Shifting political sands look to bury both sides
Shifting political sands look to bury both sides
An unbalanced major party system strains the resting state of democracy, atrophying a healthy political process that weary voters demand.
Liberal opposition leader Matthew ‘Matt’ Guy is caught between the existential crises of an ailing political movement, the new forces that tear his party asunder, and the realisation that the baseline of Victorian conservatism has been commandeered by out of touch ideologues. His party now sits far away from swathes of alienated center right Victorians, a large portion rational, who lived through the politics of the pandemic. The last comedically incompetent era of Liberal opposition from O’Brien to Guy has left its mark on voters, and a fully vaccinated and largely pragmatic group of denizens will increasingly vote Andrews and Teal in places like Victoria’s east as a result.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, sometimes in politics too. And for every chookhouse gate left ajar by a flailing Victorian Liberal iteration, the Teals dispatch foxes, and Andrews’ campaign courts the voting populace with confidence in the unprotected Liberal fortresses out in Melbourne’s inner-east. While the commercial press tries to make sense of what the Victorian Liberal Party even is this election, the Andrews Government dives into the Yarra to suck up the votes, and the shift upstream continues to have a largely unseen impact on the poorer populations of Victoria.
The redirected energies from Labor swing increasingly to the neglected center right voting bloc at the expense of the working poor in fringes out in places like Melbourne’s west. Without a healthy conservative movement to cater for the rational blue-ribbon voters, Labor shifts further to the right in sight of the opportunity, leaving behind the voting blocs that define its identity. As a result, one major party detaches from reality and the values of their traditional voters, the other walks away from their own to capture them, and the working poor on minimum wage, the single parents and those on $46 a day, are further isolated on the political periphery as a result.
While the political class of Victoria has been renaming hospitals and reaping work-from-home votes in the east, those who worked from home the least, the people who made sure all the click and collects were packed and home office equipment was delivered, are now starting to shift politically in the lack of acknowledgement, assistance or attention, and are leaving in droves. Electoral analyst, Kos Samaras notes that if the Liberal’s continue to move into new ideological territory, abandoning blue ribbon voters, and Labor moves further away from its working roots to claim them, many poorer voters such as in Melbourne’s West will be further isolated on the political spectrum. Samaras also observes not only will there be an “increasing number of independents who are elected to parliament”, identifying the threat of effective populist campaigns that could prey on the vulnerability of politically isolated working poor voters in a political vacuum.
A weak opposition emboldens the incumbent to beholden itself less to the polity, and with all the rope-a-dope and footwork between the major party pugilists, those hit harder on the lower socioeconomic fringe are being left abandoned in a political no man's land. Out in the basalt fields in the West, around the working class edges of Melbourne’s fringe sitting under powerline easements on the othersides of ring roads, people no longer feel represented by either party, and are ripe for the picking by far-right political movements who are using it as an opportunity to sow the seeds of fear and intolerance.
This lack of equilibrium hurts everyone. It leads the press to act in ways that are beneath them, to counterintuitive tabloid moments just prior to an election where the premiers wife has to join the circus of journalistic desperation at the expense of unpacking policy difference in the interests of the people. Bad faith from the commercial press who were hard at reporting subjective editorial opposition to the Andrews government at the expense of health advice and good journalism, have contributed to the disenfranchisement of voters and diminished the conversation.
The unhinging of the media in the daily press conferences of an unprecedented pandemic, unlocked a misguided confidence in the Victorian Liberals to walk away from the pragmatism that largely guides the rationale of most Victorian citizens. The current hyper-partisan American amalgam of political reporting, imported directly from the United States, experimented with in the pandemic, is now walking around the production rooms of Australia’s commercial press entities, but crucially, it hasn’t gelled with a wary voting bloc in quite the same way.
After Tony Abbott cranked the dial to new levels and Malcolm Turnbull tried to dial it back down, the destabilized core housing the fundamentals of Australian conservatism could not handle the Pentecostal heat of the new management style of the Morrison-led government. Beneath the remnants of the Liberal party tradition, the patina of blue-ribbon majority that sat as the front of the party was quashed by a new breed of political opportunists, made canon by their marketing minded Prime Minister. A Trumpian form of belligerence was metered out by the Morrison experiment, trickling down through the infrastructure of the state and local Liberal models, and due to the lack of Americanisms in the Australian values system, it all went horribly wrong.
In right wing politics across the country, there has been an almost childish belligerence by a new cohort of ideologues that have seized the talking stick from the moderates and conservatives who still make up most of the party, give the donations, and do the most door knocking. These new Liberals seem blind to the fact that many conservative Australians, and Australians more broadly, are made from different stuff to the far-right religious frameworks that they try to bake into the daily bread of the Australian political landscape. This has seen many Liberal party strategists scratching their heads to ponder if they are to stay the course in the political wilderness, to build a foundational ideology out of the building blocks of modern American political extremism against the grain of public opinion, or in the case of the Victorian Liberals, or if they might double back to the age of Baillieu, returning to more pragmatic and inoffensive policy based somewhat on public interest.
The fact might be, that while people in Australia have traditionally been living their lives under the expectation that their elected representatives have been doing a good job, this may be changing. The Victorian Liberals exemplify all that has gone wrong with modern conservatism in Australia, and the dangers of ignoring the electorate to impose platforms that are not compatible with them looks to hurt them in the ballot box. The loud voices of a retrofitted right from the United States have hijacked the party of Menzies and tried to turn it into the party of Trump, leaving behind alienated voters in their wake.
While big parties mistakenly lean too much on the lazy nature of Australian political engagement, they fail to comprehend that good governance is an expectation from many in the voting bloc. If that is not delivered, the Australian voter can become astute, upset, and adroit, able to demonstrate stinging repudiations at the ballot box, and if need be, on the streets taking to protest. It is a bad time for major parties to become complacent, to lose their footing by publicly airing attempts to retrofit poorly suited far right conservatism from incompatible cultures, or to abandon the working class on the left in the pursuit of courting big business and neo-liberalism. Both approaches ignore Victorians, Australians, and increasingly more populations across the straining democracies of the western world, converting ideological divisions into chasms of division.