Federal election 2022
If only there was a vaccine to protect election losers from the outbreak of delusions in the aftermath of defeat.
Though if such a jab existed it would deny the election winners a wicked pleasure: sneering at the losers as they grapple with the first stages of grief, shock and denial.
Scott Morrison concedes defeat on Saturday night.Credit:Getty Images
The narrative according to a chorus of hardline Coalition MPs and columnists goes like this: the Morrison government positioned itself as “Labor-lite” – experimenting “with the poison of leftism”, according to South Australian Liberal Alex Antic – because it caved in on net-zero emissions, racked up budget deficits, abandoned “freedom” during the pandemic and shirked on fighting culture wars.
This shameless Marxist posture, say the critics, not only failed to placate voters in the Liberals’ traditional seats, those folks having long metamorphosed into Maoists and not for the turning, but alienated the party from “the Quiet Australians” and blue-collar battlers the party ought to regard as its real base.
In this construction, the battlers are less concerned about climate change than they are focused on cost-of-living pressures and whether their kids are being indoctrinated into radical doctrines at school. They seem curiously unconcerned about a minimum wage rise, however.
The losers’ lament has some worthy variations. A more subtle take came from Andrew Bolt, his heartfelt prose notwithstanding: “Who’d vote for such a mewling pack of self-haters with so little self-respect that they won’t even sack a party traitor like Malcolm Turnbull?”
According to Bolt, the Morrison government’s problem was as much one of “hypocritical cant” as it was one of capitulation – he’s right about the former, at least. Thus, the Coalition admits climate change is a threat but promises less than Labor and the Greens to tackle the supposed scourge; admits an Indigenous “voice” to parliament is necessary but won’t have it enshrined in the Constitution; admits it has a women problem but won’t succumb to quotas. And so on.
Alan Tudge – under a cloud before the election, but now one of only a few urban Melbourne Liberal MPs left standing, which immediately confers upon him prophet status – said the Coalition’s strong rhetoric on China brought a backlash from Chinese-Australian voters in the eastern suburbs. Otherwise, Tudge suggested the Coalition was blamed for “not standing up enough” to the Andrews government over its lockdowns.
This “freedom” theme is confusing. (Frankly, the whole thing’s confusing so bear with me as I try to pick my way through it.) As several pundits have pointed out, anger about coronavirus restrictions saw big anti-Labor swings in safe Victorian seats. Those motivated by anti-Dan sentiment had cause enough to favour the Coalition – Scott Morrison went out of his way to express his “understanding” of the sometimes violent anti-lockdown protesters – so it’s somewhat counter-intuitive to argue the Coalition was punished for not opposing the lockdowns more aggressively.
We do know the Morrison government was punished for seeking to interfere with the McGowan government’s freedom to control its borders so that Western Australians could stay healthy and free.
And who knew that persistent blows against universities – excluding them from JobKeeper, hiking humanities fees, vetoing research grants – and stoking anxieties around transgender children and athletes during an election campaign constitute a refusal to fight the culture wars. We can, however, say these battles were ill-picked and clumsily fought, with the Coalition mistaking Sydney’s western suburbs for Republican red states where book-banning and demonising transgender medicine is all in a day’s work.
But post-defeat denialism is not confined to the Coalition. After successive election losses during the Howard years, it was common in Labor ranks to chide the party for running a “Coalition-lite” platform on asylum seekers or budget deficits. Labor was never going to out-Coalition the Coalition, the true believers argued, while the party’s “me-too-ism” bled leftist votes to the Greens. Putting aside questions of morality, the criticisms were contestable because they misread the reality of where key voters had landed on offshore processing and fiscal management.
The electorate is admittedly more fragmented these days and even harder to read. We can say the Morrison government’s flirtation with the “freedom” agenda cost it more votes than it gained, which is probably none. We can say Peter Dutton’s testosterone talk about Australia needing to “prepare for war” might have gained the Coalition more votes than it lost from Chinese voters had his government in fact prepared for war by proactively tackling China’s expanding influence in the Pacific. Instead, the minister locked in a deal on much-touted nuclear-powered submarines that are unlikely to be ready for decades, and for which the French subs deal was ditched.
Drum beating rarely distracts people from the real and present danger of government incompetence. When the Coalition’s red-meat brigade look to Dutton for salvation they’re making the same elemental mistake they accuse Morrison of: refracting reality through the eyes of “the left”. Undoubtedly, “the left” sees Dutton as the anti-Christ. But if the right warriors tried to see him through the eyes of The Quiet Australians they might arrive at a more mundane though no less devastating verdict: he represents a politics that’s more bluster than meaningful action.
Still, grief does terrible things to people. More than sneering rights, the victor’s ultimate privilege is pity.
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