One Nation has strong support, it’s a reasonable inference that it’s the Nationals who were losing support to One Nation.
Wednesday’s Poll Bludger covered four polls taken during or just after the bust-up. They suggest there has been a small movement back to Labor, a further loss in support for the “Coalition” (pollsters may need to refine their categories), and further support for One Nation.
Jason Falinski, former president of the New South Wales Liberal Party, says on Radio National that the National Party has been “freaked out” by those poll numbers, and is trying to occupy One Nation territory, hoping that they can drag the Liberals to come along with them.
The media and political parties are probably over-estimating the extent to which polls indicate support for One Nation. The Australian Election Study has polls on people’s support for political parties, and while our feelings about the established parties are roughly neutral on a like-dislike scale, our feelings towards One Nation are distinctly in the “dislike” zone. A response to a pollster indicating support for a fringe party is a politically costless way to register discontent, that may not be replicated in a real ballot.
But the political establishment takes polls seriously. So the Nationals have sought to differentiate themselves from what they portray as the woke Liberal Party. Firearms control provides a case in point. At first sight it makes little sense for the any party to oppose tighter firearms control, because as reported in the last roundup, everyone, including National Party voters, wants stronger control of firearms: in fact country people probably feel more threatened by firearms than city people because there are so many weapons out in the bush. But that’s not the point, which is about political differentiation. (Not that the Liberals had any intention of supporting the government’s firearms bill.)
So too on hate speech. The idea that the National Party would take a principled stand on any aspect of civil liberties is risible. But a wide interpretation of the government’s already watered-down legislation suggests it could throttle free speech – a point made strongly by the Greens, and by constitutional expert Anne Twomey. Again it has been a point of differentiation. And it gives some comfort to those who want to spout white supremacist idas, antisemitism, and scare campaigns about threats from hordes of armed African youth, even though the government, under pressure from the Liberals, dropped racial vilification from its legislation.
So the Coalition, at least the coalition with a capital “C”, has come apart. The conflict during the two-day special sitting of Parliament, involving rules about “shadow cabinet” loyalty, are described in forensic detail in a Saturday Paper article by Karen Barlow: Inside the Coalition split. To the outside observer the conflict seems to be about arbitrary administrative rules, making as much sense as a long-term friendship torn apart by a spelling dispute in a social Scrabble game. But as Niki Savva points out on Saturday Extra, the conflict between the parties was going to happen some time, over some issue, because the basic differences between the parties have become irreconcilable. Crispin Hull’s article on his website explores ways that the parties could get back together, but he seems to conclude that it’s the beginning of the end for the Nationals.
Maybe, but they remain strong in rural Queensland, the Northern Territory, and northern rural New South Wales. A pity that most Australians live somewhere else.
As the Liberals see it
The political aphorism for the start of the 2026 year is that the Liberals cannot form government without the Nationals, and that they can cannot form government with them.
The first part seems to be right – the only time in recent history when the Liberals had a House of Representatives majority – 68 seats in the 127-seat chamber – was after the 1975 election. The prospect that the Albanese government would do anything that verged on the incautious daring of the Whitlam government is too hard to imagine, as is the prospect that Government-General Sam Moyston would conspire with a foreign monarch to unseat an elected Australian government.
How about the other possibility – getting back together with the Nationals, and doing some preference deals with One Nation, to pursue a Farage/Trump populist right-wing agenda? Consider those poll averages: Coalition plus One Nation = 46 percent. That’s better than Labor + Green = 42 percent.
But it doesn’t work like that, and the numbers people in the Liberal Party know it. For a start, apart from a few Coalition seats held on the outer urban fringes, neither the Coalition nor One Nation have a strong urban base, in a country where two-thirds of the population live in big cities – cities with large immigrant populations and where people have increasingly turned away from established political parties.
On Radio National Linda Botterill put the issue in the way that a detached Liberal Parry strategist might. Perhaps it’s the way Menzies saw it in 1944 when he built the Liberal Party out of the smouldering ruins of the United Australia Party. Botterill captures the same spirit:
Maybe the Coalition has run its course as a marriage, and needs to be something much more flexible. If they are two independent parties they do need to be acting like independent parties. In international terms the Australian Coalition is an absolute anomaly. Everywhere else in the world when minor parties go into coalition they do so after an election in order to form government and they negotiate around points of policy, the composition of their ministers and so on.
Their looking at One Nation as a threat suggests a move to the right politically by the Coalition. That’s not going to do the Liberals any favours in those seats that it needs to win in the inner cities.
The Liberals really copped a walloping at last year’s election. Being in coalition with the Nationals, particularly as the Nationals are showing every inclination of moving to the right, is not going to help them win those seats back.
Both parties would see that they’ve got very little chance of beating Albanese at the next election, whether they’re in coalition or not. So this looks like a really good opportunity for the Liberals particularly to do some policy soul-searching and work out exactly what their values are and what they stand for, and then go back into coalition when they’re ready in a much stronger position.
Botterill’s prescription for the Liberals is right, and Jason Falinski makes much the same point: the Liberals should go it alone and see if the Nationals want to join them. But the trouble with Botterill-Falinski prescription is that the decision will be made by the Liberal Party’s survivors in Parliament, a caucus that excludes “moderates” such as Falinski and others who lost their seats.
Shoving the National Party off to the la-la land of One Nation deals with only one part of the Liberals’ problem, because within the ranks of the surviving Liberals are those who want to take their party in the same direction. As Turnbull puts it in a Saturday Extra conversation with Nick Bryant, these are the people he describes as the “angry populist right”, whose policy views are reinforced by the culture war battles played out on Sky News. (He describes Sky News as “the best thing that ever happened to the Labor Party”).
So the media talk is of a challenge to Sussan Ley’s leadership. Although the petulant behaviour has been by the Nationals, Ley has become the scapegoat for the Coalition’s problems.
And there’s gender: surely it’s a bit off for the Liberal Party, the party of real men, to be headed by a woman. So like two stud bulls fighting for dominance in a small paddock, two men are getting ready for a challenge. One has been spending his time developing weird and internally contradictory economic theories, and the other has been dog-whistling ideas about a return to White Australia, but they are united in their visceral hatred of renewable energy and in their gender. Just to be helpful, Tony Abbott is urging them to decide between them who is going to rid the Liberal Party of Sussan Ley.
Speaking on The Guardian’s “Full Story” podcast, Malcolm Turnbull describes the Liberal Party’s problems – problems they have brought down on themselves, largely because the Party’s right has immersed itself in the Sky News bubble. He is critical of Ley for having caved in to the right after the Bondi murders. But he doesn’t join the chorus calling for her to be replaced: the pool of talent to lead the Parliamentary Party “is not enormous”, and there is no assurance that changing the leader will solve its problems.
The irony of the challenge to Ley’s authority is that she is probably the model of a National Party MP. Her Farrer electorate, stretching from the Snowy Mountains to the South Australian border, is about as rural as you can get. She has worked in woolsheds, she has been a stock mustering pilot, she has lived on a farm with her husband. But she is being challenged by members of a party whose caucus is dominated by former police officers, salesmen and others with desk-bound occupations – people who would feel lost in a woolshed, who have never saddled a horse, and who wouldn’t know the difference between a flap and an aileron. Mark Kenny and Judith Brett explain on Late Night Live that although its members have adopted Akubra hats as cultural symbols, their constituency is the mining industry, particularly the coal industry. It’s a long time since it was the Country Party.
A more detached view – the end of Westminster
Since Trump’s inauguration (was it really only a year ago?) Australians have watched with wonder as the US slides into authoritarian dictatorship. How could this happen in a country with a constitution specifically designed to entrench the separation of powers? Apart from some quaint habits – using an incomprehensible system of weights and resting in lavatories – Americans aren’t all that different from Australians, but they have created a political disaster for themselves, largely because they have solidified an impenetrable two-party system. Isn’t it obvious that they need an independent electoral commission, ranked-choice voting, and compulsory voting – none of which are constitutionally proscribed?
The answer lies in the inertia of political traditions, such as their party primary systems. In any country there is huge institutional investment in political systems – by political parties, by public servants, by academics, and by the media.
A foreigner – say from Germany or the Netherlands – looking at our systems may observe that although in Australia we have a constitution that says nothing about political parties, oppositions, shadow cabinet, bipartisanship, or the Westminster system, our political parties, and our political class, including journalists and academics, behave as if we do have a constitutionally prescribed Westminster two-party system.
That’s a system borrowed from a country with a different history and a different culture. In its time Westminster did a reasonably good job when the main political differences were on lines of economic class, and when there was a basic settlement on which the dominant parties agreed. But it falls down in complex democracies where there are many lines of political differences to be resolved.
Our foreign observer might look at our long-term electoral history in terms of the primary vote for the two parties, going back to 1946, when the two-party system was established, minor parties on the right having been absorbed into the Liberal-dominated Coalition. (I have been showing this graph in previous roundups, and each time the lines descend a little more.)
At last year’s election the combined Labor-Coalition vote fell to 67 percent, meaning that one-third of voters went for some other party or for someone else. In doing so they managed to get 15 independents and “minor” party members elected to the 150 seat House of Representatives.
Let’s turn back to that table based on opinion polls, and add the Coalition and Labor votes. Their combined total, based on the poll averages, is 56 percent – 11 percentage points down from the election.
It’s hard not to conclude that Australia is well along the path to becoming a multi-party democracy.
In fact we’ve already been there. Labor had to deal with it in 2010 when it formed a minority government negotiated with support from independents. The present Labor government, holding 94 of the 150 House of Representatives seats has not had to confront the prospect of minority government.
It’s an issue for parties on the right, however, as Casey Briggs explains in a post The Nationals split shows the foundations of right-wing politics are shifting, where he outlines the options for the parties on the right – basically to re-unite or to go their own way. He also suggests there is an Option C, which is “the beginning of something bigger”.
Although he doesn’t specify it, that something bigger could be a departure from assumed “left” or “right” coalitions of any sort.
Liberals, Nationals, and many in One Nation are still thinking in terms of a “right” coalition, and indeed that is a common pattern in many countries, including New Zealand. The trouble with that model is that when the right tries to form a coalition, it has to move further and further to the right to bring in supporters, and those on most extreme fringes enjoy disproportionate power in negotiations. That winner-take-all (and more) model doesn’t work out well in a democracy like Australia where the dominant public mood is centrist.
It doesn’t have to be that way. There are other patterns in European democracies, where parties on the left and right agree to rule out forming coalitions or deals with parties on the extreme fringes, such as the Communists and Alternative für Deutschland. In fact just in the last few days in the ACT the Liberals and the Greens have been quietly talking about forming government. At this stage it’s not a serious proposal, but it’s a reminder to the long-standing Labor minority government that there is no one pattern of coalition formation.
Is our wider political establishment ready for such thinking?[1]
1. In Radio National’s weekly political panel on Friday 23 January Phil Coorey of the Financial Review, Jason Koutsoukis of the Saturday Paper and Melissa Clarke of the ABC were discussing the week’s political events. It’s a rich discussion on the complexities of the Coalition split, but it’s Melissa Clarke who raises the heretical idea that the two-party system has probably had its day. ↩
The rehabilitation of Australia’s extreme right
A partisan response to the Bondi murders paved the path to political respectability for Nazis and other white supremacists.
Within 24 hours of the Bondi murders, before the police had even laid charges against the surviving gunman, there was an explanation for the murders. It was the result of a wave of antisemitism, fuelled by radical Muslim clerics, reinforced by pro-Palestinian groups sympathetic to Hamas terrorists, and the Albanese Labor government is to blame for the murders because it has been so permissive towards antisemitism.
In fact we don’t know, and even after the trials, the report of the “royal” commission, and research reports by academics, we will be only a little closer than we are now to understanding how these murders may have been avoided.
This simple explanation had traction because it satisfied so many interests – Liberal, National and One Nation politicians who wanted to land a blow against Labor, some members of Australia’s Jewish community who wanted to equate support for Palestinians with antisemitism, the New South Wales government who didn’t want too much attention paid to possible failures in their responsibilities to protect the public, and bigots seeking a Trumpian ban on Muslim immigration – or even any non-“white” immigration.
It was therefore convenient for these groups to turn a blind eye to the rise of more serious right-wing extremism – Nazis draped in the “Australian” flag who marched to an anti-Jewish demonstration in front of the New South Wales Parliament House, Nazis who planned to kidnap the prime minister, the Nazis who shouted racist insults at Australia Day rallies.
Most seriously, someone tried to kill demonstrators at an Invasion Day demonstration. The improvised explosive device thrown at demonstrators was designed to kill and maim. It seems that it’s only a stroke of luck that it failed to detonate and cause mass casualties – another mass killing, motivated by racial, cultural or ethnic hatred. But the response by the media and by politicians has been muted. There is no call for Anthony Albanese or Roger Cook to resign, no call for a “royal” commission, no sign of blame assigned to a particular ethnic group. The asymmetry of responses to these two hate-inspired events says something disconcerting about our society. On Radio National Anne Aly, Minister for Multicultural Affairs (who is also a counter-terrorism expert) explains the way this asymmetry contributes to social fragmentation, rather than to social cohesion.
This narrow focus – on certain Muslim fanatics spreading antisemitism – ignores the reality that the same fanatics are also spreading hate against other “infidels”, including Muslims who don’t follow their perverted ideology. It ignores non-Muslims engaged in antisemitism, including those who were engaged in anti-Jewish rants at rallies on Australia Day.
There is strong evidence that Nazis are closely involved with the March for Australia movement. But when members of Liberal and National wing parties are cosying up to One Nation they don’t want too much attention to be drawn to these sources of antisemitism and more widespread forms of racism.
Writing on his Substack – Thermidor: cultural counter-revolution in the age of Trump –Robert Manne asks how long Australia can fend off the populist right-wing movements that have flourished in Europe, running on racist anti-immigration platforms. He notes that while “moderate Liberals and Nationals, led by Sussan Ley, are sincere supporters of multiculturalism and colour-blind migration”, there are others, including leadership aspirant Andrew Hastie, urging these parties to take a harder line:
Recently, when stepping down from Sussan Ley’s frontbench, Hastie made an ominous remark. Because of what he called “unsustainable migration”, he claimed that “we are starting to feel like strangers in our own home”. I do not believe that Hastie meant that migrants from England or Italy would make “Australians” feel like “strangers” in their “own home”. Hastie’s words involved a quiet, Geoffrey Blainey-like attack on both multicultural Australia and its current colour-blind migration. His seemingly mild remark is far more dangerous than Pauline Hanson’s vicious, Islamophobic, burka-in-parliament stunt. Regarding the possibility of a Far-Right Australian party-political future, an Andrew Hastie-led Coalition, relying on the second preferences of One Nation and perhaps their Senate numbers, seems the most plausible current danger.
It is in the context of running their own racist agenda that politicians on the right have tended to overlook Nazis’ antisemitism and other hate speech. The Nazis’ explicit extremism prises open the window for a softer campaign waged not by muscle-bound thugs in black uniforms, but by well-groomed articulate men in smart suits – a campaign couched in the language of “Australian values” rather than the strident language of the National Socialists and Trump’s MAGA loudmouths.
In fact, Martyn Goddard suggests in his essay The resistable rise of the modern fascist, that the threat to democracy comes not from Nazis, who he identifies as a particular party, but from the broader movement, fascism, that prevails in authoritarian regimes – regimes that gain office in elections, running on populist campaigns focussed on malevolent outsiders.
The pathway to fascism has some recognisable, common elements. There must be a single, charismatic leader in control of everything. Outsiders – migrants, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, political outcasts – are relentlessly targeted and blamed for the country’s ills. And the promises: once the great leader achieves power, the disaffected mass of ordinary people will bask in the warm sunlight of prosperity and fulfilment. The immigrants will be deported, housing stress will disappear, the economy will be supercharged, prices will fall and the trains will run on time.
It’s a general statement, referring to European movements such as Alternative für Deutschland and Britain’s Reform. To adapt it to Australia’s present situation, a couple of grammatical tweaks are necessary. “Jews” can be replaced by “Asians” and reference to Mussolini’s promise to run the trains on time can be dropped, because our trains are beyond resurrection, having fallen victims to the “small government” ideology.
The good news is that Australia’s far right may be leaving their assault on multiculturalism too late – perhaps thirty or fifty years too late – as pollster Kos Samaras explains on Late Night Live: Multicultural Australia under strain. The right’s tactics might help consolidate the National Party and One Nation vote in some non-metropolitan electorates, particularly in Queensland, but it won’t go down well in urban seats the Coalition has lost to Labor and independents, where multiculturalism enjoys strong support among native and immigrant Australians. Samaras reminds us that within four years, just in Victoria, there will be a million Chinese and Indian Australians enrolled to vote. There may even be enough in Dan Tehan’s electorate to see him replaced by an independent. (His margin against independent Dyson is only 3.3 percent.)
Searching for Labor
Sean Kelly looks at how the Albanese government operates, finding a culture of caution and conservatism that’s at odds with Labor’s traditional image.
Sean Kelly’s Quarterly Essay – The good fight, what does Labor stand for? – helps answer a question that has been bugging political scientists, who have known that as people age their political inclinations become more conservative. So why is it that in recent elections, this drift to the right has not been happening? Why are Gens X and Y – aged 30 to 60 – not moving to the Coalition as they age? This is one of the questions posed in the Australian Election Study.
The answer is in Kelly’s essay. Federal Labor, Albanese’s Labor, is a conservative party. Its approach to policy reform is incremental; consensus is to be sought where possible; policies carrying ideological labels are to be avoided. He writes “as others have noted, Labor has cast itself as a version of what the conservatives once were, the defenders of the way things are”.
Anyone who lived through the excitement of the Whitlam government, or the reforming zeal of the Hawke-Keating government, would be struck by Kelly’s description, but on reflection would see it as insightful. In fact it’s not just alongside previous incarnations of Labor that the Albanese government is conservative. Many who call themselves “conservative” want to smash stuff. They want to stop the managed transition to renewable energy. They want to replace multiculturalism with some version of White Australia lite. That’s closer to revanchism than conservatism.
The term “conservative” is the wrong label for the political right. Are the terms “labor” or “social democratic” the right terms for our governing party? Kelly asks if we want something more from our Labor government:
Perhaps it is true that voters no longer expect something more from Labor. But if so, isn’t this a mistake – shouldn’t we all expect more of our government, of whatever political stripe? And more still from Labor, which has, at least historically promised more?
Maybe the strongest but well-directed insult to the present government was by Bernard Keane on a Late Night Livesession about hate speech laws, where he described the Albanese governments as “very conventional” – very much like the Howard government.
The old parties’ election reviews
Not much sign of learning. One of the two old parties is smug, the other is trapped in a right-wing echo chamber.
Labor’s review – the victor’s self-satisfied comfort
Unsurprisingly the Labor Party’s review of its performance in last year’s election describes a very well-run campaign. Success tends to override memories of occasions when performance could have been better. For the most part, therefore, it reads like a guidebook that could apply to any political party.
It mentions some specific aspects of the 2025 campaign, including the conventional wisdom that incumbency is a liability. Therefore the party chose to campaign as if it was a new contender. (Or was that an admission that it hadn’t done much in its first three years?) To quote the review’s authors, “rather than a retrospective referendum, Labor turned the election into a contest over which party would make Australians better off in three years’ time”. Labor also give credit to the way the Coalition campaigned, particularly Dutton’s “combative style and lack of a credible plan”.
Although it focuses on the 2025 election it has advice for the government relating to the next election:
Delivery is not optional; it is the foundation upon which Labor’s bid for a third term rests. By the end of the 48th Parliament, Labor will be judged on its delivery of its key election commitments including cost of living, housing, healthcare, education and local infrastructure. The electorate’s expectations will build throughout the second term and voters will need to feel a change in their personal circumstances.
It has a large amount of data, some drawn from ANU’s Australian Election Study, and some based on the party’s own research about voter behaviour. One finding is that voter turnout was low in electorates with large populations of indigenous Australians in remote regions. The worst was a 62 percent turnout in the Lingiari electorate – the electorate that covers all of the Northern Territory apart from metropolitan Darwin. Another finding is that informal voting was particularly high in New South Wales electorates, which the researchers suggest may be due to confusion resulting from different state and Commonwealth rules, New South Wales allowing optional preferential voting.
We should keep a close eye on early signs of a drift to optional or ineffective voting.
The Liberals’ review – too hard to face but an old comrade has helped out
The Liberals’ review into its 2025 electoral disaster is delayed, because Peter Dutton claims parts of it are defamatory to him and his staff.
We do, however, have Niki Savva’s book Earthquake: the election that shook Australia.
She points out that both in terms of content and delivery the Coalition, or more particularly the Liberals, ran a terrible campaign – a campaign guided, in part, by an assumption that Australians would respond positively to Trumpian-type messages.
It is also evident that the campaign strategists were living in an echo chamber, particularly the Murdoch echo chamber. To quote Savva:
Dutton spent too many nights hanging out with the Sky After Dark hosts, as if he were out in the real world interacting with real people. It was the 21st-century version of Echo talking to Narcissus.
Savva picks up on problems that pre-date Trump, in her comment:
[Dutton’s] mantra to the party room, dating back to September 2024, was that this was one of the worst governments ever, that it was obvious to people, and that they would vote accordingly.
It’s a belief that when voters are silly enough to elect a Labor government, they will soon regret it. Everyone knows that the Coalition is the natural party of government, don’t they?
Well no, they don’t. The chart below, compiled from the Australian Election Study data, shows what people thought of the main parties’ policies when they voted.
The Coalition was particularly shocked to find that they didn’t dominate on economic policy, but that may be because they have defined sound economic policy as running a fiscal cash surplus, as if budgetary bookkeeping is the be-all-and-end-all of economic management. In fact in response to Covid-19 they ran a massive deficit. Nothing wrong with that, but it undermined their simplified message. On real economic matters – delivery of government services, cost of living, protection of the environment, Labor was way ahead in people’s reckoning.
Another of Savva’s strong points is about divisions in the Coalition – the challenge to Ley as newly-minted opposition leader doing her job “with such a divided, volatile and vengeful group surrounding her”. That division didn’t just pop up in the recent special sitting of Parliament, or even in last year’s election campaign. The Australian Election Study reveals that the public have seen the Coalition as divided in both the 2019 and 2022 elections, while their perception of Labor as united has been rising.
Of course there are divisions in political parties: that’s an essential feature of a robust democracy. But when those divisions are about personal conflicts, or the spoils of office, electors are turned off. And when they fail to be resolved witha clear policy consistent with a party’s principles, electors are turned off. The parties on the right have a lot of work to do on both aspects of party unity.
The Australian Election Study
ANU’s analysis of the 2025 election confirms continuation of long-established trends, including voter dissatisfaction with established parties, and demographic trends that go against the Coalition.
The ANU, in association with Griffith University, updates its study – Trends in Australian political opinion – after each federal election. The update covering the 2025 election, the 14th, was published in late November. It includes analysis of last year’s election, most of which has been picked up in media reports and in parties’ reviews, but its real value lies in its lengthening time series, some going back to 1967, showing how Australia is changing politically.
At the most general level, it reveals that while there are slowly emerging trends in Australian society, our political classes – politicians, journalists and lobbyists – are even slower to change.
As one drills down into its data many trends are revealed. In this roundup I draw attention to just two: it’s getting harder and harder for political parties to get our vote, and the Coalition seems to be increasingly out of touch.
The first trend is about the disappearance of the rusted-on voter, who is now an endangered species, as shown in the graph below.
This means parties are having to work harder at each election. And they are indeed working harder. In the 2011 election only 28 percent of voters were contacted by a party during the election: in the election last year 60 percent of voters were contacted by a party. The aphorism “there is no such thing as a safe seat” looks like it’s coming true.
Also, over a long period, there has been a big rise in the number of people who worked for a party or candidate during the campaign – from about 2 to 3 percent late last century to about 14 percent now. There being no evidence of growth in party membership, one inference for this surge in activism is that it has been by people rallying around independents.
The other trend is about the electorate and the Coalition parting ideological company. As Coalition parties, in government and in opposition, have swung to the authoritarian, populist “right”, the electorate, as revealed in people’s assessment on a self-reported ideological scale (1 = “left” to 10 =”right”), increasingly sees itself as “left”. This drift is shown in the graph below.
It’s not a big swing, but the direction of travel counts, particularly when the Coalition and the electorate have been moving in different directions. This same drift is evident in specific attitudes, such as enthusiasm for multiculturalism, attitudes to abortion and women’s rights generally, and support for Australia becoming a republic.
The term “left” is probably not the best description – “liberal” may be more appropriate, but that word has been corrupted by association with an illiberal political party. Voters for independents, for example, see themselves as well to the left of voters for Labor, even though the successful “teal” independents tend to be more market-oriented than socialist-oriented.
There are echoes of the period leading up to the election of the Whitlam government, when Coalition governments failed to move with the electorate. One Liberal prime minister, John Gorton, understood what was happening, but the old men of the party didn’t leave him in the top spot for long.
Substitute Turnbull for Gorton and the echo is strong. But there are differences: the McMahon government was simply lazy, while the Howard, Abbott and Morrison governments wanted to turn the political clock back, drawing their agenda from the world of right-wing media.
For other insights into the study, including a description of its methodology, authors Dr Jill Sheppard and Sarah Cameron are on a session of Radio National’s Saturday Extra, where they refer to the survey’s findings about trust. They touch on the finding that as people age their votes don’t come back to the Coalition, as does Isabella Higgins in a post about the voting patterns of “Millennials” (30 to 45): this is covered in the review of Sean Kelly’s Quarterly Essay Hyperlink where the explanation lies in Labor’s conservatism. Nick Bryant recommends the study as essential reading, but its 100 plus data-rich charts and tables present a formidable reading challenge.
Casey Briggs has posted other findings from the study, relating to trends in party leaders’ popularity and the erosion of the view that the Coalition is more competent at economic management than Labor. Briggs notes that Dutton was the least popular political leader on the survey’s record, but the survey does not go back to the days of William McMahon, the last prime minister in the Coalition’s 23-year run in office last century.
Canberra, 26 January
Cops protecting demonstrators from confronting the reality of multicultural Australia
Australians meet on the Hill.
You had to feel sorry for them, the fifty or so who turned up for the March for Australia rally in Canberra.
Their numbers were matched, perhaps even outnumbered, by the police whose instruction was to keep them apart from the much larger Invasion Day march, but in a manoeuvre that would win the admiration of an infantry colonel, the Invasion Day marchers executed a rapid left wheel, surrounding the March for Australia mob, in a scene reminiscent of western movies showing Apaches circling terrified “white” settlers in covered wagons. Spaghetti western movie director Sergio Leone could not have presented the scene more vividly than the rally leaders and the Commonwealth Police.
The irony of the confrontation was that those who were complaining about immigrants taking over their country were surrounded by those who did have a legitimate concern about immigration.
But it was mainly good humoured. They looked so pathetic, when all they had was their “white” skin, and twenty or so Australian flags fluttering in the summer wind – that colonial-era symbol incorporating the flag of a foreign country. That’s the other irony in the show, when those claiming loyalty to Australia fly a flag whose canton is the flag of a foreign nation. That flag had lost relevance in 1918 as Australians contemplated the tragedy of 60 000 young lives lost in the 1914-18 war, a war that had nothing to do with the young Commonwealth’s interests. It has always been offensive to Australians of Irish heritage, and has now been appropriated by Nazis, One Nation, Sovereign Citizens, and a handful of people who yearn for the days of White Australia. We need an Australian symbol to replace it.
As they might have said of indigenous Australians 50 years ago, the March for Australia mob who turned out in Canberra are now the “dying race”. It would be cruel to call them “white supremacists”, because there was nothing in their manner than denoted the pride and confidence of supremacy. The emotion they evoked from the Invasion Day marchers was pity, rather than anger.
Elsewhere in Canberra other Australians, including 23 who were conferred with citizenship, got on with the fun of celebrating their lives as Australians.
In some other cities it wasn’t so civilized. Rob Harris of the Sydney Morning Herald describes how people were yelling Nazi chants in Australia Day gatherings. His article includes a picture of Pauline Hanson at a Brisbane rally, using the Australian flag as a recruiting symbol for One Nation. More reason to get a proper Australian flag. Ausflag, are you ready for this civic duty?
It can be argued that Canberra’s peaceful experience shows that different people can celebrate January 26 as they wish. But a trouble with that argument is explained by Wiradjuri man Arthur Frail, interviewed on Radio National PM:
I’d love to be able to celebrate Australia as a beautiful country that we live in today, but not on a day that symbolizes such atrocities to my people.
The meaning of January 26 remains unresolved. It is notable that a Morgan poll reveals little support for re-naming January 26 as “Invasion day”: 72 percent of respondents want to keep it as “Australia Day”. A Conversation contribution by three researchers at Deakin University reveals that opposition to moving Australia Day from January 26 is hardening. They suggest that this could reflect a growing polarization as is seen in increasing support for hardline, right-wing populist parties like One Nation, the failure of the Voice referendum, and growing opposition to renaming places and institutions to reflect indigenous names and histories.
In keeping with the conventions of academic detachment they don’t name names but the sources of this hard-right populism are not hard to find.